Photoshop’s vector shapes & layer effects (strokes, gradients, etc.) are mainstays of Web & mobile design work, but they haven’t gotten updated in a while. If the Photoshop team were to improve this area of the app, what improvements would you find the most important?
The following list isn’t exhaustive, but it includes popular requests we’ve heard. It would be great to get your feedback via this quick survey. We can’t do everything (certainly all at once, anyway), so please let us know what matters most.
- Enable “real” vector shapes (stroke & fill directly editable, without reliance on layer effects or a dialog box)
- Support dashed- and dotted-line strokes
- Enable smart shapes:
- Preserve corner roundness when scaling rounded rectangles
- Support other parameterized shapes (e.g. stars with an adjustable number of points; lines with arrowheads)
- Make various layer effects enhancements:
- Apply effects at the layer group level
- Re-order effects
- Duplicate effects (e.g. apply multiple strokes per layer)
- Enable panel-based editing of effects (instead of relying on a dialog box)
- Add/edit effects on multiple selected layers at once
- Make graphical styles “live” (i.e. if edit the style definition, all styled objects update)
- Enable layer search (i.e. type to filter by layer name or attributes)
- Improve snap-to-pixel behavior
- Improve text rendering
- Export text & graphical styles as CSS
- Support guide sets (e.g. for grid layouts)
- Support linked files (i.e. edit one file to update buttons, icons, etc. across multiple PSDs)
Notes:
- We want to know what’s more important than other things, so please bear that in mind when assigning relative ratings. (That is, don’t make everything “extremely important” or “not important.”)
- Please don’t tell me that Photoshop should never be improved vis-à-vis Web & mobile design, and that everyone should use Fireworks (or Illustrator or whatever). You may be completely right about those apps, but it’s just not relevant to this survey.
- Inevitably there’s some amount of overlap among these items (e.g. applying effects at the layer group level would offer an alternative to applying multiple copies of one effect on a layer; for example, you could stroke a layer, then add another stroke on a group containing that layer).
Many thanks in advance,
J.
You cover most if not all of my current issues with layer styles.
This nook of Photoshop has been a boon for anyone doing photorealistic iconography.
Top Three would be
1. Re-order Layer Effects
2.Live graphical effects
4. Enable Smart shapes.
Very Import Points:
1) Improve snap-to-pixel behavior
2) Improve text rendering
While the focus should be on “Enable snap-to-pixel for shapes” and “Completely renew text rendering”, because it’s currently Photoshops biggest problem at small sizes.
Next on the list should be
* Support guide sets
* Preserve corner roundness when scaling rounded rectangles
* Support dashed- and dotted-line strokes
Because these are very helpful in the daily work. Especially adding guidelines should be a lot easier (full keyboard support, remember last selection in the dialog) and the guidelines should snap-to-pixel/ruler unit.
Totally unimportant is something like
* Export text & graphical styles as CSS
because Photoshop is an image editing and composing program and every webdeveloper has it’s own style and tricks to write efficient CSS.
Your comment about “overlap” at the end reminds of the times I want two independent layer masks on something, so I have one on the layer itself, then another mask on a group containing only that layer. It *works*, though applying that logic to layer styles, I think, would make things get really complicated. Especially if you wanted 3 or more of one effect.
4-1) That said, this is a great idea. Applying effects to a layer group is something that’s come up in my workflow more often than I’d have expected.
4-3) This would be a huge help. How many people have discovered using a drop shadow and outer glow as a double glow? I’ve seen so many tutorials, it’s in books… Being able to add several instances of an effect has, I think, serious potential. Strokes and (tasteful) glows, of course, but also bevels. Say you’re working on a highly stylized textured logo – maybe a movie, maybe a video game – I’ve seen plenty of well-done logos where the design called for a bevel on an object itself, but also a Stroke Bevel.
Right now, the most likely way to get that would be a second copy of the layer, to keep the effect editable. Though if the shape or transparency of the layer has to change, you’re stuck making those changes twice.
Maybe that was too detailed and specific, but that’s one “not as obvious as multiple strokes” thoughts I had.
4-4) Yes, yes, please yes. It seems no matter WHERE I place that large dialog box to get it out of the way, the VERY next image I work on, I need to move it elsewhere. I suppose if there was a way to compress the dialog to take up less space it could help, but it would likely diminish usability.
Good old ImageReady had a panel (then “palette”) for this, and it remains my favorite feature of that app, and the one thing I still long for inside Photoshop. I know everyone won’t agree – Adjustments panel anyone? Me, I like that panel, and didn’t have the keyboard shortcut/focus complaints some had.
But I really hate moving that window around so much. I think a condensed Adjustments panel-type Layer Effects panel, combined with an Appearance panel alá Illustrator will make all of this window management and multiple effect instances work well for a lot of people.
10) Also yes please.
The whole list sounds nice, but these are by far the things that interest me the most.
here, i know. our fireworks app is a piece of shit and no one uses it, but is almost a good web design app; how can we half-implement half-assed versions of what it almost does right in one of our other bloated apps. i know! we’ll half-implement it into photoshop. but of course, it won’t act like the vector tools in either fireworks or illustrator. that’s a *great* idea! and maybe we can make it export piss-poor html5, too! no, i’m not just whining john. i just get sadder and sadder when i see less and less smartness coming out of the big a. (surprise, wait for it: i really want to love adobe again.)
1. Enable smart shapes
2. Improve snap-to-pixel behavior
3. Improve text rendering
If you give me the ability to adjust roundrect corner radii on the fly without having to redraw the entire shape from scratch, I will be forever grateful.
Rest of the list sounds good too.
