Inspiring

Question

Do Adobe Devs consider customers when deploying updates? [PS 2019]

Forum|Forum|6 years ago
July 26, 2019
9 replies
3141 views

This may sound snarky, but I am shocked and appalled by the latest peculiar updates in Photoshop 2019.

And before this thread goes too far, I'm not looking for a specific answer to a problem so I am marking this as a discussion and not a question. You won't get your precious points or get recognized for being the biggest fanboy if you reply to this. Don't feel obliged to answer this if you are one of the industrious folks who have lots of questions to answer and feel pressed for time. Focus your energy where it does the most good.

I am hoping to open a discussion about the way that Adobe Devs make decisions regarding updates that change workflow. I realize this is a customer forum, but I was hoping to hear from other customers to see if I am completely off my rocker.

It appears to me that Adobe does not consider the way that people use their products and have become accustomed to using their products. It appears that the devs have decided that they know what is best for the customer whether the custom likes it or not. Like the sudden and completely ridiculous change in the transform tool in Photoshop. For those of us who are familiar with the keyboard modifications using the transform tool, everything has changed.

Why don't the Devs at least provide a "legacy" setting for changes in tool settings? It seems like a setting that let you choose "Proportional Scaling by Default" would be a simple way to accommodate the thousands (millions?) of users that are used to having to hold down keyboard modifiers to use Proportional Scaling using the transform tool.

Is this just an example of what happens when a company has become a monopoly? Once you either buy off all the competition or just muscle them out of business, you can do whatever you want to your customers and so long as you have the fanboys to ridicule and insult your majority of users, you'll get away with it?

Adobe has never been very good at considering their customers when implementing upgrades, but now that they have the service in the cloud, you don't have the option of using your legacy software because it works better for you. If this were like any other business where there was competition, Adobe would lose so many customers that they would be forced to consider the needs and desires of existing customers.

Am I the only one who feels this way?

Thanks in advance for your input. (Let the fanboy hate replies come rolling in).

This topic has been closed for replies.

D

DaveJCummings

Community Expert

As someone who had taken part in several Betas for them, I can safely say that yes, they do take this into account. The developers take the feedback to heart. As with any company, there will be moves made that make the customer feel like they aren't being considered, but if you see what happens behind the scenes, you'd see that's far from the case.

JJMack

Community Expert

Considering my dealings with Adobe support I do not share your opinion. Adobe I'm sure to take user feedback and sometimes take ideas into consideration. Taken to heart also happens when there are many complaints like in the case of transform an after effect more a bug fix.

JJMack

joanH

Inspiring

Shall we start another thread and get a fresh start. Can someone close this and open another if there is new information? Will Moderator send this on to the development staff to see this states the core of our problems?

I do know that if the upper management will use our information we must present it unemotionally and be brief and succinct. I suspect the sales department would read all of this. JH

L

Lumigraphics

Legend

You're new here, aren't you?

Computing is still a relatively new industry and change is a constant. If you drove a 1980 model year car, it would lack some of the bells and whistles found on new cars but would be pretty similar in operation and capability. You could use it on today's roads to travel just fine. Try to use a computer from 1980 and get back to me about what's changed in 40 years.

As for Adobe, they are a for-profit business and making money hand over fist. I suspect that in the eyes of Adobe's board and executives, they are doing everything right. Just saying.

JJMack

Community Expert

IMO I would not call a 1980 computer relatively new it technology is from the previous century technology including programming ages rapidly. I would not call commuting a relatively new industry either, Programming has been aground longer than digital computing programming mechanical machines use different programming methods like programmer use different languages for different projects types. Programs still need to have a good design and be well programmed throughout the centuries. Computing seems to be build into human brain.

JJMack

L

Lumigraphics

Legend

Did you even read what I said? The computer industry is new and changing, compared to other industries. That means technology gets outdated quickly, unlike the automotive industry where a 40-year-old car that has been maintained will get you around just fine. You can live in a 40-year-old house, eat food grown with 40-year-old farming methods, treat illness with drugs developed 40years ago, fly in an airplane designed 40 years ago, drive on a 40-year-old road, read this with skills learned in school 40 years ago, etc etc.

Ussnorway7605025

Legend

yes but its a numbers game at this level guys i.e, if 10,000 people stop using Photoshop today because of bugs (or whatever else) then Adobe would not notice it

p.s, the days of microsoft fixing bugs are long gone... just ask the unemployment lines

JJMack

Community Expert

Agree Adobe only cares about their bottom line If they feel they can get new uses with some poor change they will make the change for they feel most current users are locked in. Disrupting their workflow is good for business.

JJMack

jane-e

Community Expert

https://forums.adobe.com/people/JP+Burnout wrote
It appears to me that Adobe does not consider the way that people use their products and have become accustomed to using their products. .

Hi JP,

My experience has been that the folk at Adobe are very receptive to their user base. One of the things I love most about attending Adobe MAX has been the opportunity to sit at a round table discussion with the engineers and product managers who work at Adobe and be able to give feedback directly.

