Photoshop UI

It will definitely help if you talk about some specific examples. What basic functions have gotten hidden, and what have you been looking for that you can't find? Nothing should be “impossible to find” unless the UI isn’t being used optimally.

Yes, the Photoshop UI has gotten more complicated, but they haven’t really hidden any basic functions. If anything, in recent years they have added UI to give us more ways to find things and simpler ways to get the basics done. The Properties panel, Contextual Task Bar, Find (any feature) command, the search field in Preferences, etc. didn’t exist 10 years ago but they all make it much easier to find a feature that you might have lost track of; or provide less buried, more up-front alternate access points to features.

Make sure you aren’t listening too closely to influencers who only teach about keyboard shortcuts and right-click menus. Photoshop is very good about trying to make almost all commands available on the normal menus, where they can be found without memorizing anything.

And if the Photoshop UI becomes too strange and unfamiliar, make sure it hasn’t gotten into a special state where the panels and menus have gotten overly customized, because for example it’s possible to remove tools and commands. You can restore menus, panels, and the Tools panel to a more out-of-the-box state by choosing Window > Workspace > Essentials (Default) and then Window > Workspace > Reset Essentials.

whenever  I need to find a tool I just type the tool into help- and 99 times out of 100 The tool gets selected for me. 

Trevor.dennis provided some great tips-  the interface is pretty customizable to the users needs.

I suspect it is an unavoidable consequence of an ever more capable application.  Some of the menus (Right Click especially) are contextual. i.e. there is no line for New Smart Object via Copy if the image does not have any Smart Object Layers.  This helps to minimise the clutter as much as possible, but rest assured, you are not the only person who gets frustrated.  I HATE right click menus, and begrudge the time it takes to find the line you want out of 30 plus (in the layers panel right click menu).   

The Smart Object shortcuts above are my own, and F12 is one of my most used shortcuts.  What makes this more useable is that we can save custom shortcuts with custom Workspaces, so you can even repurpose the same shortcut according to context.

As well as shortcuts, we can also save custom menus and toolbars with a particular workspace.

If you open the Keyboard Shortcuts panel and click on the Menus tab, teirl open a group and you'll see these eye icons. clicking to turn off any of those eye icons will remove that line from its menu. So if you never use a particular command while performing a particular image processing session, then you can make a menu less cluttered.

Save the edited menu with a custom workspace, and swap between workspaces to suit what you are doing.   

I use tiny Actions to set and reset my workspaces, and trigger them with Function keys.

The other thing to remember is the Discover panel. Click on the magnifying glass in the top right corner to open Discover. Start typing the thing you are trying to find, and Discover where will tell you where to find it, how it works, and offer a tutorial with beautiful graphics and maybe a video.  Even experienced users make use of Discover sometimes.

Please ask any time you get stuck. You can ask as many questions as you like, and someone will help you.

Hi @Rafaelis! Thanks for the feedback — we really appreciate it. Could you let us know a bit more specifically what you're having trouble finding? We'd love to help point you in the right direction.

Thanks again!
Alek