Reprising the session from a couple of weeks ago, I again joined Deke McClelland & Colleen Wheeler for a Martini Hour podcast. This time we were joined by Adobe creative director Russell Brown. Both conversation & sidecars flowed freely, though only the latter stayed within predictable boundaries.
dook! dook! dook!
nice reference. i love drinky crow!
[I did hope someone would get that. 😉 –J.]
That was pretty funny and informative. Dammit. I miss all the fun stuff.
Hmm, you guys talked about layers in PS as if that was a World Historical First. But PS 3.0 came out in fall 1994, and I had by then been using Micrografx Picture Publisher 3.0 (I think that was the version?) for a whole year — and it had fine layers galore. PP was an excellent Windows-only bitmap editor which I for years preferred to PS — it was faster and leaner and really excellent at most kinds of RGB work. It wasn’t so good for CMYK, though, and had other weaknesses in the plugins/automation areas — but it was a great package back then. I don’t know for sure if that was the very first pixel editor with layers — maybe other readers know of even earlier attempts? (Like in Corel PhotoPaint, which also was pretty hot for a while?)
No layers were first in Photoshop, and its the feature that immediately put Photoshop on a different standing to everything else out there. Interesting and not surprising, to hear from Russell that it was Mark Hamburg. They obviously had “play time” in those days, these incredible moves forward probably happen like that.
[Don’t despair too much about lack of play time. I wish we had more, but I’ve been having interesting conversations this week with engineering about some nice surprise developments. There’s still room for spontaneity & “happy accidents.” –J.]
With the addition of adjustments (photoshop 4 I believe although people didn’t realise they were there until about 6 in my experience) and masking – it just about knocked everything else permanently out of the water.
It might sometimes take people a WHILE to get their heads round the true benefits of genuinely new developments, but its only these kind of developments that will keep Adobe so far ahead of the game. Most recent example, really just going through its ‘discovery’ process – Smart Objects.
[Having devised the Smart Object idea, I’d peg our progress in unlocking the full vision/potential at 50%, at best. –J.]