Photoshop is not intuitive for an Illustrator user

[SIMEON5C7F]

I use Illustrator a lot and ive come to love it, but today I had to use photoshop so that i can make mock ups and whatnot. I though that it would be similar to Illustrator and dear lord was I devastatingly wrong. I was at the brink of poking my eyes out every 5 minutes, im not even joking. I almost smashed my monitor a couple of times, screamed at the top of my lungs a couple of times, lost my voice, had some spasms.

Why dont object become highlited in some way when i click on them?

Why do i have to click a checkmark manually everytime i do something? And sometimes i dont even notice that i have to click that [cursing removed] checkmark and i accidentaly carry on clicking other things.

WHY CANT I MOVE MY (Profanity removed by moderator) ARTBOARD WHEREVER I WANT??? 

WHY DO I HAVE TO GO TO EDIT-TRANSFORM EVERY (Profanity removed) TIME TO SCALE SOME [cursing removed]?

WHY DO I HAVE TO MANUALLY SELECT MULTIPLE LAYERS AFTER IVE ALREADY GROUPED THEM IN ORDER TO MOVE THEM???

AND WHY THE (Profanity removed) DO I SELECT MULTIPLE LAYERS WITH "ctrl" RATHER THAN WITH "shift"????

WHY IS IT SO (Profanity removed) HARD TO COLOUR ANYTHING HERE???

This program is UTTER GARBAGE!

[c.pfaffenbichler]

»Why dont object become highlited in some way when i click on them?«

What do you mean by »object«? Layers?

If so the selected ones can clearly be noted in the Layers Panel and by checking »Show Transform Controls« for the Move Tool in the Options Bar the Transform Controls become visible on the Canvas. 

»Why do i have to click a checkmark manually everytime i do something?«

What do you mean by »do something«? Painting, selecting, … need no confirmation so are you talking about Filters, Transformations, …?

»WHY CANT I MOVE MY (OP's Profanity removed) ARTBOARD WHEREVER I WANT???«

What are you talking about? What is hindering you in moving Artboards? 

Could you please post screenshots with the pertinent Panels (Toolbar, Layers, Options Bar, …) visible to clarify? 

 »WHY DO I HAVE TO GO TO EDIT-TRANSFORM EVERY (OP's Profanity removed) TIME TO SCALE SOME SHITT???«

You don’t; there is the Shortcut (cmd-T) and there is »Show Transform Controls« for the Move Tool. 

»WHY DO I HAVE TO MANUALLY SELECT MULTIPLE LAYERS AFTER IVE ALREADY GROUPED THEM IN ORDER TO MOVE THEM???«

You don’t; you can select the Group. 

»WHY IS IT SO (OP's Profanity removed) HARD TO COLOUR ANYTHING HERE???«

Coloring stuff in Photohsop does not seem to be hard, so what are you talking about? 

Edit: If you are talking about colorizing individual elements in a photograph then the difficulty would naturally depend on that photograph – how well is the element distinguishable, how strong is the color difference to the surroundings, how sharp are the edges … but that eventually gets down to masking. 

»This program is UTTER GARBAGE!«

You are apparently not familiar with Photoshop, so the problem does not seem to be the program but the assumption that the program would have to be efficiently usable without familiarizing oneself with it. 

I have not reported your post but you should be aware that you have violated the Forum guidelines. 

[Conrad_C · Accepted solution]

I’ve used both Illustrator and Photoshop, for many years, and it looks like you’re running into a basic difference between the two. That is the difference between how a vector graphics editing application (like Illustrator) works, and how a pixel editing application (Photoshop) works.

The reason I say that is because the differences you are complaining about are not specific to Adobe software. You would run into them if you were used to Affinity Designer (vector drawing) and got frustrated with Affinity Photo (pixel graphics), or if you were used to Corel Draw (vector drawing)  and tried out Corel PaintShop Pro (pixel graphics). You cannot select, colorize, and edit pixels the same way you edit your Illustrator vector graphics.

You need to dial back the anger and reframe what you are frustrated by so that you can learn both ways, because you are at risk of rejecting a valuable career skill. If you stay angry and reject Photoshop, then you will wall yourself off from gaining work experience with the entire 30+ year history of paint/photo/pixel editing applications, which all work like Photoshop, even before Photoshop was invented.

