Photoshop Needs an Update/Refresh to its Interfaces and Routines

Forum|Forum|4 months ago
November 19, 2025
2 replies
105 views

I have been working with Adobe Photoshop (Illustrator, After Effects & Premiere Pro as well) for ~20 years. And over the last five it is a little curious to see so many updates to filters, generative tools, and advanced selection tools and almost literally nothing else. I like these changes and updates, don't get me wrong.

But the basic workflow of the app feels positively archaic in 2025. A good example of a the kinds of circular and needlessly complicated routines PS still requires here:

An example of a brutally segmented task that many people are familiar with below. It's something that sometimes I'll do from habit without thinking about. But when I think about it, it's absurd.

The math that compels a pixel selection -> path -> shape is right there and should be controllable with a two click operation, and one click in any one direction creating a real-time layer (not a saved custom shape that requires more tedious menu diving or a path in a paths tab that visually corresponds to nothing and requires more separate steps to create something graphically meaningful).

1. Make a selection: Select the pixels within the raster mask you want to convert. You can do this by holding Ctrl (Windows) or Cmd (Mac) and clicking the layer thumbnail in the Layers panel.
2. Convert the selection to a path: Go to the Paths panel (Window > Paths) and click the Make Work Path icon (a dotted circle) at the bottom. You may need to adjust the tolerance for best results.
3. Make sure the path is selected: In the Paths panel, make sure the path you just created is selected.
4. Convert path to shape: In the options bar at the top, click the Shape button. This will create a new shape layer with the path as its vector mask 5.
5. Fill the shape: With the new shape layer selected, choose a solid color fill from the Layers panel menu (Layer > New Fill Layer)

Other examples of out-of-date interfaces that could use a refresh.
1.) Anything related to color range selections and/or legacy filters that propagate into useless postage stamp-like windows that we are supposed to use as a preview.
2.) And save-for-web style menu options with cluttered Windows 3.1 style interfaces.

Still enjoy the products professionally but consider some updates like this focused on modern usability.

Windows

jane-e

Community Expert

@Zachary5DCB and @welk171

While you both have some good ideas, Adobe asks that you make one feature request per thread so they can track it and other users can upvote and comment. It’s best to be concise when making a feature request, but you can also link back to this thread.

Here is the link to the post from Pete Green on how to write a feature request so your ideas can be tracked by the Photoshop team:

https://community.adobe.com/feature-requests-713/how-do-i-write-a-feature-request-653216

Here are a couple of highlights from Pete’s post:

“How will the feature help your workflow?
“Describe why you want the feature - include the problem you're currently hitting, and how this new feature would solve that problem. Before working on a feature, the product team will need to understand how your idea fits in, and may even come up with a better way of solving your problem.

“One request per thread:

“When creating an Idea or Feature Request thread, please keep requests for features to ONE request per thread. Doing this will allow others to vote on the single, specific feature and not confuse Upvotes amongst a list of feature requests.

“If an Idea thread has multiple requests in it, you may be asked by a moderator to split the multiple requests up into multiple threads so others can vote.”

Jane

welk171

Participating Frequently

You’re absolutely right that Photoshop is a 2005 design in 2026 and Adobe didn’t fix the tons of obvious and painful UI/UX mistakes for the past 10-20 years.

There are so many things that are so extremely poorly designed and no one at Adobe is reading or considering our feedback for 10-20 years. It’s painful to work in Photoshop. Actions that can take 1-2 clicks take 10-20 clicks and a lot of mouse travel.

To name a few pain points:

Grid config is per Photoshop, not per PSD… How did this even happen... Tragic workflow… Every time you open new PSD you need to re-configure grid again and again. Your config is not saved.
Gamma blend is per PSD, not per layer like in Affinity v3… That’s just incorrect. Such code commit never should have been approved.
Guides layout could be created by simply pasting JSON in a textarea or made be layers (like in Illustrator) but instead we get some poorly though-out and unnecessary “GDS” files to save and load. It’s really incompetent design in this area, very little flexibility, hard long setup, no simple copy-paste of layout as text. No multiple layouts with on/off functionality in one PSD.
No reorderable sidebar and top bar… I only use 10-20 certain functions that are hidden deep in sub-sub-sub-menus (like Image > Select > Contract...) and I’d like to pin that to the sidebar forever.
I also switch between color picker and ruler all the time and both are under “I” hotkey…………… Please………… I need to pin both to a different hotkey and it’s not possible.

But it’s been 20 years of extremely incompetent Adobe design and it’s unlikely they will actually read user feedback, understand it (they clearly don’t/can’t), care or do anything. It’s just not going to happen.

Affinity v3 still isn’t production-ready because in Affinity they didn’t even get the “Zoom” tool right yet. It doesn’t zoom to pixel level in one slide of mouse. You need 5, so I’m closing Affinity and waiting for v4 in 2030, maybe they will understand one day how to design software.

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