P: Non-destructive filter layers instead of smart-filters

and nearly all of the books by your so called professionals with photoshop secrets and great professional stuff are lame. for most of the stuff they hype, there are better, faster easier ways that are used in professional businesses. nobody thinks smart-objects are user-friendly. graphic designers use them a lot i heard. but not retouchers. i know nearly every single professional retoucher in germany by name - i talked to nearly all of them because i started writing a book about how people use photoshop in such different ways creating their own techniques - and i wanted to pick the best workarounds for this book. i have no chapter about smart-objects.

A Smart Object is no slower than using a flat layer of the same size, and much faster than having all the component layers in your document. Somehow, I think you misunderstand Smart Objects and how they work.

okay - i believe you've tried. but if i add smart-objects to my files the get slow as hell. and this is a common problem all retouchers i know have. everyone is like: oh there are smart-objects in there, thats why.

"No professional I know uses layers, because they're not user friendly in our workflow" - several users in 1998 (who all use layers now)

Many users, around the world, do use smart objects regularly because they are so powerful, friendly, and flexible. There are books written about the workflows that smart objects enable. They do a lot more than non-destructive transforms.

Smart Filters take a while to calculate, because that's how long the filter takes to run on the size document you are using - they don't add anything to the time it would take to run them manually. It would actually be slower if you tried to use those same filters as "filter layers", and if you tried to work under the filter layer, it would be painfully slow (or just offer a bad UI by disabling and re-enabling the filters all the time).

We've looked at the possibilities, we've tried a variety of approaches (including what you propose - which users hated once they tried it). What you've got in Smart Filters is probably the fastest and most flexible approach.

no professional digital artist or retoucher in germany i met - and i know lots - uses smart-objects regularly. because it`s not even close to user-friendly enough to fit in our workflow. it just plain stinks. the only reason to use it, is when you need to downscale images within a composing and want it to be non-destructive.

by the way - smart-filters also take ages to calculate if you use 2 or 3 of them.

i`m sure there are way better possibilities.

well... please find a way because smart-filters are really killing the workflow!

Some apps get away with the concept on screen size images, but at higher resolutions - the computational complexity kills usability. If you do the math, you quickly figure out that live "filter layers" just can't work well on anything but tiny screen rez documents (and even then only if you use a few filters, stack more than 2 or 3 up and it gets painful to use).

Smart Filters give you the re-editability, an explicit update step (since realtime updates would kill performance and usability), and have the benefit of work on real world image sizes.