Dan Margulis Applied Color Theory

Paths and CS4 Adoption

Photoshop CS4 ?
Posted by: "John Romano"
Thu Apr 9, 2009 8:29 am (PDT)

Did they change something from CS3 to CS4 in regard to paths ? For some reason they seem like they are harder to see or is it my eyes Getting older :)

I have adjusted to it but other retouchers are somewhat annoyed !

--
John Romano
Acme Color Manager
G7 Certified Expert
Acme Printing Co. LLC
978-658-0800 x231
___________________________________________________________________________

Re: Photoshop CS4 ?
Posted by: Alessandro Bernardi
Tue Apr 14, 2009 4:16 am (PDT)

Hi John,

you're right, something has changed from CS3 to CS4. The difference comes from the OpenGL support in CS4 that enables the anti-alias feature of many graphic cards. Before that there was no anti-alias in the paths display. This is the typical case in which a new option is almost worse than the previous one.

I make intense use of paths in my daily workflow so, yes, this annoying as it affects the color samplers and brush pointers as well. In some images I cannot really see them and sometimes when I option-click to set the sampling point of the clone stamp or the healing brush, the sampling point is not visible when I paint.

Fortunately you can go back to the previous way. Just choose Preferences, Perfomance and, in the GPU Settings area, disable the "Enable OpenGL Drawing" option. Then quit and restart PS to see the changes.

Now you'll have the paths more visible but you'll loose the benefit of the graphic card OpenGL acceleration.

Hope this helps.

Kind regards,
Alessandro Bernardi
___________________________________________________________________________

Re: Photoshop CS4 ?
Posted by: John Romano
Tue Apr 14, 2009 6:29 am (PDT)

Thank you Alessandro, It works !

What benefits will I loose by not using the OpenGL acceleration ?

If Im not using GoLive it shouldn?t be an issue right ?

Thank you again !!

Regards

John Romano
___________________________________________________________________________

Re: Photoshop CS4 ?
Posted by: Alessandro Bernardi
Tue Apr 14, 2009 7:55 am (PDT)

The OpenGL Acceleration uses the power of the Graphic Processor of the graphic card instead of the computer processor for some functions such as screen redraw and similar. It's limited to the first ten images opened in PS. After that number it's turned off and PS will work in the old way for all the screen operations.

You can take a closer look at:
http: //kb.adobe.com/selfservice/viewContent.do?externalId=kb404898

Kind regards,
Alessandro Bernardi
___________________________________________________________________________

Re: Photoshop CS4 ?
Posted by: "steveoshoots"
Tue Apr 14, 2009 10:52 am (PDT)

Hi John,

One new feature you will not have with OpenGL off is the Rotate tool and you won't have the gaps between pixels when zooming way in.

cheers,
SteveO
___________________________________________________________________________

Re: Photoshop CS4 ?
Posted by: "photografix1999"
Tue Apr 14, 2009 10:52 am (PDT)

Yes, ever since disabling OpenGL, I've had no weird anomalies like that, flickering image and strange objects showing up. I hope Adobe keeps working to perfect it. Right now, however, it seems more like a workflow-buster. I'm glad they give us a choice!

Eric Basir
Photo Grafix
847-673-7043
___________________________________________________________________________

Re: Photoshop CS4 ?
Posted by: J Walton
Tue Apr 14, 2009 11:33 am (PDT)

I was a little skeptical about the Rotate Canvas tool. At first I hated it because it used the same shortcut that *every other app in the world* uses for zooming out. But that was in the beta, and I didn't use CS4 in a production setting during the beta period.

Now that it's officially out the shortcut for Rotate Canvas replaces another tool I use a lot (smudge), but I don't use it nearly as much as zooming out. I have actually used the Rotate tool to good effect - I had to create some blinking eyes for an animation and had to do a lot of shading. It's certainly more natural to do a lot of painting when you can rotate the canvas the way you would rotate a piece of paper.

However, the pixel gaps are *incredibly* annoying. I'm hoping there's a way to hide them beyond Command-H, because sometimes I want to see the active selection and I NEVER want to see the gridlines. I am having a hard time figuring out why you would ever want to see those. Maybe it's a web design thing...

