You may well know about "scrubby sliders" in Photoshop–the little finger-with-arrows icon you get when your cursor hovers over the label next to a numerical field, such as "Opacity" on the Layers panel.  (Here’s a screenshot borrowed from Photoshop Essentials.)  With scrubby sliders you can click and drag on the text label, moving left and right to adjust the field’s value up and down.  You may not have discovered a couple of nuances, however:

• Holding Opt/Alt while scrubbing makes the values change 10x more slowly.  This is great for fine-tuning a value.  Conversely, holding Shift while scrubbing makes the values change 10x faster.  This is great for making an audience sick while demoing canvas rotation.  (Open a really big image, zoom out, hit R, and then Shift-drag over the Rotation Angle text on the Options Bar. Entreat your viewers to stare at the center. Watch them become your willing thralls…)
• Some fields don’t have text label next to them, and it therefore seems that you can’t use scrubby sliders with them.  Ah, but that’s where holding down Cmd/Ctrl while mousing over the field comes into play.  By holding the modifier while dragging, you can use a scrubby slider on these fields.  (Adding Opt/Alt or Shift works as you’d expect.)

On a related note, when you put focus on a text field in Photoshop, you can nudge its value up and down by using the up/down arrow keys.  Holding Shift while arrowing naturally makes the increment of change 10x larger.

It’s all these little custom behaviors that help make moving Photoshop from Carbon to Cocoa a rather involved affair.  The app has developed a lot of little tweaks (e.g. holding down Opt/Alt in dialog boxes to turn Cancel into Reset) that don’t just come along for free.  It’s also an illustration of why custom widgets are sometimes desirable.  I’d like to see Photoshop and other CS apps make scrubby sliders much more universal/discoverable via something like the Adobe video apps’ sliders (screenshot). [Update: See also the ones in Flash CS4.]

There’s one other related thing, which I hate to mention as it’s a bug, but I can offer a solution.  In CS4 if you click on a text label to highlight a field, then use a mouse wheel to adjust values, you may notice that the field stops changing.  The workaround is to keep your cursor over the text label, or anywhere outside the field itself.  Sorry about that rough edge.

Based on some recent comments (e.g. “Please add a way to navigate through layers via the keyboard”), I get the impression that many people don’t know some/all of the following:

• Opt/Alt + left/right bracket keys change layer selection, selecting the layer above/below the current one.
• Those shortcuts plus Shift extend the layer selection.  For example, to select the layer above the current one while keeping the current one selected, hit Shift-Opt-]/Shift-Alt-].
• Shift-Opt-,/Shift-Alt-, (comma) selects the the current layer and all those below it.  Shift-Opt-./Shift-Alt-.  (period) selects the current layer and all those above it.
• Opt-,/Alt-, selects the bottom layer.  Opt-./Alt-. selects the top one.
• Cmd-G/Ctrl-G groups layers into a layer group (aka layer set, aka “little folder thing”).  Shift-Cmd-G/Shift-Ctrl-G ungroups layers.
• Cmd-Opt-A/Ctrl-Alt-A selects all layers.
• Shift-Cmd-N/Shift-Ctrl-N makes a new layer. Add Opt/Alt to do so while skipping the layer options dialog box.

And while we’re at it, you can also change blending modes via the keyboard:

• Shift-plus (=) selects the next blending mode.  Shift-minus (-) selects the previous one.  Note that the target of these changes depends on what tool is active.  If you’ve got a painting tool (Brush, Clone Stamp, etc.) selected, the changes apply to the tool’s blending mode.  If you’ve got other tools selected, they’ll apply to the blending mode of the selected layer.  (My rule of thumb is to tap V to make the Move tool active before applying blending changes to a layer via the keyboard.)
• Shift-Opt-letter/Shift-Alt-letter will set the selected tool/layer to a specific blending mode.  For example, M is Multiple, N is Normal, and H is Hard Light.  A fairly complete list is here (scroll down).

If you find this kind of thing useful, check out Trevor Morris’s list of PS shortcuts, or Michael Ninness’s old but useful Photoshop Power Shortcuts book.  (I updated it for PS7.)

[Update: See the comments below for more good suggestions.]