All of the 4) subpoints are incredibly important. Text rendering used to be more relevant, but with browsers moving forward with their in-browser rendering, I’m not sure if this will still be factor?
@taitems:
Reading the other comments around here, I found this one an amusing contrast. Lots of folks are saying “quit playing web in PS, use Fw, stop bloating.” Your comment seems to reflect the opposite side user who’s now pegged Ps as a tool for the web, rather exclusively. But…we’ll still be making artwork with Ps, and we’ll still print stuff. It’ll be nice to have good text 🙂
As well as all the things listed above, I’d love to see a colour palette for type and colour fill layers. So you could adjust the colour of all body copy at once, or all icons or all links etc. This would also help to have consistent use of colours. Rather than having 100 slightly different shades of grey.
1) Support dashed- and dotted-line strokes (!) I’ve been waiting about that for millions of years.
2) Make various layer effects enhancements (all of them pwetty please)
3) Enable “real” vector shapes (stroke & fill directly editable, without reliance on layer effects or a dialog box)
Also fix your comment form, whenever I hit tab it send me back to the beginning of the website (i’m on Chrome 6 🙂 )
1. Add multiple and and the ability to re-order layer styles.
2. Symmetry draw tool like in zbrush
3. Lazymouse feature similar to zbrush.
4. Refine tool sets for interface dev. ex: better rounded corner controls.
5. Clean up the brush palette.
Buyer’s remorse just hit me. Can you not talk about CS6 until I have gotten used to CS5…and the fact that my wallet is quite thin these days?
@Tony:
Don’t worry, you’ve got 2 years to enjoy CS5 before they talk about *buying* another version. But, I certainly hope Adobe doesn’t sit on its hands for that whole time. In fact, the earlier in the process they ask for improvements, the more likely the stuff finds its way into a hit list. 🙂
You ~really~ want to do the design community a big favor of inestimable value? Forget Photoshop – revive FreeHand (which puts Illustrator to shame!).
Took the survey — thanks for asking!
Top:
-Preserve corner roundness when scaling rounded rectangles
-Support other parameterized shape
-Re-order Layer Effects
Bottom (although all are good ideas, I just don’t care as much about these):
-Enable panel-based editing of effects
-Export text & graphical styles as CSS
-Enable layer search
1. real vector shapes
2. smart shapes ala fireworks
Those two features and I wont have to use fireworks anymore.
Everything under #4 aka “Make various layer effects enhancements”
With the most important being: reordering effects and being able to apply multiple effects on one layer.
But seriously, if you guys implemented everything on this list, it would fix Photoshop 100% in my book. Thanks so much in advance!
[Thanks, Dan, though I should reiterate that doing everything in one shot would be a tall order. (Changing the way layer effects are drawn, for example, is no small matter: they draw in the way they do for specific technical reasons.) Glad to hear the ideas are interesting, though. –J.]
All fantastic ideas, John. If you implement half of this stuff the design community is going to love you.
Sending this to my team to fill out as well. Thanks!
How about fixing Photoshop so it doesn’t crash. PS used to be the most solid program on my system. Since upgrading to cs5 it crashes a lot. While you’re at it, tell the Flash team to fix that bug-ridden app.
I’d recommend improving the user experience and consistency of your applications, vs. adding more features.
None of your competitors are close in terms of feature checklists, but there are products that your customers are starting up instead of photoshop to complete as many tasks as they can. They do this because those products are simpler to use, more consistent in their UI (especially with respect to the platform UI guidelines), easier to navigate around within, faster to start and generally more stable.
Nr 4 would be nice.
A fx panel (like adjustmentspanel), same effects more often (e.g. 2 dropshadows, 3 strokes,…),…
I think I want to see something like Illustrators appereance panel.
Other highend Vector stuff I do in Illustrator and copy and paste it as Vector smart object.
Make various layer effects enhancements &
Support guide sets (e.g. for grid layouts) are enough:P
Of course they are not enough but seems like most importants
ones are these for me…
Plus; Layer Search will be nice, if there’re too many layers and if you named them organized. For example in Flash, Library Search is very helpful.
Thanks for asking, top 5 for me (in that order):
1. Real vector shapes (with ability to add multiple strokes, ie. one for inside stroke, one for outside)
2. Smart shapes (similar to Fireworks)
3. Improve snap to pixel behavior
4. Supporting guide sets (now it takes much more effort than it should)
5. Layer search
Good luck 🙂
Priority 1:
Make various layer effects enhancements
Improve snap-to-pixel behavior
Improve text rendering
Thats it. Make that, I am happy =)
Who the hell needs Layer Search? Do you people know you can Ctrl+click on an element on canvas to select it’s layer?
All the ideas are fantastic, it’s really hard to point the “top-3” but in my opinion they would be:
1. Make graphical styles “live”;
2. Add/edit effects on multiple selected layers at once;
3. Enable smart shapes.
(OK, I’ll be cheating, but I can’t leave Linked Files out of this list)
Keep up the great work, John!
Hey John,
Reflecting pretty much everything Daemon says:
Smart shapes like Fireworks.
Better Text Rendering
Snap to pixel
+
Providing a PS lite mode, to completely disable seldom used features. If I were using PS for web design, Id probably want the least amount of bloat!
Enable “real” vector shapes (stroke & fill directly editable, without reliance on layer effects or a dialog box) <- really important
Support dashed- and dotted-line strokes <- interesting
Enable smart shapes:
Preserve corner roundness when scaling rounded rectangles <- important, this should be done in illustrator too 🙂
Support other parameterized shapes (e.g. stars with an adjustable number of points; lines with arrowheads)
Make various layer effects enhancements:
Apply effects at the layer group level <- this should be added a lot of time ago
Re-order effects <- what this mean?