J Walton
___________________________________________________________________________

Re: Photoshop CS4 ?
Posted by: "John Romano"
Tue Apr 14, 2009 11:34 am (PDT)

Well after researching it, it looks like its better to have it on and deal With it for it adds speed on redrawing and so on.

Check out this link explaining the benefits of having it on, if your video card can handle it.

http: //www.earthboundlight.com/phototips/cs4-gpu-acceleration.html

John Romano
___________________________________________________________________________

Superadvanced/PSW 4--CS4 adoption
Posted by: Dan Margulis
Tue Apr 14, 2009 10:52 am (PDT)

The posts on OpenGL behavior bring up the entire question of Photoshop CS4 vs. CS3, which I've discussed in the last month with a number of people. We have presumably all heard through the grapevine that CS4 has not been well received. During the superadvanced classes, the two ACT sessions that preceded them, and Photoshop World, I polled the audiences to find out the level of penetration.

1. In the two basic classes, late February/early March, 2 of 14 students were using CS4. Both were hobbyists, not professionals.

2. In the two superadvanced classes that followed, 4 of 15 were using CS4. However, all four stated that they were doing so only because they were legally required to by their companies. Apparently this has to do with site licensing for the full Creative Suite. Two of the four said that their companies were actively looking at ways by which they could give up their Photoshop CS4 licenses and retrograde to CS3.

3. In all four of these classes it appeared that the people who had not adopted CS4 did not intend to. One person had purchased CS4 but had not installed it.

4. In two of my three sessions at Photoshop World, I asked a series of questions, one of which was "as of today, what version of Photoshop are you using in daily production?" There was no followup question, so I don't know how many were happy or unhappy with their decision, or how many were using it under duress, or how many planned to buy in the future. In my preconference session on LAB, it seemed like just short of 50% were using CS4. In my two-session channels lecture during the show proper, the percentage was significantly lower, it looked like 35-40% to me. In both sessions of Photoshop World, as well as all my classes, zero people were using CS2.

The difference in response rate corresponded closely to the level of imaging professionals in the audience. Students in my classes, particularly the superadvanced, are heavy users of curves, and the curves interface of CS4 is a train wreck, so it's no great shock that their rate of adoption should be lower. At Photoshop World, the other questions I asked indicated that there were many more hobbyists in the first audience than in the second. Very sophisticated "prosumer"-type hobbyists, mind you, people who seemed to know as much about Photoshop as many professionals do. Nevertheless, they're not doing it for a living.

These prosumers are generally, in my experience, more prone to spring for an update automatically. Professionals tend to be a little more leery, in case there is something wrong with the initial release. Based on past releases, my classes would only now have a majority of people using the newer software. However (with the lone exception of Photoshop 7, which I and several others never adopted) they all eventually migrate to the new version.

This time it appears that they do not intend to do so. These numbers are across-the-board much worse than could be accounted for just by a bad economy. In any event, the economy would not deter a professional user: if a new version of Photoshop is more productive than the old one, $180 or whatever is a no-brainer.

The basic ACT classes seemed to shrug the issues off--the comments indicated that they had heard bad things about CS4 from colleagues, particularly on the PC side, where there were some huge performance issues in the first release that may now have been corrected or at least improved. Myself, I don't get emotional about it either. Like any other update, Photoshop CS4 has good features and bad ones. Overall, it is the logical culmination of a lengthy slide, but it parallels what has happened to a lot of other products. As software goes through more and more iterations, it gets more and more complicated, opportunities for adding killer features are fewer, and probably above all, corporate politics starts to interfere more and more. There are many obstacles to excellence and incentives for inertia. When this happens to a programming group, the signature symptom is change for the sake of change, not because it adds capabilities or speed, coupled with the marketing claim that it constitutes a reason to "upgrade".

When this happens, the sensible user response is the simple one of standing pat until such time as something that can truly be called an "upgrade" appears. That, for the first time, appears to have happened. Meanwhile, I used CS4 for nine days running during my San Diego classes, for the first time since the beta period. To punish myself for past sins, I refused to load the plugin that supposedly restores keyboard shortcuts vis-a-vis channel. Without that, there's nothing to talk about--somebody who's been using one set of keyboard shortcuts hundreds of times a day for more than 15 years, like I have, simply can't unlearn them, not in nine days or nine months. So, I slogged along, considerably slowed down when I would forget the new behavior.

