Spectrum is the name of Adobe's design system that prescribes common UX elements (eg, buttons, fonts, colors, contrast, layout, etc.) so that participating applications can share visual and interactive behaviors, minimizing friction if you use mutliple applications in the Spectrum app universe.
Illustrator, Premiere and After Effects all adhere to Spectrum guidelines (though to varying degrees). Photoshop has only sparingly adopted Spectrum due to implementation costs and the potential downside of transitioning large portions of the application to a new system that might lack controls or features that long-time Photoshop customers have become accustomed to. We always have to consider the impact the changing even peculiar interactions so that we don't inadvertently disrupt a key workflow that needs to remain efficient.
But reluctance to modernize UI means that we don't go back and fix arbitrarily non-standard designs that could be unified to make interactions more consistent and rational. We also fail to meet our goals for accessibility, which is important to allow everyone to be able to love creating art and/or making a living with Photoshop.
We are beginning to embrace more aspects of Spectrum in Photoshop, bringing with it several enhancements:
- Updated font size and contrast ratios for better legibility
- Adjusted layout for easier navigation
- Similar color theme to match previous Photoshop theming
- Improved keyboard accessibility; able to tab through functions and controls, including OK and Cancel
- Where previously available, Reset functionality broken out into a separate button for discoverability
- Eliminated the separate 'out of range' alert if you enter an invalid value in a field; auto reverts to nearest supported value on 'OK'
Since the Photoshop UI is vast, the rollout will be in several phases, and we want to test each phase and make sure that we will not compromise efficient workflows. Some finer points of how you enter values into fields or how we lay out buttons and controls might be changing, and we want to make sure that the intended result is as efficient and accessible to you as it can be.
Please try out any of the following features, and let us know what you think about the changes; are you missing any key behaviors that you depended on before? Are there interactions you find unwieldy or overly complext? Is the size and legibility of the text sufficient for your needs?
As we roll out Spectrum to other parts of the application, you will start to see greater convergence across the app, but in the short term, you might notice some differences betwen parts of converted UI, and yet to be converted UI. Here is a snapshot of the old vs. new Spectrum UI in Photoshop as it relates to the Expand Selection dialog:
Please try out any of these commands (below) to see how the 'Spectrumized' dialogs and tools perform for you, and let us know what you think!
| Image > Duplicate |
| Image > Adjustments > Color Lookup... |
| Select > Modify > Border |
| Select > Modify > Smooth |
| Select > Modify > Expand |
| Select > Modify > Contract |
| Select > Modify > Feather... |
| Image > Adjustments > Posterize... |
| Image > Adjustments > Vibrance... |
Known issues:
- On Mac, the dialogs do not scale with the UI size control
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