Another way of saying this: If you used Photoshop all your life and then tried Illustrator for a day, you would be cursing Illustrator for being an unituitive, terribly designed application because it doesn’t work the way you are used to. It’s like saying the French language is terrible because it is not like the German that you know, or that you reject all baking because it works differently than cooking dinner. Those are all wrong conclusions; those differences are there to create more options and more enjoyment for us.

Keep an open mind, try a few tutorials, watch a few videos. You will soon learn that if Photoshop was designed like Illustrator, it would be unable to work the way Photoshop needs to work. If you make the effort to learn how Photoshop and all image editing applications work, you will expand your range of career skills.

It is hard to learn a new discipline. I am still trying to learn 3D, animation, video editing, audio editing, etc. They are all too different from how Illustrator and Photoshop work. But if I curse them for working in stupid crazy ways, I will never learn them. So I do not judge them too soon, I commit the proper amount of time to study them, and eventually I understand why they have to be different and it all becomes clear.

[RRKing]

whats funny is i say the same thing when working in illistrator.  I still can't stand it but i'm sure if i gave it a go it would make sense and thats the same with photoshop a pixel editor and illistrator a vector editor.  It maes it more confusing is the each have a small section or ability to do the others job inside and thast where it gets confusing 🙂 

[c.pfaffenbichler]

@SIMEON5C7F , do you at least want to address the nonsensical and/or incorrect claims you made? 

[Lumigraphics]

Why have you not taken two minutes to learn the basics of Photoshop instead of raging? At its heart, its no different than coloring with crayons and three year olds can do that...

[renatus1234565]

lol

 I'm with you buddy, I understand what you're going through. I finally got through the hair pulling of learning illustrator and starting to feel comfortable with it and sometimes have to go into PS to do things with my co-workers' files and wow it's frustrating. I got here from googling something like what you're saying becuase I needed to take a breather trying to mask or clip some things or whatever.

   My frustration usually is with both programs, then also After effects and Premiere around 'masking' stuff. I've tried to learn the basics more times than I can count but the language around "masking" something has never made sense to me. So when I "mask" something it's never clear to me whether the "mask" is the thing that is being conformed to a shape or the shape that its being conformed to. the term mask doesn't make sense for defining that at all. Like idk, a gate or a pool, or really even 'crop' makes more sense. All mask says to me is something is covered up, not conformed to a shape. never mind that between PS, AI and CH (Character animator which I use a lot) the order in which a mask needs to be to work isn't always the same. Anyway, that's my gripe. 
   But I'm aware that this stuff is pretty much my fault; just gotta hit youtube and keep at them tutorials.

[Zachary242663960uq7]

The basic interface for photoshop hasn't changed since its inception. It is now, and always has been, incredibly unintuitive. The tools it offers are great, but the user interface is essentially the same as it was in 1990. That's 34 years ago. Think about how UI/UX has changed in 34 years. The interface for Photoshop is anachronistic, it doesn't belong in this time. I can only guess at why they won't work on a true UI update. I'm sure it would be a massive undertaking. It's why I avoid using it as much as I can. It's generative AI is pretty good, so I use it almost exclusively for that. The bulk of my edits are done in Lightroom and Topaz AI (I'm a photographer). I think that Photoshop becomes less relevant every day, and if they don't overhaul the UI/UX eventually it will be overtaken by more modern tools. Even Adobe's own Lightroom is decades better from a UX perspective. 

[Lumigraphics]

Millions of artists, graphic designers, videographers, and yes photographers, have relied on Photoshop for decades and have created some amazing work. Lightroom's UI blows goats, frankly, Aperture was miles ahead and much easier to use. Don't hold LR up as a model of UI design :shudder:

As for fawning over generative AI, why am I not surprised? A lot of us who actually have talent are not interested whatsoever in letting the computer create artwork while calling it our own, or in promoting the rise of AI.

Maybe its because you are new at this but Photoshop, with all its flaws, it not going away anytime soon. It has the same grip on professional image editing as Word and Excel have in the office market.

[Zachary242663960uq7]

I don't think LR is the gold standard, it's interface is mediocre. It's just more intuitive for general workflow than PS. I prefered Aperture as well. If it still existed, I wouldn't be using any Adobe products at all. I'm not new at this at all, and I'm not a proponent of heavy editing through AI or PS, at least from the perspective of photgraphy. Photograpy is all I do, I have not thoughts or comments about the use of photoshop for anything else. As applied to photography, I don't see the value in heavily edited images weather they come from AI or from hours of maniuplation manually in photoshop. I didn't care for heavy manipulation in the darkroom either. 