Duplicate effects (e.g. apply multiple strokes per layer) <- really important
Enable panel-based editing of effects (instead of relying on a dialog box) <- this would be a real improvement
Add/edit effects on multiple selected layers at once <- important
Make graphical styles “live” (i.e. if edit the style definition, all styled objects update) <- useful
Enable layer search (i.e. type to filter by layer name or attributes) <- unimportant, there's the right click behavior for this
Improve snap-to-pixel behavior <- this is really important
Improve text rendering
Export text & graphical styles as CSS <- i think it's really hard to export something visual to what we really mean as css, there's dreamweaver for these things
Support guide sets (e.g. for grid layouts) <- for sure
Support linked files (i.e. edit one file to update buttons, icons, etc. across multiple PSDs) really important
Excellent! So, seems there won’t be Adobe Fireworks CS6, but there will be Adobe Photoshop CS6, that will have just another 2000 features added to it… cool.
[A) No one said anything about the future of Fireworks. In fact, I specifically asked that we keep this focused on Photoshop. B) Frankly, it’s not a matter of adding features to Photoshop; rather, it’s a matter of cleaning up what’s there & making it work well. A variety of things are currently just sort of dumb, and their behavior simply needs to be modified. –J.]
Keep’em coming, Adobe, I see where you go… 🙁
[No, you don’t. –J.]
Number 4 (all points) is the most important for me. The Layer styles are critical and need improving a lot. The feature listed are all very important for those improvements.
You’re always chasing for the next release. CS5 is bloated, buggy and crashing at will, but nevermind lets concentrate on pushing for CS6.
I hate you.
Absolutely 100% I would love to see:
“Support guide sets (e.g. for grid layouts)”
This would be a huge help for working with slices and grids.
Please add:
Sortable fonts. Let’s be able to sort those fonts other than alphabetical.
The fact you are asking this just makes it more apparent that Adobe is the new Microsoft. Fireworks already does web brilliantly but Adobe don’t even want to think about investing more money in it and seemingly wont even listen to their Photoshop spokesman when he tells them to work on fucking Fireworks, instead they would rather bloat their paint/photo package even more because they are too moronic too see a focused web design tool is the way forward.
I mean if InDesign wasn’t popular yet would you be cramming print layout tools into Photoshop? Treat web design with some respect and invest money/time in the application best suited for it…
@ARM:
You seem amazed that when you tell the Photoshop PM to work on Fireworks, nobody listens. Perhaps you and I are amazed by different things. Go use Fw. Ignore Ps. Why does it bother you that Photoshop is looking to offer its users more ways to interact with different kinds of graphical content? If Fw does everything you want and more…use it. If Fw has issues, submit bug reports to the Fw team. It seems simple.
Also, why does everyone talk about bloat? I’m seriously puzzled by the level of offense people seem to take when software gains new features that they personally don’t plan to use. Has anyone use Photoshop CS2? It took 5 minutes to start up on my machine, back in the day. CS5 loads in 20 seconds. Is it taking up too much hard drive space? Hell, this is multimedia. If you’re in the game, don’t you have the right hardware? Is that Adobe’s fault?
Sorry, I shouldn’t pick low-hanging fruit here, but the angst and rage…it’s just inappropriate.
I post here because its the only place on Adobe.com where you don’t get completely ignored.
As said earlier, all ideas are good, but from my experience :
Enable smart shapes
Support dashed- and dotted-line strokes
Export text & graphical styles as CSS
would clearly be useful – I used to work with someone who creates dashed lines in HTML, take a snapshot and paste it into the psd mockup 🙂
these cover almost everything that I want improved in PS, though if I were to choose 3, those would be:… oh wait, that I have to specify in the survey.
The ability to re-arrange the z-index/stacking order of layer styles.
1. Text rendering
2. Support linked files
3. Support guide sets
1) Multiple Styles (not duplicates) – would help tremendously in UI prototyping. I could draw a few boxes, apply multi-stroke styles, done.
2) *Live* Linked files: why should just After Effects have all the fun? 🙂 – smart objects are a bit clunky with saving inbetween files and such.
3) Live updating effects that are:
4) -panel based, yes please!
Thanks John! 🙂
Nice list, somebody has been digging out Adobe Fireworks features. The biggest problem will be with conflicts, the whole Photoshop workflow got to be redesigned (and reprogrammed).
You forgot Pages & States.
Wow, exciting features!
The must usefull for me would have to be the following in order:
1. Export text & graphical styles
2.Layer search
3.Dashed / dotted like stroke
4.Improved text rendering
5.Enable “real” vector shapes
Looking forward to seeing some of these John 🙂
Font Rendering. Give an option to mimic different technologies. i.e. Internet Explorer default kerning and font styling, Firefox, Chrome etc.
When mocking up designs it is virtually impossible to render text the same as a browser in Photoshop.
3.
6.
7.
Mabye to much of a side note.. but
Sync layerstyle presets with adobe.com (or photoshop.com profile) – so you could have all your favorite styles where ever you are. Then if you wanted to make a glass button or something you could just load that preset, from the web.
Same would be amazing for brushes and patterens!
I don’t know how many times i deleted my brushes and wished i had a copy 🙂
auto save or something of the like would be brilliant, or less crashes.
Wow. Almost everything on that list addresses my current gripes about doing web design with Photoshop.
Consider this: when I do web design, 90% of my layers are either text layers or fill layers with styles, 5% are smart objects (and would be 70% if they were properly managed) and the rest 5% are logos and icons.
This means that I think about objects, not about “pixels”. See Omnigraffle’s UI, they got many things right. 🙂
I’d also like to see the ability to adjust the positioning a vector point while you’re placing it (with the pen tool), by pressing the spacebar and dragging (like in Illustrator).