After a few days of wondering how it is possible in this day and age to find people capable of designing an interface as badly as that of the Photoshop CS4 curves adjustment layer, I simply changed my workflow. In previous versions, I use adjustment layers to incorporate changes unless I'm fairly sure I'll never need to alter them later; with CS4 I don't use adjustment layers unless I think there is a strong probability that I *will* need their capabilities. This is not all that horrible, it merely reverts to an older mindset. Adjustment layers have only been around since 1996. Work was and is possible without them.

Is this loss of functionality a reasonable tradeoff for getting a Bridge that finally is stable, additional speed, the reversion to a sensible interface for displaying images instead of the vapid method introduced in CS3, and a few minor but welcome new additions? I suppose it depends on how often you use adjustment layers. My decision was made easier by repeated performance issues when I was working with several images open at once. There has been a performance update since then, so the problem may have been corrected, but for the moment I'm with the other holdouts.

Unlike the basic classes and me, anger was the prevailing sentiment of the superadvanced classes and of the few PSW instructors that I gossiped with about it. One instructor did feel that the upgrade was an advance, although he thought that it was a bad idea to overhaul adjustment layers, whether a good job was been done of it or not. The others, some of whom work for Adobe and are paid to promote CS4, divested themselves of obscenities.

I don't see the point of anger. The situation is not likely to change. Photoshop CS4's issues didn't drop out of the sky, they've been with us for a while. Think of it this way: it adds speed (assuming that the performance-enhancing updates word) and a few nice touches, but the two BIG reasons to use CS4--Bridge, and the improved image-display interface--are not advances, but rather corrections of problems introduced by previous releases. Bridge was introduced in CS2. By CS3 its stability had improved so much that many companies would consider it suitable for an early beta release. In CS4 it works correctly AFAIK.

Similarly, the interface in CS2 was the traditional one. There was no reason to overhaul it in CS3, any more than there was a reason to overhaul adjustment layers in CS4. And, just as with CS4's adjustment layers, the design of CS3's unnecessary changes was amateurish and considerably worse than what it had replaced. In CS4, this mistake was acknowledged, and we got something resembling CS2 more than it does CS3.

The net result of fixing these two issues, then: balancing the loss of adjustment-layer functionality against all the smaller advances, Photoshop CS4 is almost as good of a product as CS2 would have been if CS2's Bridge had been stable. This rate of advance does not bode well for the future.

What I keep hearing is that there is a bright side: that Adobe is aware that people are not happy with CS4 and that they know that the loss in sales of the CS4 suite is considerably more than can be explained away by the economy. I agree that they certainly do know it, and are doubtless having meetings right now to figure out why this is so and what to do about it, but I doubt that it's a bright side. A lot of theories will be put forward, such as that the user base is too stupid to realize the inherent wisdom of these changes and that if only we shove some similar pap down their throats in CS5 they will come around. However, this view is unlikely to prevail, as even stock analysts are suggesting that Adobe is not doing enough to induce its regular customers (that's us) to buy updates. So I would predict that the powers that be will conclude, if they have not done so already, that Photoshop CS4 was a seriously inadequate effort and that steps need to be taken to prevent a recurrence.

The problem is that this is much easier said than done, as Microsoft has recently learned. It's not as though there isn't the talent--any group as big as either Adobe or Microsoft has plenty of brilliant people on staff. Unfortunately, once the culture of mediocrity has set in, it is excruciatingly difficult to undo. No one person or group is to blame. There are too many demands for too many features, too many people trying to defend their own turf, too much acceptance of the attitude that this slows everything down, but it makes it more compatible with our other products; and that obviously has no business in our product but marketing really wants it; and the other thing is sloppily coded and we could fix it if we had the time and energy but we don't, and so on. And once a certain number of people adopt this mindset, it becomes exceedingly difficult to stop others from doing so as well. And so Microsoft gets Vista, and Adobe gets Photoshop CS4.

There is no shortage of people at Adobe who want to do the right thing and who are dedicated to our interests. We can only wish them the best, but there is not much reason for optimism about the next version.

