On Adobe Part 1:
Incremental Improvements

The goal of this post will be to point out some of my frustrations with CS2 as it stands. Future posts will cover new tools that I think Adobe should incorporate into Photoshop and Illustrator, but this entry will deal only with incremental improvements that simply modify existing tools within CS2. They’re in no particular order.

Illustrator CS2

• Selecting multiple objects almost always yields the much-despised “mixed appearances” cop-out nasty-gram in the appearances palette. Can’t you at least show me what all of the selected objects have in common? All too often I apply an effect to a bunch of objects, only to find that the only way of making a global change involves changing each object individually! The appearance palette should be smart enough to discern differing properties from identical ones.
• The “Join” tool needs to be smarter. As it stands, the join tool will only work with the end-points of two lines (not more, not less). This is a woefully weak tool. It should automatically recognize selected lines with coincident end-points and join them, no matter how many. When importing CAD data, for instance, geometry is often fragmented into hundreds of individual little spline segments. Joining these is a cinch in Freehand, where the Join tool easily joins as many lines as needed automatically. In Illustrator one is left to go through and manually join the end-points of each and every line. Pure suffering!
• There needs to be a user-adjustable pointer accuracy setting. I don’t know about you guys, but I have a lot of trouble selecting individual points and snapping them to one another, even with smart-guides enabled. The distance tolerance is much too small for me.
• In Rhinoceros 3D, when you click on overlapping objects a drop-down appears to help you select the specific object in the stack you were trying for. The same would be equally helpful in Illustrator! It’s such a pain to have to hide or lock foreground objects just to select something underneath! And don’t gimme no bull about “next object below” or whatever that is. It’s confusing, rarely works, and frustrates more than it helps. A simple list of all the possibilities is so much easier!
• Why don’t all tools have a “preview” button? For example, I use the offset tool frequently, and it’s the weakest offset I’ve ever used. Why on earth would I have to manually type in a number, having no visual reference for how large or small the number is, in a modern drawing application? Here’s what I want for offset, and I want it with EVERY drawing tool in Illustrator. You should still have numeric control, but we need a visual preview at the very least.
• All menu-driven tools should have iconic equivalents, and the icons should be easily customizable into custom toolboxes by drag and drop.
• The “round corners” filter should be strengthened to allow the user to control radii for individual corners. It should also be smart enough to distinguish between a corner and a smooth point on a spline. At current it only works on simple line-to-line corners, but anything curved will have unpredictable results. Line-line fillets are predictable, but predictably poor. They’re not circular, they’re something oddly round but not radial. You should be able to apply a round fillet between any two curves, and get a predictable result, like this. If you were feeling ambitious, you could actually make the fillets historical, allowing the user to change them later. But more on that in a later post.
• Selecting objects in the Layers palette, my primary means of selecting objects, should be vastly improved. Firstly, the current distinction between highlighting objects in the layers palette (by clicking the name) and actually selecting them (by clicking the circle to the right of the name) should be eliminated. Clicking the name should select the object, and that’s that. It would also be very helpful if, by mousing-over an object on the art-board, the object is automatically highlighted in the layer palette, helping you to locate it for selection and modification. Like this.
  