I wish that when I am on a layer, and I try to select points on a vector object, PS did not force me down to another layer containing an underlying vector object. The only workaround is to turn off the visibility of the underlying layer. That is a hassle.
I use to work with multiple psd files and tons of groups / subgroups of layers so
5. Enable layer search
10. Support linked files
Would be a huge improvement in my opinion.
1. Enable “real” vector shapes
3. 1. Preserve corner roundness when scaling rounded rectangle
could be really awesome too.
Not many people know this but you can already apply/remove, effects to/from a layer group(s), just not via the “expected” method. Select layer group, or groups and then use the Styles panel.
[Hah–I didn’t know that! You can also select multiple layers, then apply a style (no grouping required). –J.]
My vote would be for these three options:
Support dashed- and dotted-line strokes3
Improve snap-to-pixel behavior
Support linked files
As far as the more vector based features (and to some lesser extent, text features) I use Photoshop for PIXELS, Illustrator for VECTORS. I really think Adobe should consider a more modular approach to their software where each one does one thing and one thing only and an easy way to use multiple modules on a single file and even within the same IDE.
[I’ve tried to do exactly that. It’s hard to boil the ocean, though, and software development is, like politics, “the art of the possible.” –J.]
I think there is only one item in this list that isn’t already a standard feature in Fireworks (i.e., support linked files.) All of these are already important features to how I work everyday.
If you can’t get all of these features implemented in Photoshop in an effective way without suffering super-bloat or incomplete functionality, then why bother? The Adobe workflow message for the past few years has been, “the right tool for the job, and they all work together”, but there is nothing “working together” in the covert message beneath this survey. I’m an interaction designer, and I use FW, AI, and PS, and I select the right tool for the right job, but adding a ton of vector features to PS is not going to improve my workflow.
My thoughts on the survey? All of these features should be available in PS, because they are already essential to my everyday workflow in a tool that already has them, and I think that the people who use only PS would benefit greatly from them. I just lament the apparent loss of FW, because it is a tool that meets the needs of information and interaction designers (and some very talented visual designers – have you looked at Dribbble lately?) – clearly we are not on the Adobe radar. Where do we fit into your “workflow”?
[I’ve asked those responsible for Fireworks to comment. –J.]
I’d be happy if i could apply strokes from the layer styles dialogue WITHOUT ROUNDED CORNERS in the very near future, or at least having options if or not and why to do so without creepy workarounds.
Thanks
Fireworks already does this.
It also supports rounded corners on rectangles, and changing the radius of them down the line without redrawing
[That’s super! But guess what? I said we were talking about Photoshop, not about Fireworks, and yet you keep posting about Fireworks. Thanks for wasting everyone’s time. (Just to save you further time, I’m not going to get dragged into some pissing match about the relative merits of the apps, or how things should work on some big macro level. FW is great, and you can feel free to conveniently blame the marketing departments of Macromedia & Adobe for failing for 12 years to get it more widely adopted. It should get more use than it does, but here we are, and my job is to help make Photoshop better for Photoshop customers who are going to keep using it, regardless of whether FW sits up and starts granting wishes.) –J.]
@John Nack:
“ADOBE RAGE MACHINE” is maybe a wrong nickname, but ARM asks the right questions. John, in this post you clearly described 95% of the excellent and super-useful features in Adobe Fireworks CS5, that are exist and are working today! You do not need Super-Cool Photoshop CSNext, that will (probably) copy all of these features and functionality — today, you can have all of these goodies in Fireworks, use them, and then you can even exchange assets, created in Fireworks CS5, with Ai, Ps and Flash!
Or you do not teach this to your users? The right tool for the right job?
Dave Hogue asked a bit earlier some very good questions, too. Do you realize there are thousands of professional designers (Web, UI, UX, graphic designers, etc.) that are relying on Fireworks today, need all the excellent Fireworks features today, and will probably need them tomorrow, in Fireworks — when you’ll announce the big next version of Photoshop (in 12-14 months), that will be even more super-bloated piece of software, “borrowing” features from Fireworks (and Ai) and then what? You’ll simply kill Fireworks, that is being used by so many professionals — just because they did not fall into this “Ps is for everything, Adobe said so!” trap?
Do you know that when you are using Fireworks for Web and screen design, you are at least twice as fast and effective, compared to Photoshop use? Fireworks is mostly a vector-app, it’s much better suited for creating and editing Web layouts, it has rounded rectangles that are super-easy to edit (and full vector!), much better gradients (fully editable at all times!), excellent auto-shapes, Pages (and Master pages), Layers, States…
Fireworks is the right tool for the right job — Web/screen design.
Cramming all of its features into Photoshop? Don’t you think Ps already has too many of them?
I hope you also realize what kind of message you are sending to the design community right now, with posts like this one?…
@Michel: To reiterate the point (because I hate seeing talk about squashing new feature proposals for silly reasons)… People use Fw, yes. But you seem to be forgetting that people use Photoshop, too. You worry that Fw users will suffer for not drinking the Ps kool-aid, but what about Ps users who aren’t in Fw? Should they suffer for their lack of buy-in?
Fw is great for some things, and those things are in the web-graphics area. Ai is great for some things, and those things are in the vector area. Ps has a harder time. It was designed as an improvement to Macpaint…not a strictly “photo-editing” app, but an all-purpose art creation tool. Ps users enjoy the flexibility of ACR, photomanipulation, painting, image analysis, 3D touch-up, layout design, and more.
To serve its customers, it must continue to provide access to many types of graphical functionality, and methods to bring artwork from many different modes of creation together seamlessly. “Art Creation” tools *must* be flexible.
