When using Free Transform, holding down Shift while dragging a corner rightly constrains the proportions of the shape while resizing. However, holding down Shift while dragging a side handle does nothing. It should continue to constrain the proportions as it does in Illustrator.
I'm a little surprised there's so much passionate animosity over this usability change. I've used Photoshop since the early 90's ... and yes, I like consistency in vendor products (so I'm waiting for the illustrator change), but this "constrain proportions" should really be the default. In 5 years, we'll be saying "remember when you had to train people to hold down the shift key first". I'm just glad the "keep-it-like-it-is-because-I-don't-want-change" groups didn't rule the auto industry ... otherwise I'd still be pulling down the license plate to fill-up. Make it easier for people (new users, new revenue) to enjoy and learn more quickly ... smart.
No one's going to be signing up for a subscription because they don't need to occasionally hold down shift. And catering to the market segment who may only use Ps a few times per year is really shooting yourself in the foot.
Ps is a professional tool used by hundreds of thousands of professionals and needs to be treated as such. Having a lock to constrain is fine, but this was poorly implemented.
Donnie, I have no issue with a change like this in principle but this change isn't consistent within Photoshop itself.
Why not do it right? Identify how fundamental the change is (very), identify how it impacts tools within the app (many), identify how it impacts apps in the suite (all apps). Then change everything and announce it properly. Is that really so hard?
The 'passionate animosity' is not just because of the change, the sloppy implementation, and the lazy announcement, it sums up a growing annoyance with inconsistencies, and the way new features are prioritised: design by committee, or corporate priorities.
Show some design leadership and do it right. Our clients would nail us to the wall if did the same to them because we're in a relationship with them, and that's how relationships work (think FCPX, Aperture or Quark Express - fortunes can change quickly).
What Ben said--there isn't consistency. For example, resizing vector shapes still requires you to hold the shift key to constrain proportions. Would a new user intuitively understand this?
Personally, I found the change especially annoying because I wasted a lot of time searching for bugs in my app--deleting preference files and the like--since it didn't occur to me that such a standard thing would suddenly be changed. I searched the Adobe forums to see what was causing the problem, and got nothing useful, until I encountered the separate "Photoshop Family" forum (I can't say I understand why Adobe hosts two community forums for Photoshop). Is there some place Adobe announced this that I missed?
The way the "Quality Engineer" (who I guess works for Adobe?) described it wasn't very helpful to me, either: "Photoshop 20.0 proportional transform is now the default behavior of transform in Photoshop (except with regard to vector graphics)." Saying "proportional transform is now the default behavior of transform" makes sense in hindsight, but seeing it in the middle of the confusion didn't make it clear to me that we were supposed to stop holding down the shift key.
Ben ... I don't disagree with the "notification" or "announcement" part. But I'm imaging how that would play out. I can imagine an effort by Adobe to inform their customer base of new changes ... and for whatever reason, the communication isn't delivered well enough, it never is, to truly inform and prepare the masses. The fact is that I too had to do a quick search to figure out what was going on after the update ... it was a bit surprising, but not earth shattering. Actually, I agree with several of your observations ... I work with corporations that have 90K+ employees ... if Adobe adopted their type of "robust and thorough" change management process for Photoshop, it would never be the product it is today. I'm not saying be reckless ... but, as a daily user of Photoshop, this, and all of the other recent enhancements, aren't making me hate Adobe. It's interesting to see the fervor behind this particular change. I'm guessing Adobe is noting the activity : )
BTW ... thanks for the respectful reply ... it's always disappointing to find myself in an unproductive discussion and wondering how I got there.
"The fact is that I too had to do a quick search to figure out what was going on after the update ... it was a bit surprising, but not earth shattering."But it wasn't a "quick search" for all of us. I did several searches before I hit the answer, and so did a number of other people posting here.
Hey Donnie, a fundamental change to the way graphics software has worked for 30+ years was always going to cause friction but that's frustrating, not infuriating.
What makes it infuriating, is that the change probably needed to happen in a 100 different places across CC but it was only made in one app, in one place.
That's low-quality work in anyone's book and that's what gets under people's skin. Yes, Adobe will write this off as 'you can't teach old dogs new tricks' but that's an over-simplification and a convenient excuse for poor work.
The half-baked way this change was implemented is well below the quality threshold for professional software, that's why I (and many others who can't be bothered posting/voting/liking) are annoyed.
"the change probably needed to happen in a 100 different places " ... that's a fair statement. Consistency is quality. I look at all the comments that attacked this change as though the people "outside of the change" have all the data necessary to show this was pure and simple ... sloppy work. I'm not in Adobe's meetings ... I don't have knowledge of the full myriad of challenges it takes to make any one change to Ps ... but I have attended many meetings with worldwide companies making similar process changes. And sometimes ... a lot of times ... a change that looks completely baffling, had some unique challenges and/or variables that required that change to be made in the way it was made. I've also seen companies live with a burdensome, unintuitive costly process because they simply could not find an "acceptable" solution for change.
Maybe ... just maybe ... the cost to change a default constrained proportion in every place necessary to satisfy all users at once ... would have taken a very long time and maybe this would increase the development budget significantly ... and maybe this would have injected some risk to the application stability ... requiring additional resources for regression testing ... so that a final product could be released ... in 2025? with increased subscription prices? If you had all the same data as the people making change would you still say it was "half-baked"?
I'd like to believe that companies like Adobe have some fairly intelligent leaders who understand the value of a company's relationship with it's support base (aka customers). And that these leaders are part of the decision making process. Maybe someday I'll run into one of them in a coffee shop. If I do ... I'll ask them to at least provide a road-map next time (even if it's a work in progress) so we can better prepare.
I couldn't agree more, making this change would've taken ages and been hugely costly which makes the decision even more baffling.
Many of us have built careers unraveling a small inconsistency which has ballooned into a massive problem and it's 10,000 times worse when it involves code. So why go there?
Touch apps/tools are an entirely different context, it's totally fine if they work differently, especially when it comes at the expense of making all other tools within the same context work the opposite way. That's just, well... stupid..
I'm sure the story of this decision is like the millions of other corporate decisions, we've all been there and it's sad, horrible and deflating. What a bummer.
So when you just do a transform (not holding shift) it still does a free transform? If that's the case can you please go to Help > System Info and then copy and paste the contents of that window in your reply?
I'm having such trouble with the proportional resizing that I've had to go back and use PS 19.1. Also why do I have to hit Command H twice now to get the Type tool to unselect? Good god I hate this new version. I've been a user since 1999 and this is the worst update ever!
Ohhhh I finally see. OMG. This change just took me days to figure out. I've been using PS for 20yrs and when you are plugging away at your work it's hard to find the time to stop and relearn new features. Got it now.
Pro users shouldn't have to waste even 5 min trying to understand a completely unnecessary modification of something that was never broken. Glad that you figured it out though.
Making uniform scaling the default without holding shift is probably the right move by Adobe, although it will take some time to get used to for old users like me. However for smart objects and vectors, it still uses the old behavior, so this is really confusing because of the inconsistency.
Please spend more time in QA/beta before you release features like this to the public! It should be obvious that changing this behavior for one type of objects should also be consistently changed across the application regardless of whether it's paths, smart objects or pixels.
Next time I would suggest holding back the feature until it is complete (at least along one singular app), but all software companies seem to have this idea that you need to release X amount of features in X amount of time to justify subscription fees!
Quit defending sub-par development that creates jaw dropping inconsistencies within Photoshop and across CC. I’ve used the text hack to make things consistent so have moved on but this kind of poor quality development deserves to be called out.
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