• Smart Guides should be toggle-able while in mid-curve! Currently, if I’m drawing a curve and I hit ctrl-U, I have to click the endpoint of the line to continue drawing. This ruins any curve that I was in the process of drawing, so I have to re-adjust it later. I should be able to toggle it in real-time.
• Live-paint should be incorporated into the rest of the program, and the parent objects should not be kept sacred. You should be able to use the paint bucket anywhere on the screen, and the object will be dynamically created based on the current locations of lines on the canvas. The parent-child relationship should be smart, so that moving, changing, or replacing parent objects will update the children.
• Object masking should be as simple as it is in Photoshop. It’s currently very confusing to learn, and once mastered leaves much to be desired in terms of power and flexibility. More on that later.
• The arc tool is practically useless. It should be a robust and powerful tool! You should be able to draw three-point arcs, end-end-center, tangent-end, and all kinds of other arcs. And when editing them they should remain circular unless explicitly converted to splines. The point of an arc is to make a radial arc. The Illustrator arc tool is redundant and annoying to use.
• The paint brush is good! If only it had pen-pressure opacity, life would be a dream :) It seems that the same chord locations currently being used to change the size of the brush with pressure could be used to change the alpha as well, no? Of course, alpha by itself wouldn’t be best. I’d also like the option of color-shifting with pressure instead (to avoid darkening at crosshatch intersections).
• Raster effects in a vector program should never be defined by measuring pixels! Gaussian blur, for example, should be measured as a distance in inches, points, etc. By defining it in pixels, you are making it so that scaling the page can prove unpredictable. Even with “Scale Strokes and Effects” turned on, changing the document resolution or page size will leave the blurs un-altered, and your work in disrepair. The obvious workaround is to simply paste your object into a Photoshop doc as a smart object and re-size it from there. This is a jury-rig solution, however.
• Zooming should be smooth and infinite. Currently I can not zoom in as far as I’d like. CAD packages let me smoothly zoom into an object, all the way down to the minimum tolerance set by the program (usually .001mm). Illustrator should afford the same. The idea of stepped-increment zoom is so old-school! You should be able to zoom smoothly to any zoom level.
• Items should have individual anti-alias settings like text does in Photoshop. Obviously the difference wouldn’t be visible when printing, but it would be very helpful when, for example, mocking up websites.
• Overall, the Illustrator interface needs a pretty radical re-think. It’s been amended over and over, with layer upon layer of added functionality without any fundamental change in user interaction. It’s long overdue! Illustrator is a good product, but it can be so much better!
• Select>Same>_______ is much too weak. What if I want multiple criteria? The “find” function in Free Hand is much better. Please give me a better way of selecting objects by criteria!
• Why do you still include the same hokey symbol, pattern, and gradient swatches as the default in this professional app? It just seems a little chincy :) Give us something useful or nothing at all. I’d expect these kinds of patterns in a toy app, not in pro graphics. Obviously no big deal, I just think it’s funny.
• Why doesn’t the color picker mode default to your most recently used? I, for one, use HSB more often than anything else. Yet I have to pick it from a pull-down EVERY time I make a color. It’s a pain!

