Keeping It Real: How I wished we could’ve made Photoshop feel

Design, User Interface

jnack.com/BlowingYourMindClearOutYourAss—that’s the URL I picked, back circa 2005 (when men were men & we had to self-host all our videos!), to express my admiration for Nelson Chu’s Moxi watercolor app. Harnessing graphics processors to create realtime natural-media simulations has been a passion of his for the better part of 30 years.

We hosted Nelson as a summer intern on Photoshop, but we could never quite manage to marry this tech to the, ah, somewhat vintage underpinnings of PS. Later he launched a refined version as Expresii:


It remains, to my eye, just incredibly cool—never mind that its target audience will seemingly forever be limited to those with serious painting ambitions and abilities.

I thought of all this upon seeing the procedural Damage Control. Here too I dreamed of offering godlike command of realistic materials & motion:

All this stuff has remained so niche, but I think a day is coming—very soon, I hope—when realtime world models (think Google Genie, which is the realtime 3D cousin of our new Gemini Omni) make this kind of grounded manipulation absolutely ubiquitous. We shall see!