A frustrating 3 hours with PhotoShop

[yesthattom]

I just spent 3 hours with PhotoShop trying to make a single damn button for a web page. The first hour or so was spent trying to remember how to use PhotoShop, which I guess I haven’t used in over 10 years. What saved me was C coming to my rescue and brainstorming (she was the brain, I was the storm) about how to use it. I can’t believe how it hasn’t improved once inch since the 1980s!

This piece of crap software is what the entire universe still uses? This fucked up, icons from hell, anti-usable piece of shit is paying Adobe’s bills?

Isn’t there anything out that for the Mac that does LAYERS and has a user interface designed in this decade?

FUCK!

Comments

[docstrange.livejournal.com]

What, GIMP won't do it for you? :-}

PS is stuck in the 20% side of the 80/20 rule. Yes, it's popular, but it's made for the 20% of potential users who want the remarkable depth of features, not for the 80% who have a large set of common tasks they want to complete. You, m'good sir, are in the 80%. It'll do what you want, but the learning curve is not worth it. GIMP can do what you want, probably, with a slightly better curve, though it is still feature-laden.

FINK or DarwinPorts (or whatever ports thang you like) it in!

[tgeller.livejournal.com]

If you're on a Mac, try Intaglio or Lineform. I reviewed both for MacLife and liked them. (Reviews: Lineform, Intaglio.)

Other Adobe products

[mrfantasy.livejournal.com]

There's always Fireworks, which is really designed for making web buttons. And it used to be Macromedia, although I don't think the interface is much better than Photoshop.

[stormsweeper.livejournal.com]

If they still bundle it with Photoshop, use ImageReady. It's far, far better for light web image work.

[charleshaynes.livejournal.com]

"I haven’t used [Photoshop] in over 10 years. ... I can’t believe how it hasn’t improved once inch since the 1980s! This piece of crap software is what the entire universe still uses?"

Tom, you're on crack. Photoshop has changed immensely since the '80s, but it has NEVER been something you can just pick up and start using. It's an expert's tool, and as such it requires learning and practice.

If you don't want to take the time to learn how to use it well, find a simpler tool that meets your needs.

[And FWIW, I second the recommendation of Image Ready for most web work. If all you want to do is make a button for a web page, Photoshop is overkill.]

[thespian.livejournal.com]

dingdingding.

This attitude from programmers and network admins has always baffled me. I can, in fact, whip off buttons and graphics and all sorts of things in minutes with Photoshop, because it's a pro tool. It's designed for a graphics professional, and I'm always stunned when (twice a year or so), I see someone complaining like this, because it makes me wish that they'd made a slightly different Barbie, one that would sigh and say, "Professional graphics tools are hard." Instead I just instead wish that rather than encountering these issues and blaming the tool because they can't use it, more tech types would turn around and instead say, 'Hey. Maybe the graphics designer is ALSO getting paid well because she has a lot of technical knowledge in her brain, it's just different from mine.'

Sorry. This might just be a sore point ;-)

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Touche. But what about all the little things that make it not very Mac OS 10-ish. Like, CMD-A doesn't select all the text in forms (but it does in some other places).

[whipartist.livejournal.com]

The right tool for the job and all... Photoshop has improved *tremendously* just from CS2 to CS3. However, I'm speaking as a photographer rather than as a casual graphic creator. I would use Photoshop for it because I already know the UI well.

[cinema-babe.livejournal.com]

I loath Photoshop 100 different ways. It's way too robust and complex for 95% of the people who use it. I've been using Fireworks for year, since long before Adobe bought out Macromedia. If you're just building buttons, it's a pretty good app for that.

[la-directora.livejournal.com]

I loath Photoshop 100 different ways. It's way too robust and complex for 95% of the people who use it.

Is that the fault of the program, or of the users trying to use it? If I were to pick up an electron microscope in order to try to make my small-print newspaper easier to read, and discovered the electron microscope was too robust for the job, wouldn't it be unfair of me to then declare that the electron microscope sucks? Wouldn't it be more accurate to say that I had chosen the wrong tool for the job?