[Lumigraphics]

I'm a working pro myself, with 40 years of experience. I'm always open to new things but I'm pretty skeptical about buzzword tech. Most of it is less about being useful and more about lining someone's pockets.

[davescm]

The reason the basic interface does not change much is that this is a professional raster image editor used by millions around the world, day in - day out and thefore the users develop 'muscle memory' around the tools. When Adobe have make even slight changes to the interface, there is an outcry in these forums about how the designers have ruined workflows. As an example, look at the huge wailing when Adobe aligned the use of the Shift key when transforming, between Illustrator and Photoshop.  It is easy to conclude that the danger to the customer base, comes from changing the UI not from retaining it.

Dave

[frazzlesnap]

The debatable "fact" that the basic interface for Photoshop hasn't changed since its inception is one of the main reasons it has such staying power. People learn to use it and don't have to relearn it every update. I don't agree that it is unintuitive, as I learned it precisely by using it, along with Illustrator, InDesign, etc. While I will complain about the Acrobat UI/UX update, most Adobe software is intuitive, at least for the people I know. If you are really a photographer, then you probably don't need AI. The majority of what it creates is soulless garbage, in my opinion. Real artists rely on their abilities, not a generative program creating things based on text prompts or sampling of existing material. My best friend is an AI scientist, and we are diametrically opposed when it comes to our views on the value of AI in art. Real artists are being marginalized and squeezed out of the market because AI is now "good enough" for most people. (I know that using quotation marks for emphasis is grammatically incorrect, but it seems to get the point across.)

Sorry for my rant.

[Zachary242663960uq7]

While I agree with you from the perspective of Art, generative AI is helpful for working photographers. I don't use AI on my personal projects because my personal projects have no time constraints and can be done over and over until perfect. However for my business, AI tools are invaluable. When I'm shooting a group portrait of 20 people with a bunch of kids involved and have a child with a disability who can't remain still and am constrained by lighthing conditions to use a reasonably low shutter speed, AI can be a life safer. That's a real example. In this situation I could use face recovery in Topaz AI, then sharpen and denoise and I take an unusable photo and turn it into something I can deliver. 

Another example; I recently did a portrait shoot in a popular location. I had a few shots that were perfect other than some random person walking in the background, obscured by reeds. Generative AI removed this easily without requiring me to waste time on manual removal. Need to remove a piece of litter I missed when composing? Generative AI. 

I would never use it to make major edits, change entire backgrounds etc, but when you're dealing with a small change in a background that is already blurred from shooting wide open, it's very helpful. It's just another tool for the business, and it's a valuable one. As a photographer I've alway hated futzing in PS modifying layer after layer. I've never liked the over edited portraits that have been trending in the last 5 to 10 years. Ironically, when used carefully, generative AI produces more natural results to make quick corrections that are meaningful to someone delivering a product, rather than creating ridiculous over edited posts for instagram. It's way easier and much more natural to use AI to recover face sharpness and denoise than it is to go into photoshop, create multiple layers, align multiple images to mask over  a certain face, then try to bring the sharp face through, combine layers etc. 

You're talking 30 seconds for an arguably better result versus 5 minutes messing around with the clunky PS interface, and when you're working and edting hundreds of photos a week, that is really meaningful. I think PS is great for manipulating images for magazines and high end products, but it's a waste of time for the average working photographer doing portraits, sports, events etc. I think it will continue to be used for high end workflows in the corporate world, and for super high end portraiture in fields like boudoir, or food photography that are often also dominated by medium format, but for a strandar family portraiture business, Lightroom and other tools just make more sense because of the more streamlined workflows due to modern UX/UI. 

[frazzlesnap]

Ah. Yes, I see your point. I've been practically forced to use AI to correct abnormalities and glitches in some photos for work, since my traditional methods of retouching aren't fast enough for some people. I don't ever use AI on personal projects, and, also like you, don't make major edits/replacements with AI. I would still argue that PS has a decently intuitive interface, however. I've been using it for over 26 years, and I remember that it seemed to have a reasonable learning curve. I've been using Illustrator for the same time, and grew up on PageMaker. We all have our preferences, of course.

I apologize if I came across as insulting. It was not my intent. I often fail to communicate in the manner I intend.