P: Make stacks Really Useful

Hello,
I agree with Sean Phillips "group all of the images ... into collections and work on them from there ...". For me that seems to be a common workflow, recommended also by many people of the community and found in many books and online tutorials. Since stacks are not available in collections I run into trouble for example when developing an image in an external program (Photoshop) and afterwards the derivatives are not stackable with the "Master". This permanently leads to a messy workspace with a lot of similar versions of an image. (Just to name one use case)
I think it could be a basic feature for an effective workflow...

Phil

Hello,
I agree with Sean Phillips "group all of the images ... into collections and work on them from there ...". For me that seems to be a common workflow, recommended also by many people of the community and found in many books and online tutorials. Since stacks are not available in collections I run into trouble for example when developing an image in an external program (Photoshop) and afterwards the derivatives are not stackable with the "Master". This permanently leads to a messy workspace with a lot of similar versions of an image. (Just to name one use case)
I think it could be a basic feature for an effective workflow...

Phil

A similar idea that evolved (read down a ways to see what it became):

A New Way Of Handling Groups of Related Photos: http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

I've come to like the idea of replacing 'stacks' with "relationships". So you can select a group of photos and define/assign an "hdr" relationship to them. And that would not preclude them being in other relationships either (e.g. pano). And one could collapse or expand various relationships for viewing/editing purposes at will... So, one distinction is "relationships" *could* be nested, but would not have to be. i.e. hierarchical organization is just one possibility - user's choice...

I've come to like the idea of replacing 'stacks' with "relationships". So you can select a group of photos and define/assign an "hdr" relationship to them. And that would not preclude them being in other relationships either (e.g. pano). And one could collapse or expand various relationships for viewing/editing purposes at will... So, one distinction is "relationships" *could* be nested, but would not have to be. i.e. hierarchical organization is just one possibility - user's choice...

Apple got stacks right in Aperture. If Adobe took a look at their implementation it would be a great starting point. Having a "stack pick" and an "album pick" is just a genius idea and makes the stack/album system very powerful.

Thank you for the link to the other FR re: stacks. A related point is that when I click on "All Photograph" and use the filter bar at the top, the stacks are invisible.

Here is another use for stacks within stacks: A lot of people, myself included, are shooting HDR panoramas. That means two or more exposures of each shot. It would be nice if the multiple exposures of each shot would be a stack, and all the stacks together would be put in a stack along with the finished product. So when one opens the "top" stack instead of a hopeless muddle consisting of possibly a few douzen images, one sees the building blocks that went into the final image.

So let's say I'm throwing a submission together and have created a Collection of possible subjects. It'd be nice to go into that Collection and finish my work in one place. If I've found some duplicate or similar images maybe I'd like to stack them together. If an image I picked isn't the best of the subject for this use, but if I had a stack of all images of that subject, I could easily select a more appropriate one. While I'm there, if I had stacks of similar images, I could find some other appropriate images, again, without leaving the Collection. Once I whittled the collection down to images I want to submit, if I had my Master images stacked with their existing derivative images, I could grab an existing file to send in instead of having to export a new one.

I know some of this can be done with Collections, but it's already difficult to navigate a large number of Collections. Rob Cole's suggestion of having 'atomic' or single photo stacks, as well as multiple photo stacks, could help make some of the above possible.

Paul Wasserman

So let's say I'm throwing a submission together and have created a Collection of possible subjects. It'd be nice to go into that Collection and finish my work in one place. If I've found some duplicate or similar images maybe I'd like to stack them together. If an image I picked isn't the best of the subject for this use, but if I had a stack of all images of that subject, I could easily select a more appropriate one. While I'm there, if I had stacks of similar images, I could find some other appropriate images, again, without leaving the Collection. Once I whittled the collection down to images I want to submit, if I had my Master images stacked with their existing derivative images, I could grab an existing file to send in instead of having to export a new one.

I know some of this can be done with Collections, but it's already difficult to navigate a large number of Collections. Rob Cole's suggestion of having 'atomic' or single photo stacks, as well as multiple photo stacks, could help make some of the above possible.

Paul Wasserman

See this topic for additional thoughts on stacks:

http://feedback.photoshop.com/photosh...

In addition to folders and collections, it would be great if stacking were viewable in the results of smart collections, since smart collections are the only way of doing advanced searches.