New Photoshop enhancements, live-coded for your pleasure

At last week’s Photoshop world, a small group of engineers tried something new & fun: applying small bits of polish & picking off little annoyances in the app, all coded live at the show. After taking suggestions via Twitter and Facebook, the engineers whipped up the following:

  • On a background layer, one click on the lock icon unlocks the layer
  • Set custom background color in New Document dialog
  • Set the background color in File -> New
  • Curves adjustments support negative numbers
  • See recent colors in the Swatches panel
  • Add more than 4 color samplers in Info panel
  • Change all color samplers in Info palette at the same time

Look for these tweaks to arrive in Photoshop CC later this year. In the meantime, Adobe’s video team is soliciting JDI requests. Let ’em know what you’d like to see!

JDI swatches

JDI color

[Via]

12 thoughts on “New Photoshop enhancements, live-coded for your pleasure

    1. You’re in luck, then. They did. It’s called CS6 and it’s a perpetual license version with nothing else, just like you asked for! 🙂

  1. Agree with John, rather than starting a new list of things a few people reading this blog think up on the spot, I’d much rather see the Adobe team tackle the issues/requests that have been suggested over the years based on the most requests on the Photoshop Feedback site.
    That being said I think it’s great Adobe is doing this, as Adobe products are not ones we typically think of as agile development and rather if their is a bug or an annoyance it most likely will be there for several years at least compared to smaller companies where the bugs/features get added within days or months based on demand.
    “On a background layer, one click on the lock icon unlocks the layer” has been one of those issues that I assumed would never be resolved, so glad it has!

    1. And I agree with Christopher! There’s no problem at all with Adobe using trade show events in the way that is highlighted here. It’s truly a fine thing to do (I would have added two more things for the Swatches Panel to accomplish easily if I’d been in Las Vegas last week …).
      But the majority – especially from the international user base – will never get the chance to be present at a Photoshop World or other trade event. And even for the fortunate attendees, there may not be the opportunity to provide documented inputs on the spot.

  2. A few things, also posted on the feedback site..
    (most of the i guess)
    Ungroup of smart object via right click.
    If I make a circle a smart object and scale it down some areas (left, top..) become square, while others still are round..
    Auto scale of huge brushes so they fit the file i work on.. (for those high res brushes)
    Optimizing of the brush “display”.. When selecting a more complicated brush, scaling it up and down kills my machine..
    Fix the transform bug that sometimes makes it almost impossible to scale a object because the cursor can not grab the corner
    When dragging a layer into a folder why (og why) does it have to be placed in the bottom of the folder? Should be the top..
    My two cents…
    PoulG

  3. >>Add more than 4 color samplers in Info panel
    OMG for me that’s huge and something I’ve been begging for over the years. Even ACR has more than four sampler points.
    What would make this even more special: sync readout (ability to toggle from Actual Color to say Lab, then all sampler points update to that new color model).
    Ability for differing sample sizes per sample point (one at 3×3, one at 5×5 etc).
    Ability to automatically ‘find’ and stick to brightest highlight, darkest shadow.
    Ability to ‘go to’ the sampler (x,y). Finding all those sampler’s, even with four isn’t easy.
    Option to see RGB and CMYK (using current color space setup) at the same time.

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