Meanwhile, it looks like, for the first time, we will have an entire release cycle in which a substantial number of serious users, if not a majority, will not adopt the current version of Photoshop. As was pointed out at Photoshop World by several people, this is rather disruptive. CS3 and CS4 are different animals and need to be taught differently. I've always followed the policy of using the old version in my classes until 2/3 of the students have the new one. This usually takes about six months after release, and for a while there are times when I teach one class in the new version and the next one in the old, depending upon who's enrolled. The other instructors move a little faster than that, but still they say they feel uncomfortable demonstrating some behavior that's unique to CS4 when more than half the audience doesn't use it.

There are bigger things to worry about in the world, so whatever decision you have made about CS4, may it prove to be the correct one.

Dan Margulis
___________________________________________________________________________

Re: Superadvanced/PSW 4--CS4 adoption
Posted by: "Jeremy Schultz"
Wed Apr 15, 2009 4:51 pm (PDT)

Thanks very much for sharing this data about penetration of Photoshop CS4 in the marketplace. FWIW, I use CS4 and I think it's okay though the Adjustments panel and the interface for working with curve adjustment layers cripples my workflow (I either do what Dan does and adjust or use adjustment layers and slog through it). I also wrote reviews for PSCS4 and the other CS4 apps and gave PSCS4 relatively average marks while some other CS4 apps (InDesign, Flash and others) really did turn out very well.

One comment from Dan stood out to me‹the speculation that Adobe is surely looking at CS4's losses and trying to figure out why or how it happened. He predicted they will conclude that PSCS4 was inadequate and will try to prevent a recurrence, and I think that's partly true. I say this because Adobe recently announced some benchmark results that suggest PSCS4 and other CS4 apps provide a big boost to productivity and saves users time and money, which is not what we expect when we upgrade (we expect cool new killer features) but ?productivity is the new killer feature? and this was Adobe?s game plan early on.

I?m sure every one of Dan?s disciples will say that?s a load of crap and point out how hard it is to use PSCS4?s curves‹and I agree. For me, PSCS4 does not give the same productivity benefits Adobe?s benchmark data indicates‹but I, like most of Dan?s students, use PS in general and curves especially in a particular manner, and PSCS4 may very well improve productivity for other users who want a central panel for creating and editing adjustment layers.

I guess my point is that I think Adobe has approached the failure of PSCS4 to penetrate the market by (1) trying to convince the market the current version is a productivity enhancer, and (2) working behind the scenes to make the next version a more enticing upgrade.

Jeremy Schultz
Design and illustration for print and the web
___________________________________________________________________________

Re: Superadvanced/PSW 4--CS4 adoption
Posted by: "Ian Craig"
Thu Apr 16, 2009 6:14 am (PDT)

On 15-Apr-09, at 7:10 PM, Jeremy Schultz wrote:

Thanks very much for sharing this data about penetration of
Photoshop CS4 in the marketplace. FWIW, I use CS4 and I think it’s okay though the
Adjustments panel and the interface for working with curve
adjustment layers cripples my workflow

Jeremy,

I would certainly agree that the new curves interface is very limiting. Perhaps this has been covered before but I did download the Configurator from John Nack's website and the premade mxp (on the page under "Some sample panels") file which restores the Curves panel to its previous functionality.

http: //blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/11/configurator_is_live.html#more

With it in place you just click on the "Adjust Curves Layer" button in the Curves Dialog panel and the floating Curves dialog appears.

I. Craig
___________________________________________________________________________

Re: Superadvanced/PSW 4--CS4 adoption
Posted by: "Jim Donovan"
Thu Apr 16, 2009 7:00 am (PDT)

It's beyond stupid to cripple by far and away the most useful and powerful color tool correction ever invented,curves. I hope stuff like this cripples cash flow and prevents needless money grabbing "upgrades". I hope people are finally catching on that change for the sake of change eventually leads us backward not forward. Thanx for the restoration link. Hopefully we will never be forced to degrade to CS4 but if we do it will come in handy. Jim Donovan
___________________________________________________________________________

Re: Superadvanced/PSW 4--CS4 adoption
Posted by: "Jeremy Schultz"
Thu Apr 16, 2009 7:01 am (PDT)

Thanks for letting me know about this! Configurator is pretty cool, IMHO. I wonder if in a few years it will make the whole discussion of Adobe?s interface design moot, because it will be totally customizable?

Jeremy Schultz