Allow Free Distort like Photoshop

I found this thread looking for answers as to why the distortion in Illustrator is basically unuseable. I'm very disappointed to see that it isn't something I'm doing wrong but I am glad to see everyone agrees that it's such a sorry state of affairs at least. The pathetic mini 'preview' you are forced to use to try and make a vague guess about distortion effects is archaic and unacceptable - it's so small and you can't zoom in, you can't use guides to help, you can't constrain any proportions there's no undo/step back available to tweak it and you can't even reference your artboard to see how it's going to look. I simply can't believe that the industry-standard program for precise vector manipulation continually fails to match up to Photoshop's ways of doing things in many areas when common-sense would suggest that it would be completely the other way around! Doesn't make any sense at all. It's about time Adobe pulled their finger out and radically revised Illustrator.

Joining the chorus of laments - I really really need this particular feature, and implore Adobe to revamp Illustrator's free distortion to work as effectively as Photoshop's

This is a huge omission.  are there any third party plugins that will make this all the distortion tools available in photoshop to be available in Illustrator?

I've had my head down working with Illustrator for so long that I had no idea that Photoshop had better vector transformation tools than its supposedly vector-centric teammate!

A long time ago I worked on the development of the product LetraStudio and the Illustrator plug-in Envelopes. (My - thoroughly microscopic - claim to fame is that I introduced the now-widespread word 'envelope' in a distortion context.) LetraStudio pioneered free distortion of vectors, and as a I recall both it and Envelopes had features which we have yet to see in Illustrator. Nonetheless I was delighted when Illustrator adopted 'enveloping' - imitation, sincere flattery and so on.

To find, after all this time, that Illustrator has to look to its bitmap stablemate for a better implementation of LetraStudio's idea is frankly shocking. I imagine most of the development teams in Adobe, perhaps especially Illustrator's, must be tired of seeing the bulk of interest and resources disappear in the direction of Photoshop. Of course Photoshop is an important product (the only software product name to have become a verb?). But the next release of Illustrator will be time to correct this embarrassing and shameful imbalance.

To me this is a very infuriating problem. Not only is it something that is commonly needed, and would be extremely useful, but it is something that should've been a basic function since Illustrator Version 1. And when it was included there, it easily should've been FIXED in Version 2, etc. This should've been worked on long before adding symbols, and advanced gradient options, and so on. I love those things, but seriously guys: Basic path manipulation is first and foremost what Illustrator is about. And there is ZERO excuse for not having it. You can't say the technology or know how doesn't exist. As countless others have stated—to deaf ears, apparently—Photoshop's had this feature for years. And Photoshop isn't even a vector editor, and they do it right.

Everytime a new version of Illustrator comes out I get my hopes up thinking this will be fixed, only to be let down. It's really disappointing.

So please, stop the stupid bounding box from resetting after every adjustment!

How is it that the Illustrator team didn't make this possible? The free transform tool is virtually useless, and the perspective tool is too much of a hassle. It's a simple function. Take a stroll over to your friends in the Photoshop department and get them to walk you through it.

+1

There is a tedious but effective workaround: Copy and paste the object into Photoshop as a path, use the superior distortion tools there, and then export it back into Illustrator.

I concur.

And if the Illustrator team ever get around to evaluating their basic Path functionalities they might also drop the current stupid (yes, that adjective is provocative, but in my opinion justified) path-closing behaviour of eliminating the first point’s backward bezier handle.

Absolutely agree.

Can't Adobe's Photoshop team spend a few months working on Illustrator and make it more Photoshoppy?