This isn’t a talk about making Fw obsolete. Or Ai. It’s about making Ps adapt to new styles and modes of artwork in order to best support *it’s* users.
Cool down ppl.
The biggest problem in CS Bundles i see is that a company like ours do not buy Bundles per se.
We purchase Ps, Ai, Ae, that’s it that’s all, we’d never buy Fireworks just to have a few tools more at hand to accomplish certain tasks more reliable.
But still, did i say “still”?, we have to workaround same software problems we have since then, just because we feel too that Adobe rather likes to push new “features” into every release instead of improving outdated quirks.
For my opinion John and the Ps-Team did a giant leap in terms of improvement but im still frustrated by the fact and the feeling that internally all teams (Ps, Ai, Ae in our case) do not work closely enough together.
I’dont like the fact that you have Ps and Ai working very induvidual in terms of usability.
The core functionalities like handling Layers in the layers panel, Menues, Context Menues, Color Swatches, etc. i makes me mad working with Ai, even in CS5, not because i’m a Freehand Veteran.
And no! i’m not going into the discussion ring about Ae, makes no sense at all anymore. For me, John is the only Product manager at Adobe who gives me the feeling that he really cares for his user base and therefore for his product.
After many years of work with Adobe Products and following improvements, i will tell now my opinion as it is (tell me if i’m wrong): Mr. Coleman does not care enough about his user base, i wish he could be more agressive in pushing Ae usability forward but he don’t.
I think Todd Koppriva would be the better Ae man for sure.
So, here to everyone: be happy having John Nack as a product manager.
over and out
Getting mac-version of Bridge to same level in features than Windows-version would be fair (since I paid the same price of it…).
[What are you talking about? –J.]
If I have to pick one item from the list it would be 4.4 ‘Enable panel-based editing of effects (instead of relying on a dialog box)’. This would be very helpful.
One of the beauties of the suite is that I can keep my vectors in a vector program, page layout in a page layout program, my rasters in a raster editing program and my web assets in an HTML based program. What happened to the idea of using the proper tool for the job and avoiding feature bloat on one product? Vectors should be created in Illustrator and then brought over to Photoshop as Smart Objects, not adding additional vector features to Photoshop for lazy web designers…
Christine…
The vectors have been a fantastic addition for some groups including me who want resizable elements that can have bitmap like effects and keep your artwork in one program.
What’s the point in being strident about what everyone should use? To do me current workflow in Illustrator would take twice the time for half the benefits.
Web features in Photoshop? Sheesh. Seriously, if Adobe wants to do something positive, build a full suite of HTML5 features into Dreamweaver/Flash. Flash Player’s death as a browser plugin is inevitable, a matter of time. Somebody’s going to do a strong HTML5 authoring program. If Adobe doesn’t want that market, the market will go elsewhere.
[I guess you missed the news about the Dreamweaver HTML5 update, or the Illustrator HTML5 pack. I sometimes think people miss news because they want to miss it, because it’s out of step with their accepted narratives. –J.]
Brining primitives to Photoshop would be very helpful, and if the goal is to export certain styles as CSS I would love to request a simple feature:
Have Photoshop display the proper vendor and CSS3 properties+values for gradient swatches. For example, if I’ve created or downloaded a series of gradient swatches it would be very helpful if an option in a contextual menu or the panel options existed to simply display a window with that gradient’s CSS for quick copy and paste. I find myself spending more time playing with the gradient background syntax between vendor-prefixes than I do any other CSS3 property.
All I want from Adobe is a fixed Save for Web option that doesn’t send Mac OS into a beach ball state every single time. Sometime’s this happens with a 1kb file. It’s quite frustrating. Please fix!
[I know. I believe it has to do with allocating memory, which is why you see the behavior sometimes but not others. It should be better in CS5. Let me know if not. –J.]
First, a thank you for asking us for our input.
Second, I’ll apologize for my colleagues that thought this would be a good place to complain about Photoshop.
Third, the goods:
1. Improve text rendering. Please. There are more important items on this list, but it just needs to be done.
2. Fix vector tools. That means, but isn’t limited to, respect corner radii, snap to pixel grid, directly edit fill/stroke, etc.
3. Layer effects goodness
Fourth, luxuries:
Guide sets, searching layers panel, and linked files would all be great additions. Also, more ways to edit multiple layers.
Fifth, don’t add:
CSS exporting. Many designers don’t code, others prefer writing from scratch. It requires too much interface and represents too much feature creep to be included in PS.
Again, thanks for asking for our input. Great job.
1. Improve text rendering
2. Export text & graphical styles as CSS
3. Improve snap-to-pixel behavior
If you do any of the vector stuff if we could open a .psd in Illustrator to edit it that would be super sweet.
Also, at some point on here you’ve mentioned the idea of an HTML layer. I love that idea immensely and would love to see it tied into the exporting of graphics & text as CSS &or HTML. Maybe even let you open a .psd in Dreamweaver to edit or finish your work.
I’m a huge Fireworks user and I love the app, but the last two releases have convinced me that Adobe is just about done with it. Two years ago, I’d be the same as Adobe Rage Machine, but at this point, I cant deal with lack of development in Fireworks anymore. Adobe fails to market it, fails to put development dollars, etc. It may not be officially end of life, but like Director, its being only passionate users clinging to hope that is keeping it alive. Time to move on.
So if you can’t beat them, join them, and that means I want to see Photoshop gain the features that I love about Fireworks.