I know you don’t want specific help, but changing to not needing Shift for constrain brings Photoshop in line with newer applications, such as Affinity, iPad apps, and even resizing in the Jive window when posting a screen shot in these forums.

Resizing with Shift - inconsistency - Pre 1.7 thread archive - Affinity | Forum

If you allow Adobe to glean information as you work, they can better track how people use the software. I used to disable that setting until I found out how much they use it to find out how people use it and to improve the program.

They have provided a feedback site for bug reports and feature requests where you can vote and track what is being worked on. To me, it shows that they are very interested in their customers.

Photoshop Family Customer Community

When Adobe changed Transform to be proportional without Shift and folk posted there in protest, we were given a checkbox to revert to legacy behavior. Here’s the link:

Photoshop CC 2019: Transform/Resize is constrained by default - Want ability to go back to legacy behavior | Photoshop F…

I’ve been using PS since version 3.0 came out in 1994. I’m grateful for all of the improvements that have been made along the way and would be very frustrated if the Type tool still only put pixels on the current layer instead of live, editable text, for instance.

~ Jane

Jason BurnettAuthor

Inspiring

@jane-e, thanks for your thoughtful reply. Unfortunately, I am afraid that what you mention about the feedback sounds not entirely unlike the feedback at Ikea.

Now supposedly this computer terminal collects the data from button pushes to let Ikea know how they are doing. They supposedly use this data and some complex algorithms to adjust their ......naw. Oh and the little light on the top goes blinky blinky.

I've been using Adobe products almost as long as Adobe has been around and I remember BEGGING Adobe to allow some sort of customer feedback when they absorbed Freehand and eliminated the only other vector-graphics app worth using. Granted it used non-quadratic transforms that Illustrator didn't but Adobe didn't really care and there was no way to get them to listen.

You would think at least that Adobe would use the feedback in the bug reports to help prioritize bug fixes, but alas that has not been my experience. The same is true with any monolithic near-monopoly in the tech field. They are focused on implementing aspects that do not belong in Photoshop but allow them to claim they have new features so they get more money from new users.

The fact remains that nobody wants pixels for text the way they did it when I started using Photoshop. Your praise of such a basic accommodation sounds specious there. Nobody is complaining about the fact that Adobe Photoshop continues to improve. In fact, content-aware everything is brilliant and getting better every day whereas non-photo editing tools like the 3D render tools (which are and always will be substandard to a program whose entire focus is 3D rendering) are a total waste of time and money and should be plugins.

As for it being a numbers game, sure. I see that. Greedy folks at the top are driving their devs to create new features to lure in new customers. They are releasing crappy software with the promise to come back and clean it up later. Not a new model.

But what would be great is if Adobe would offer a new version of Photoshop with a development team that focused on fixing the existing problems, isolating non-image-editing features and making them plugins, and optimizing the user experience Even if they called it Photoshop Basic, it would be nice to see how many people would use it in place of the monstrosity we use now.

In fact, strip all of the vector crap from Photoshop and leave it in Illustrator. If you want vector functions, use a smart object from Illustrator. All of the text crap should be left in InDesign and if you want text in Photoshop, use a smart object from InDesign. It would be great to see how sleek and modular the core apps could get and the consistency between interfaces would be amazing. Make it all configurable and put it out there to see if folks would use it.

Instead, each app redevelops the wheel with their own preferences and their own bugs and limitations and you end up flipping back and forth to combat the mess anyways.

I know, I know. Get back in line, take your creative suite like everyone else and be grateful for non-pixelized text. Give us your money and press one of the emoji face buttons to let us know how we are doing.

davescm

Community Expert

Whether we like it or not, if companies are to survive then they need to provide a return to their investors which means they need to grow. That in turn means that marketing led, bottom line affecting, developments will get priority.

Adding limited functionality from other apps (vectors, text, 3D etc) has made Photoshop the only app needed for many users . That, in turn, has led to the success of the Photography subscription plan bringing Photoshop to a wider customer base than ever before and growing Adobe as a company.

I am all for dealing with the bugs, of which there are too many, but also recognise that in a realistic world they will have to take their place in the priority list with other functions and that may mean that some will never reach the top of the list. One thing that brings hope is that we can see evidence of some of the very old core code atcthecheart of Photoshop being changed e.g. the current inclusion of the 'use legacy compositing' checkbox in Preferences. It may be that this will enable some of the lower priority, or not economic to fix, issues being addressed.

Am I a Photoshop fan? Yes, and I make no apology for that. I also get frustrated and annoyed with some of the bugs just like other users of the app. But I remain optimistic and involved as that is the best way to keep issues on the radar.

Dave

Chuck Uebele

Community Expert

My personal opinion is that they do consider customers, but more new and inexperienced customers. Maybe trying to make it easier for them, while disrupting the workflow of more experienced users. As Nancy stated, some of the changes I didn't like, but as I got used to them, they did make a bit more sense - others, not so much.

JJMack

Community Expert

How well do you like Adobe like Problem support as seen on their site Photoshop Family Customer Community . Adobe Acknowledges some reported problems are Adobe Problems and even mark some as in progress and they remaine that way year after year. The vast majority of Problem reports never seem to be looked as they are in a group "Needs a Solution".