Photoshop CS2

• The undo stack should NOT include “select layer.” I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to be drawing something, to undo it, and retry, only to discover that your new line is drawn on the wrong layer. I’ve made this mistake hundreds of times, and will continue to make it until this is fixed. Please!!
• Panning should allow you to go outside the window frame, even when not in full-screen mode. People who know that this functionality was (finally) added to full-screen mode never use Windowed mode anymore, because it’s so limited. People who don’t know, however, stay in Windowed mode and remain frustrated with this fundamental problem.
• PNG export currently creates inferior PNG files to the ones that come out of Illustrator. They don’t work properly as often or on as many platforms. PNG is an awesome format, if only it were consistently implemented!
• Zooming should be smooth and infinite. I know you’re limited by that silly graphics engine you’ve been using for a decade and a half, but for heaven’s sake, don’t you think it’s time for an update? I want anti-aliased zooming ad-infinitum. For good sketching and design work it’s critical. I’m so frustrated with the current situation, where I have to choose the size of my illustration based on the size of my screen, lest I’m forced to work with a jaggy image. The current situation is so bad that I avoid Photoshop for rapid work whenever possible, using it only when absolutely needed.
• The brush tool needs to get rid of it’s faceting problem. “Smoothing” is helpful, but it’s still not enough. I still get faceted lines, which is why I’ve switched to Sketchbook Pro. I obviously lose a lot of functionality by using Sketchbook, but at least it’s enjoyable and fast, while Photoshop is aggravating and cumbersome. Better sketching tools are key for my work.
• Brush tool should be able to “snap to path,” so you can create hand-sketched lines with pressure sensitivity while using a path as a guide.
• The concept of “spacing” should not be included in brushes. Sample-spacing is completely irrelevant to me, a control of spray “volume” in the airbrush would make sense, but novice users are confused by the spacing control.
• Custom brush management should be much simpler and more user-friendly. As it stands it is very easy to accidentally delete brushes forever, and very difficult to reorganize them or make changes to them. Sketchbook Pro has a much more intuitive system.
• This one is technically “new functionality,” but it seems so plausible! I want a tool that can select any color and change it to transparent. Much like using channels, except not limited to the colors in the current color space (RGB, CMYK, etc). I’d like to be able to say “take all of the white on this layer and make it transparent. If a pixel is 50% white and 50% mauve, change the pixel to 100% mauve and make it 50% transparent.” Is this possible? It’d be a HUGE help for working with compositing sketches and imported images! There are work-arounds currently, but I need something easier.
• Layer effects should be a flexible list that can be re-ordered. You should be able to assign multiple drop-shadows to a single layer, and stack them up in whatever order you wish.
• This one is technically new functionality as well, but layers should be able to be duplicated with a link between them. What I mean by that is that you should be able to have two layers that remain at all times identical in content (preferably the same exact data to avoid filesize-bloat), but that can be at different locations in the stack and have different sets of layer effects. This would be a HUGE improvement!
• Clipping masks are good, but you should allow for multiple nested clipping masks. Masks within masks. You did it with groups, and it’s great!
• Control-Clicking layers should always select the individual layer, not its group. I use groups heavily, which makes it impossible for me to easily select the correct layer without moving to the layers palette. Could even be an alternate key combination, like ctrl-alt.
• Get rid of the whole concept of “step backward” and “step forward.” Just use “Undo”/”Redo” like everybody else. Those legacy kids who liked it the old way will get over it :)
• Guides should be able to be number-driven. I should be able to easily punch in a numerical location for a guide in real-time as I drag it out. It’s too difficult to reliably place guides on the ruler tick-marks. Guides should also be stored in groups, like paths or layers. You should be able to have groups of guides for different purposes.

I’m sure I’ll think of more, these are the ones I can think of off the top of my head. I’ll append as necessary. What do the rest of you think? Any other ways Photoshop and Illustrator could improve ON CURRENT FUNCTIONALITY? The next post will be about new functionality, so save those ideas for then!

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Photoshop Addenda 1:

When creating vector shapes in Photoshop, if the user is currently working inside the vector part of a shape the vector tools should default to “add” mode instead of always creating a new shape layer. If the user is in a raster layer, obviously a new shape layer would still be created.

Shape layers in Photoshop should have a stroke property built-in without having to add a layer effect. Most users don’t understand the concept of “fill” vs. “opacity,” so it would be helpful to find a less confusing way of gaining the same functionality.

You should be able to have a vector mask on a layer without also having to first create a raster one. You should be able to apply either a vector or raster mask as needed.

Copy and Paste are confusing and frustrating. What if I want to copy a normal layer and paste it into the mask of another? The only way I’ve found to do this is to use channels to create a selection of the grayscale of an isolated layer, and then do a “fill” in the desired mask. That’s silly. Copy-Paste should work the way it used to (paste goes into current layer), and there should be a secondary option for “paste as new layer”.

For the life of me I can’t understand why I need three different arrow tools (Move, Closed, and Open Arrow). One tool could be smart enough to recognize it’s context and act accordingly. I can see no reason why an arrow tool couldn’t be smart enough to recognize whether I clicked a point, vector object, or a raster layer or selection.

Select-All, when a path is selected, should select every object in the path, not create a raster selection around the whole object. Intuitively, when I’m in the context of a vector object, I expect for select-all to work like it does in Illustrator.