1. Vectors
2. Auto Shapes
3. Live Effects (re-order, etc)
1,3,4
recently lots of useless features got added. plz, get rid of the junk again. put illustrator and photoshop 2gether…
[It’s sort of funny: you’re deriding recent feature additions as useless junk, and at the same time you’re asking that we slam together two of the largest apps out there–a move that many people would inevitably see at *the* definition of adding bloat and complexity. –J.]
Count me among those who wish that PS would quit focusing on web development. The JPEGS exported directly from PS with Save For Web have too large a file size for quality received. In business one would say that it doesn’t get enough bang for the buck.
However, for all of those who keep boasting about FW, it only shines in sRGB. What is needed in PS is the kind of Vector Tools that are in FW available in all color spaces and with all color profiles. That would be terrific! For those of you who have never used the Vector Tools in FW, it would really be an epiphany to have a PS that could create these kinds of objects.
Adobe has such an application, it’s called ImageReady. Oh darn, adobe dropped ImageReady
cause it actually worked!
Apparently you misunderstood what I wrote.
Image Ready Was for RGB only.
I know what Image Ready Was. I still have a copy of Image Ready 7 if I were to ever want to use it.
I said that I wish that PS would QUIT focusing on Web Export and start focusing on Better Vector tools in the non-RGB Color Spaces.
3 & 8 would be the ones I’d be most keen on getting from PS to CSS would be beyond amazing 🙂
Most important :
1.Improve text rendering
2.Enable smart shapes
3.Enable “real” vector shapes
4.Make various layer effects enhancements
5.Export text & graphical styles as CSS
Thank you for asking!
1. Support linked files (i.e. edit one file to update buttons, icons, etc. across multiple PSDs)
2. Many other mentioned above
The support for linked files would help me enormously when designing complex corporate web sites. Its almost always the case that you have to update say 30 psd:s if you change something in the menu, and that could be done several times. It´s astonishing that this feature hasn’t been included yet when most other adobe programs support it.
You’ve got a remarkable list there, John! I know a number of those features have been sorely missed, particularly dealing more flexibly with vectors.
Personally, I’d put text-rendering high up on things to look at–warping text, and rendering transformed or warped text from Smart Objects always seems to leave rough results for me, which I can’t really use in a finished work.
The linked files–that’s interesting…I feel like Smart Objects cover this in most of the ways that I’d want to use it, but I’d definitely be interested in seeing what other folks do with it.
Ok, enough commentary, making lists seems popular:
1) Improve text rendering. Text cuts across most of what we do. High bang for the buck. Especially, dealing with jaggies and smudging when rendering through Smart Objects.
2) Vector support for adjustable stroke widths, smart path strokes, etc. We have Ai, but the case for vectors in Ps is pretty clear, and bringing some of the basic artistic benefits of vectors in would be a very welcome feature.
3) Smart Shapes. Arguable, this is vector support, so, ditto on the value of being able to more easily modify the vectors that Ps lets us create.
Those, I think, play most heavily into the game of bringing different kinds of graphical media together more easily, which strikes me as the thing Ps is about.
All of the suggestions are great, but some are basically achievable already with the addition of Smart Objects, and some seem to be getting web-specific enough that they will be unused by other parties. Neither of those are good reasons to leave a potentially great feature out of the app, but they are reasons to consider them second to the features that touch most users and address the design intent of the software. 🙂
-Jim
Survey completed. Thanks for asking, John.
On a related note: I really wish that changing the opacity of an inner stroke effect wouldn’t change the opacity of the object itself. When I change the opacity of the effect, I expect it to blend with the underlying object, not “eat away” the object. Because of the way it works now, I always have to duplicate the current object to a new layer, change the fill opacity to zero, and then change the stroke opacity. (Feels like a bug.)
Fireworks does this already
FW does not produce files which are outside of the sRGB color space. Some of us want to be able to produce these things in other color spaces.
Can you understand that sRGB is not the WHOLE purpose of Photoshop?
The linked files like Indesign does is missing since the smart objects were introduced.
Would be a major feature!!!
Wow. That list pretty much sums up all the crazy fantasies I’ve been collecting in my head over the last years for what Photoshop should be able to do. I’m stoked that you wonderful people at Adobe are that well connected to my brain. 😉
1. Make graphical styles “live” (i.e. if edit the style definition, all styled objects update)
Yes, yes, yes! I’ve been hoping for a sort of “CSS for Photoshop” for ages. Client wants all the buttons recolored, do it in one shot.
2. Support linked files (i.e. edit one file to update buttons, icons, etc. across multiple PSDs)
Hah, that’s like the previous point in overdrive. And yes, it’s another thing I’ve wanted for years. Please add this!
3. Add/edit effects on multiple selected layers at once
Yes please, and while you’re at it, I’d love if you enabled “fill layer” (cmd+shift+backspace) on multiple selected layers so it behaves the same way as with single layers, instead of deleting them.
Daily work would be so much easier if these features were to become reality. I’m really excited about this post. 🙂
I think Jerry hit the nail on the head.
1. Make graphical styles “live” (i.e. if edit the style definition, all styled objects update)
2. Support linked files (i.e. edit one file to update buttons, icons, etc. across multiple PSDs)
3. Add/edit effects on multiple selected layers at once
2, 3, and 4 would be my most important choices. However, they all sound good. I would also like to see Adobe allow for third party add-ins for the layer styles. Kind of like mini-plug-ins.
John
Survey completed.
I use PS for photo editing, banners and email designs. The latter two require limited or no HTML and CSS (banners are images, emails have to render correctly in the MS Word HTML engine).
For actual site and UI design I use Fireworks because:
(a) It gives me crisp, pixel-perfect lines and edges. No anti-aliasing on a straight, horizontal line! This makes for sharp layouts.
(b) The panel – I can edit the size and position of an item using pixel values. This is incredibly useful.