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JJMack

Chuck Uebele

Community Expert

I have talked with Stephen Nielson, Adobe's product manager, regarding this. Fixing bugs comes down to a lot of issues. Some bugs are easy to fix, and are fixed quickly. Is the bug a catastrophic bug that causes crashes or major failure? Those are attempted to fix quickly also. Are there work arounds for the bug? Those may not be fixed as quickly or not at all. How many complaints are logged against a bug? The more complaints, the more likely it will get fixed, but not always. Will fixing the bug cause other more severe problems. Sometimes fixing a bug isn't as easy as people think, the the fix might be worse than the actual bug. They also have their budget, which they have to adhere to, so the bugs have to be prioritized. They do fix a tremendous amount of bugs, but obviously not all of them, or nearly enough.

c.pfaffenbichler

Community Expert

Is this just an example of what happens when a company has become a monopoly?

Which Adobe application are you talking about?

Because obviously there are alternatives to Photoshop so using the word »monopoly« (which has a meaning/definition after all) to describe its market position would seem nonsensical.

Why don't the Devs at least provide a "legacy" setting for changes in tool settings?

If you are still talking about the Transform-changes then the option exists, now one can set it in the Preferences whereas previously there was a more involved approach.

If you are talking about something else please make clear which Tool settings you mean specifically.

Generally the issues you complain about seem close to irrelevant to me.

At current one can still keep older CC versions, so one need not use the most current version, and the changes you mentioned don’t seem worth the fuss to me.

Remember when they changed the shortcut for selecting the composite channel from cmd-0 to cmd-2 (and for the R, G, B, C, M, Y, K etc. channels correspondingly)?

At the time it was annoying but ultimately the effort to learn the new shortcuts was not that steep …

(One lasting negative effect of this concerns selecting Whites, Neutrals, Blacks in the Selective Color Adjustment, though.)

Ussnorway7605025

Legend

https://forums.adobe.com/people/JP+Burnout wrote
It appears to me that Adobe does not consider the way that people use their products and have become accustomed to using their products. It appears that the devs have decided that they know what is best for the customer whether the custom likes it or not.

correct but when you need it to work on ipads then changes had to be made

Nancy OShea

Community Expert

I admit Photoshop has injected some major changes into our workflow lately but nothing I can't get accustomed to. I never understood why Undo (Ctrl / Cmd + Z) didn't work when repeated the way it does in every other application. So I was really glad to finally see that fixed.

Re-scaling images without the shift key was another major change for people like me who have used Photoshop forever. And there is a legacy option for that in Preferences. But so far, I've resisted using it.

I think everyone should be part of the pre-release process at least once to fully appreciate what goes on behind the scenes. IMO beta testing is a thankless job. One must be very dedicated and not easily frustrated when things don't get fixed in time for the public release. And this isn't unique to Adobe or even computer software. 2 months after purchasing my previous washing machine, it was re-called for major safety reasons. At least Photoshop bugs are not life threatening .

Nancy O'Shea— Product User & Community Expert

JJMack

Community Expert

If Photoshop was critical software like an Operating system with Adobe policies it would go out of business. Reported bugs should be addressed. In an OS if they are not the OS will not be used. Adobe stays in business only because Photoshop is not critical and the number of unfixed bugs is growing. Adobe should change user wokflow without warning.

JJMack

Nancy OShea

Community Expert

My OS has had lots of bugs over the years. And MS and Apple usually send out a patch 1-2 months later. Security vulnerabilities are patched quicker for obvious liability reasons.

Nancy O'Shea— Product User & Community Expert

JJMack

Community Expert

I believe Adobe development take many things into consideration before releasing updates. However, Adobe Add. Removes and Changes feature in Photoshop. Adobe does not maintain Photoshop so it is always backwards compatible with previous releases and Adobe has engineered Bugs and changes features the work the opposite way then previous version. For example Text where Esc now Commits not cancel. Transform Shift now is sometimes unconstrained rather than constrain. Adobe re-implemented ScriptUI some old Photoshop script and Extension no longer work because of the re-implementation for example Adobe mini Bridge does not work in CC version of Photoshop. I have been using Photoshop for more than 20 years. I do not believe Adobe will change their behavior. I would advise you to do what I do keep several version of Photoshop installed and work around Photoshop's bugs. Currently I have CS3, CS6, CC 2014, CC 208 and CC 2019 installed. CS3, CS6 and CC 2014 are very stable version of Photoshop. If you have old version you have the option of using them. Old Creative cloud users had the option of using CS6 but Adobe has now taken that off the board for new subscribers. Its seems that Adobe is in some legal litigation with some third part developers like Dolby.

Adobe has received flack from users and sometime make additional changes. There are now Photoshop Preference to use the old consistent legacy Transform behavior and a text Preference to change ESC to be cancel not commit.

I think Photoshop is a powerful Image editor so I am a Photoshop fanboy. However I have never been an Adobe support or Adobe Development fanboy. Adobe needs new management and software development procedures. Adobe unleashes far too many bugs.

JJMack

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