Comment by quitit | Hacker News Reader

Comment by quitit | Hacker News Reader

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Photoshop falls into a category where people assume it's the best because it's used by professionals - and so that's what they want to be using. The problem is that people assume professional graphics is just drawing pictures. (Society in general has a pretty low expectation/understanding of what this industry does, this is also fuelling the hyperventilating over AI, but that's a different discussion.)

Using Photoshop without a specific professional objective is a trap: That's like driving a tractor in the city. Photoshop is only the best for specific professional workflows, and to date I'm still to find any alternative that can replace it. (I'm happy to elaborate on that.)

The way Photoshop serves its market is quite specific and just casually loading up Photopea now I can see many parts of the app that would trivially frustrate a production workflow. I'm happy to list these for anyone curious. This is typical for photoshop alternatives, this doesn't make them bad, often it makes the app more useful for casual users by hand-waving away complex, industry-specific concepts.

If you find yourself using Photoshop and it doesn't feel like it's actively helping you achieve your ambitions, then I encourage that you reach out to others in your creative space to learn what software other people are using, like you all are in this thread today.

The graphics market has a litany of apps to serve different graphics objectives. These each have interesting features and workflows that are better suited to different audiences and, as mentioned, they also benefit from removing needless complexity and control.

> The way Photoshop serves its market is quite specific and just casually loading up Photopea now I can see many parts of the app that would trivially frustrate a production workflow. I'm happy to list these for anyone curious.

This did make me curious. What problems did you notice? I know next to nothing about image editing software. However, I always like to understand how someone judges the usefulness of a given thing, assuming he or she has enough background knowledge / experience on a subject.

A non-expert workflow for photoshop is editing images in the CMYK colour mode and handling the use of specials such as pantone colours or custom ink mixes.

Photopea has a CMYK mode, which is great, but despite the document being in CMYK mode the swatches adjacent are RGB. A useful approach would be to automatically convert RGB swatches to the destination colour space, since that's how they look when one uses them.

I also noticed the layer blending modes were undertaken in the RGB colour space rather than CMYK despite the document colour mode setting. This difference produces different results especially if using the transparency modes screen and multiply which behave a fair bit differently in the CMYK colour mode versus the RGB colour mode. A person that opens the Photopea PSD in photoshop would thus see a different result which the Photopea user did not intend.

Next I noticed that the channel management for the CMYK plates and specials provided no ability to set or manage the specials plate. For example when utilising a pantone colour one would need to establish an additional plate and input the LAB value for the ink, there didn't seem to be any way of doing that, however it supported what was already in the sample PSD file I loaded into it.

I didn't delve into colour profiles and control over dot gain, but that is another aspect which is usually absent in Photoshop alternatives.

Also just rehashing that the above is not expert-level, anyone in the industry would be familiar with these concepts and find themselves needing to manage them for production output. This is what I mean when I say to people "you don't need photoshop, get something better", non-industry people don't need to be fussing over whether the document intention should be perceptual or absolute (or seldom used middle-grounds), what is the output LPI, or device pixel requirements, what byte order is supported by the RIP, what their ink weights maximums are, or adjusting screen angles to deter plate mottling.

Thank you for taking the time to write this out! It's so interesting to see exactly where things become tricky once you go from hobbyist to professional -- or from regular hobbyist to fancy hobbyist, for that matter.

Hi, you make all excellent points. However they do sound more like comments from 2002, not 2024. With the complete takeover of the web, digital media, and digital photography, just where do you imagine all this cmyk stuff is still happening? Save for the last vestiges of print, it isn't. Most work today goes from rgb, to rgb, and then to rgb. Maybe throw in sRGB as well. So cmyk, nice to have, but not needed for most pro work today. FWIW, 40 years pro work at top NYC ad agencies and pub houses.

>Hi, you make all excellent points. However they do sound more like comments from 2002, not 2024. With the complete takeover of the web, digital media, and digital photography, just where do you imagine all this cmyk stuff is still happening? Save for the last vestiges of print, it isn't. Most work today goes from rgb, to rgb, and then to rgb. Maybe throw in sRGB as well. So cmyk, nice to have, but not needed for most pro work today. FWIW, 40 years pro work at top NYC ad agencies and pub houses.

Hi LanceNY from the top NYC ad agency wink wink. I see why you've made a fresh account just to reply to this, because it's quite clear you don't have the experience that you claim, nor even an understanding of basic digital-only principles such as the difference between a colour mode and a colour space.

It also seems you're suggesting that print and manufacturing don't occur in 2024. Classic.

I dare say your experience in this industry is no longer than the time it took you to write that comment.

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