(c) Superior RGB file compression
(d) PNG8 with alpha transparency
(e) I can select an object without selecting its layer (I know I can auto-select layer/group in PS, but it just doesn’t work as well)
(f) Pages and Master Pages, which can be different sizes
But PS has:
(a) Superior effects implementation
(b) Layer Comps (I realise this functionality can overlap with Fireworks’ Pages, but in some cases, like multiple branded versions of the same email, this is much more elegant)
(c) Smart Objects. Combined with Layer Comps, these are great if your machine has enough memory.
Frankly, if you add all the above FW items to PS, I’ll dump FW. Conversely, adding the above PS features to FW and improving PSD handling would severely reduce my PS usage to (almost) non-existent.
I can go either way.
Like many others here my top three
1. Font/text rendering
2. Pixel snapping
3. ‘Smart’ shapes, specifically for radius corners
Cheers
Gradient Mesh – My Fav
Please include color palette in PSD file. Like it works in AI und ID.
Took the survey. And I know this is mostly web and functionality related. But come on…let’s get those Glyphs into Photoshop. I can’t believe I still have to open Illustrator just to get certain glyphs.
You didn’t list my first choice:
Save As Data URI
Which would output a .css file.
1. live graphical styles – this is huge, if it means changing colours, fonts and other properties of similar objects in one place, but it should work across layers, more like illustrator’s implementation
2. better text rendering
3. real vector shapes
4. batch add/edit effects
5. smart shapes
6. improve snap to pixel
7. guide groups
also selectable guides and effects presets would be awesome
I only hope that this doesn’t mean work on Fireworks is being put on the backburner. FW CS5 was basically one giant bugfix for CS4, let’s hope we get some useful new features in FW CS6 as well.
Although not included in your list, I beg you to please include a rounded corner option for the marquee tool. Please. I have requested this of Adobe several times over the years.
I honestly think all of those additions would be enormously helpful to a web design workflow.
Like others, I think snap-to-pixel, font rendering, real vectors, smart shapes and layer style > CSS would be the top priorities.
Photoshop has long needed proper web-based font rendering, and on top of that, it would be great if you offered it on a browser-specific basis (i.e. Having “Firefox”, “Safari”, “Chrome” and “IE” options in the formatting pane).
Gosh photoshop gets all this attention. What about Fireworks…it’s supposed to be the creative web design app right? Photoshop is for photo editing.
Wish Adobe would give FW users some attention. I agree with @erwin Fireworks CS5 was a bug fix. Nice but a let down. Is this symbolic of the future for Fireworks? If so Photoshop has a lot of strides to make to incorporate things like pages, vector controls, export options such as PNG8, jpeg compression masking to name a few.
It would be really nice, if you had an easier way to edit fonts and text. Say you’ve created 25 layers with text in it, and then decides to use another font. As it is, you have to click on each layer, change the font and so on. It would be cool to have something like “Paragraph styles” like in InDesign – something that resembles the CSS way of doing it.
You can do this today in Adobe Fireworks:
– Press Ctrl+F,
– Type name of the font you search for, then type name of font you’d like to replace it with,
– Click “Replace All” and you’re done!
This can be 3 seconds work, done in Fireworks, today — you don’t have to wait for PS CSNext to be able to do this font replacement!
@John & Co: Don’t you see you’re trying to “re-invent the wheel” in Photoshop, while the perfect app for Web design — Fireworks — is sitting quietly in the corner and tries to get some attention from the part of Adobe? 🙂
Fireworks is not only great for Web design, but it can also create perfect screen graphics, and faster and better than Ps or Ai, combined!
And for this purpose, Fireworks doesn’t have to copy features from Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign — on the contrary, I see that Ps Team is trying hard to copy almost all Web features from Fw and incorporate them in Ps! 😉
Thanks for considering these features. I’d really love better effects, text rendering and guides in Photoshop. I don’t do ANY web design work myself, where I work we have more qualified people doing that. But at home I’d really love all these features (all of them in your list) for the occasional poster/ad I do as a freelance job. I don’t get enough money from it to buy any other parts of Creative Suite and I need Photoshop mainly for retouching photos.
Text rendering should be top of the list IMO. Thanks!
All the points above are definitely something we have been waiting for to be updated. However, I would love to see some of the text functionality of InDesign and Illustrator passed along, glyphs panel, tabbed paragraphs (comd \) to enable easier bullets on paragraphs, paragraph styles and character styles would also be a huge time saver.
As always, thanks for asking John. Just completed the survey.
Subpixel text rendering and preserving corner roundness when scaling are my top picks.
I am surely coming too late to a discussion and possibly with “off topic” suggestion. but thereis one UI thing i love in 3dmax which i peronaly think shuld be implimented in all programs, or in win/mac save us interface (not sure who is responsible for that “save as” table, operating system or program. but i would love to see a small bar showing not only the last seved location, but history of folders where one has saved files before. it helps when u have lots of documents opened and one u have to save to say c/work/newproject/
and a next shoud be saved under d/forweb/updates/
or whatever… i mean when u have to save files to different locations, u spend lots of time navigating folder trees in save as dialog box. this could be easily changed… i think? here i have some pictures to make point clearer:
http://3dideas.wordpress.com/2010/02/28/what-can-program-developers-learn-from-3d-max-interface/
best,
m.
Please bring back the OS X File Proxy in the title bar.
Just create one super suite that does them all. In other words put all adobe apps in a blender and put out one product call adobe suite that does it all. Then there will be not more nagging and arguing about what features should and shouldn’t be there.