Thanks for all the great feedback regarding ways to manage complex documents.  I should probably toss in the inevitable disclaimer that we’re just gathering feedback, none of this is a promise/hint about future work, void where prohibited, blah blah.

A couple of people have mentioned the idea of expanding Smart Objects back into the layers that formed them initially.  That is, you’d be able to select multiple layers, turn them into an SO, do various things to the SO, and then explode the layers back out into the main layer stack.  It’s a great idea, and of course (you knew this was coming) it’s really hard to make work, which is why it’s not supported today.  In case you’re interested, let me explain why.

Smart Objects let you apply a variety of transformations to the selected object.  You can scale, skew, perspective-transform, warp, and filter them.  The trick is, how would you turn the transformed content back into layers while preserving its appearance?

In some cases the job would be easy.  Let’s say you put four layers into an SO, then scale it up & want to expand the layers back out.  That seems pretty straightforward: apply the same scale factor to each layer, then move it so that the positions match.  The same might go for skewing & distorting, though I may be overlooking some cases.  But what about warping and filtering?  It gets tough, if not impossible, quickly.  I’ve made a little illustration (read it left to right) that may help illuminate the challenges.

The upshot is that expanding Smart Objects back to layers could be made to work some times and not others.  Addressing at least the simpler cases would be a worthwhile effort, though that task would have to jockey for position relative to other SO-related enhancements.

For instance, if PS offered an option not to save the composite data of an SO in a file, the SO wouldn’t add file size above and beyond the layers it contains. That would in turn open the door to PS creating SOs automatically when transforming layers, which is essential to getting more people using this feature.  The consequence would be more time spent opening files, however, as SO composites would have to be rendered on the fly.  That in turn adds new requirements to other PSD-reading apps–e.g. that they be able to run filters on the fly in order to preserve appearance.  The whole thing becomes a quasi-religious argument about format compatibility and trading one kind of performance for another. There are many cans of worms here.

If you’ve read this far, my fellow geek, you may be interested in previous entries about The Secret Life of Smart Filters and the closely related Simplicty vs. Power in Photoshop.  Nobody ever said progress was gonna be easy. 🙂

Designers–and Web designers in particular–create some of the most complex, intricately layered Photoshop compositions possible.  How could we make the management & navigation of these files more efficient? I’d love to get your take on the following ideas:

• Layer panel search/filtering:
  • Photoshop could offer a small search field at the top of the Layers panel.  As you’d type in text, PS would narrow down the display of layers (e.g. typing "b-u-r-r.." would hide everything but the layer called "burrito").  Searching would also find custom tags applied to layers.  Hiding layers in the list would have no effect on the appearance of the document.
  • Separately, PS could offer buttons on Layers that would let you filter the view so that you could, say, show only type layers, or only type layers and bitmap layers, etc.
• Layer sorting: Photoshop would offer the ability to sort the Layers panel by layer type, layer name, etc.
• Symbols (i.e. reusable objects that enable "edit one, update many"): Photoshop already supports this concept to some degree via Smart Objects.  You can convert a layer to be an SO, then duplicate the object, edit one copy, and have both copies update.  The interface could be made clearer, however (e.g. through adding a Symbols panel for managing objects).
• Linked files (place a file, update it externally, and have all placed copies updated in PSDs): Again, Photoshop already supports linked files in a couple of ways.  If you double-click a Smart Object placed from Illustrator, PS will open a copy in AI.  You can also choose Layer->Smart Objects->Replace Contents… to have an SO replace with a file on disk.  Oh, and video layers are always linked to external files.  The raw materials for a traditional linking implementation are there, but PS would need to add things like a Links panel.
• Type styles:  As you can in Illustrator and InDesign, you could assign a style to type layers in Photoshop, and when you changed the style definition, PS would update all layers that have the style attached.
• Other?  Anything I haven’t mentioned?  Anything you like in other apps?

To gather feedback I’ve created a very quick survey, and of course your comments (below) would be most welcome. (And in the interests of sharing ideas freely, you can browse others’ responses, too. Note that I can’t edit/reply inline to suggestions posted via the survey.)

Thanks

J.