Yes, Photoshop is far too complex and robust for the average user's simple graphics needs. That doesn't make Photoshop a bad tool. It makes it the wrong one for those jobs. I've never seen a bit of marketing for Photoshop that said, "Use our program if you want a fast, easy way to make simple graphics for your personal website." Hell, the price alone tells me that Adobe isn't trying to market it for casual use. If people chose to use the tool in a way the tool wasn't intended, and then found that tool inappropriate for the job, that's hardly the tool's fault.

[cinema-babe.livejournal.com]

I agree. I said that I loath it for a variety of reasons (including what I consider to be a shitty, inorganic UI) but I don't think it's bad for the5% of users who really need something that beefy.

Just because it's useful doesn't mean it's the most elegant, intuitive piece of software on the block.

[nulldevice.livejournal.com]

Anyones who suggests GIMP is an idiot.

Just saying.


I've never found photoshop particularly hard to use. Of course, I have a background with actual photography equipment so the icons make perfect sense to me. Most of the people I've come across who have photoshop problems have them because they're trying to use it as though it were Illustrator or (god help them) Word. It's an app that really does one thing exceptionally well - retouch and modify bitmaps. It has however been repurposed over the years such that epople think it's also an acceptable tool for text editing, page design, layout etc.

I also want to smack web designers who do all their design in photoshop, then hand developers 15 psd files and say "well, it's your job to make this work on the web."

[sjthespian.livejournal.com]

Ok, GIMP isn't that bad -- although it doesn't have a standard OSX interface either, as it has to run under X11 and uses the control key for everything instead of the clover (or open apple) like a normal OSX app. For those of us who don't want to mortgage our first born to Adobe it's a perfectly usable solution. But the UI is just as bad as photoshop (and in some cases worse). As long as you know the shortcomings going into it, GIMP may be a fine solution for some people (I use it myself).

As for web designers -- can I smack them with you? I was trying to use some site the other day where their home page was a massive tile of images -- not a single piece of text that wasn't part of a graphical element. Obviously someone had done the layout in photoshop (or something like it) and then carved it up into tiles to make it load faster. Instead of having the text be text and the images be images.

Re:

[dannyman.livejournal.com]

If you ever graduate from a Macintosh, you'll find the gimp completely familiar because it runs on other Unix platforms as well as Windows. :)

-danny

[la-directora.livejournal.com]

I also want to smack web designers who do all their design in photoshop, then hand developers 15 psd files and say "well, it's your job to make this work on the web."

And I'm sure instead of "web designers" you meant to say "total wankers". :) _I_ am a web designer. And I call myself that, rather than a developer, because I don't know any of the more robust programming tools available now - Java, C sharp, etc. (When I was learning programming, I was on the database side, not the web side, so I never learned that stuff.) But I do know HTML, CSS, and good interface design. And creating a .psd file and breaking it into tiles is NOT good interface design.

Anyone who would "design" a website that way does not deserve to call themselves a "web designer". Says me. :)

Proud Idiot

[dannyman.livejournal.com]

The GIMP works for me, doesn't cost $500, and saves me from running Adobe software. I could probably make a button within an hour.

-danny

Re: Proud Idiot

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

Is there a native port to Mac? Running X windows on a Mac makes me a sad bear.

Tom

Denial

[dannyman.livejournal.com]

I think it is best to be honest with yourself and embrace the queer reality that underneath your candy-colored interface you're running a Unix OS.

-danny

Re: Denial

[yesthattom.livejournal.com]

My fingers are too tired to explain to you how "you said that to the wrong guy"-territory you are in. The short version is that I ran a multi-billion/year billing app on OS X. Believe me, I know it's Unix, and I know in what ways assuming that will bite you.

However, I don't consider X windows to be Unix.

Re: Denial

[dannyman.livejournal.com]

Tom,

I am just a troll reminding you to be grateful that while it seems everyone is too good to use GIMP or to port it to a true Macintosh interface, at least you can run the same X11 apps available to the rest of the world if you really have to. Boohoo!

Love,
-danny

[niallm.livejournal.com]

Pixelmator, but it's not out of private beta yet. :(