Here are my top picks (ranked by importance):
* Export text & graphical styles as CSS
* Support linked files (i.e. edit one file to update * buttons, icons, etc. across multiple PSDs)
* Support guide sets
* Support dashed- and dotted-line strokes
* Improve text rendering
* re-order effects
* duplicate effects
* Add/edit effects on multiple selected layers at once
Frankly, when it comes to shapes, I don’t really “get it”. Wouldn’t it make more sense to have better Illustrator integration instead of adding more and more vector functionality to Photoshop?. I’d rather have “Illustrator layers”, and ideally a “morphing ui” that would switch to illustrator when you are editing an vector layer. Then photoshop would be able to use some of the illustrator objects directly (e.g. paths for stroke path etc., and maybe can continue having it’s current vector capability, but when you want to do something more advanced you just right-click on a vector layer and say “convert to to illustrator” and go do you vector edits there.
I see no logic in duplicating too much functionality. It must come at a cost to the dev team that then cannot spend their time on improving the core (pixel) functionality of photoshop.
It would be more productive to think about illustrator and photoshop as two facets of one, well integrated product (rather than a “suite” or “bundle”. Make the sum greater than the two parts combined by making both products better aware of each other and make it easier for the user to “live in one document” and be focused on whet they are trying to do. Make it easier to switch back and forth between the two aspects in a seamless workflow.
All this constant tweaking of photoshop native vector capability just seems like one big distraction from where I stand…
Just my 2 cents…
I hope that I’m not beating a dead horse, but I came over this thread in the U2U. http://forums.adobe.com/thread/668882?tstart=0
Excerpts:
“The automation, which made Photoshop such a great tool for rollovers, has been completely stripped from all recent versions.
With CS or CS2, I could set the save for web preferences, then easily create a single image with one layer and three states. Assign visibility for states then Save For Web a single time (2 clicks total) and get three files.
Now, I must save, alter visibility, save, alter visibility, save (totaling no less than 8 clicks) to end with the same resulting files.
If I needed to, say alter text on a button, one change and one save got me all new images for each state. Now.. three changes (one for each Layer comp) and 3 saves at a minimum are needed. So, in essence, all work was tripled.”
“This, combined with the lack of animated gif support, made and make CS4 and CS5 a major step backwards in terms of web production via Photoshop. Two simple features that reduced web production time by 20% or more…”
“The IR HTML was junk and I never used it and advised others to throw it away. What I would do is dump all the output except the images folder… that images folder was a fantastic timesaver. Where IR shined was multiple images saved for web via states in one fell swoop. States allowed one edit to be seen across all states.”
“All I really would like to see return is the Web Content panel from IR. No image maps, no HTML output, none of that. In fact, if the Layer Comp panel were simply beefed up to add the states options and when Save for Web was invoked there was an option to save all states from the layer comp, that would do it.
In fact… the ability to save multiple layer comps as individual files in the Save For Web dialog would do it as well. Looking at Illustrator… Save For Web there needs the ability to choose which artboard (or multiple artboards) to save in the Save for Web dialog. So, maybe the issue is more a need to improve the Save For Web dialog across Adobe apps rather than focus on internal application features.
That and the the ability to open an animated GIF and maintain both frames and transparency would bring CS6+ back to where CS2 was in terms of speeding workflow.”
In order from most important to least important:
7, 4, 6, 8, 3, 5, 1, 10, 2, 9
These would be the best improvements for me, divided in three categories:
SIMPLE BUT EFFECTIVE
* Support dashed- and dotted-line strokes
* Preserve corner roundness when scaling rounded rectangles
MAKING LIFE EASIER
* Enable panel-based editing of effects (instead of relying on a dialog box)
MAKING LIFE REALLY EASIER
* Support linked files (i.e. edit one file to update buttons, icons, etc. across multiple PSDs)
Here’s some brief things I could use, for web or otherwise. I’m still on CS4, so if any of these are in CS5, don’t be too venomous.
• Pixel accurate text layer distributing like illustrator has (I beg for this)
• Layer Styles for Groups
• Overlay Mode/Opacity/FX changes for multi-selected layers/groups
• Web-Style text rendering (based on browser if possible)
• Right click layer menu allows you to make it a background
• Break apart smart objects back into layers
• Tear Off Menus ala Autodesk Maya
• Global option to move shapes no less than 1 pixel when zoomed
btw, for you fireworks people, the reason some of us want things back in Photoshop is that we started out in web design using photoshop and imageready (and golive) for everything. Then Adobe swallowed Macromedia and they threw out the apps we had been using for years. Everyone I know just got pissed off and threw fireworks in the trash. It’s nothing personal to you, but they might not see a wide adoption of fireworks when they look at the whole of the design world and cater more to the PS crowd.
Improve Fireworks! Care about your users, care for better tools and workflows, not about selling the most expensive tool to do everything, be creative!
For the sake of common sense, specialize tools instead of creating monsters.
Why does Adobe keep promoting PS and hardly care about FW when it does anything a screen designer could dream about in the easiest, fastest and more intuitive way?
FW is the tool for screen design, and designers don’t even know about its benefits, thank, in big part, to Adobe.
If ppl would realize how many good things using FW brings, Adobe would have to adopt it as its most beloved child, put some money and sell it as the best tool for the digital era, specially these days, with all the apps and devices.
Why not letting people know?
@Jim Monaco – When u say:
“Why does it bother you that Photoshop is looking to offer its users more ways to interact with different kinds of graphical content? If Fw does everything you want and more…use it”
We can answer, that’s what we do, and will keep on doing as long as it exists. That’s why we worry… cause it smells like omnipotent monster PS will eat it.. sooner or later.. and that’s simply absurd, but maybe not for an uncreative business that cares about making money, but not the best of the products.
Long life to common sense.