Community Expert

Open for Voting

P: Improve legacy filters with larger image previews, before and after, split images

Forum|Forum|14 years ago
May 28, 2011
11 replies
1207 views

Part of the success of Photoshop was the integrated and additional plug-ins it could have.But most of the built-in filters in Photoshop feel antiquated by their interface, even the mondo ones (Filter gallery, Liquify, Camera Raw...) have some limitations, and do not act like others. I'm using more and more After Effects, and I love the fact that the filters have their own panel, where one can search for a filter.Combined to this I'd like to borrow an idea from Lightroom: have the image be the full preview of the filters, with a before and after view, or a split image, where one could move a slider to review the effects of the plug-ins. Heck, this should work with history!

M

Mike2958838912tc

Participant

It's pretty wild that's it's been more than 10 years and Adobe somehow can't find the time to fix these issues. Someone brought up a perfect example with Filter>Distort>Wave. It takes up so much time having to apply the filter, hope for the best because the preview window is so excruciatingly small, then having to undo and retry different settings because it didn't come out how you wanted it. Why does it take so long for Adobe to address such glaring QOL issues.

PECourtejoie

Author

Community Expert

More and more, I wonder if I would not prefer to have the filters controls live in the properties panel, so that we could have the layers panel available. The workspace interface of the Blur Gallery feels limitative comparatively, but I understand that modality can be needed. I would still enjoy to see other filters escape their smallish preview, or total lack of WISIWIGness.

B

Bentley B

Known Participant

Smart blur needs the features like smart sharpen such as preview option, sizing of the window, shadows/highlight adjustments, etc.

Jeff Arola

Community Expert

Some filters don't even have previews and require lots of experimentation (time) to find the right setting.

A perfect example is the Displace filter.

(Filter>Distort>Displace)

Other filters in need of previews are Filter>Pixelate>Color Halftone, Filter>Stylize>Tiles, Filter>Stylize>Extrude and Filter>Video>De-Interlace.

P

pioslo

Inspiring

The year is almost 2022 but Adobe still can't do bigger or scalable preview windows for legacy filters like gausaian blur and others. Maybe it was enough when screen resolutions was 800x600 or 1024x768 but now on 4K screens it is like post stamp. Some filters yopu have to work blind because you can see literally nothing like for example in "wave" filter when you want apply bigger numbers.

If someone find those filters unusefull or outdated it would be just better to remove it from Photoshop and replace with some new fancy filters. Otherwise make bigger preview widnows Adobe!

F

FeedbackCommunityMember

Inspiring

For the distort-wave tool, the preview is very small and there's no way to enlarge the preview (unless I'm missing something). When using the liquify tool, for example, you can enlarge the preview as much as you want so you can see the details. Is there any way that can be changed?

HTK421

Participant

The popup box you get when selecting a FILTER (eg blur, noise etc) is an extremely poor user experience. The preview window is far too small, and it defaults to 100% zoom, so all you see is a tiny area of the screen. This is made even worse if you have a layer selected that only has a small footprint and sits off to one side, - well outside of the preview window. In this case you have to click 'zoom-out' multiple times before you can even find your selection, and then carry on clicking a combination of drag & zoom-in to get close enough to see what you're doing. This is pathetic!!

Give us a much larger preview window, and make it a LOT easier & quicker to see the selection.
In fact,... why not give it them same tools as the new Blur Gallery, with large preview and dynamic controls?

S

StefanKlein

Known Participant

Jeffrrey,
the new blur gallery UI is great! Please give this UI to ACR as well!!!

PECourtejoie

Author

Community Expert

Yes, this new interface/framework seems the ideal basis for many filters. I'd need the ability to show underlying layers, like in liquify.

The fact that we can add panels from the "regular interface" is useful.

The on-image control would be a perfect fit for the ages-long request to have radial blur have immediate feedback, and be able to control the origin point, reach and strenght.

It would be a good timing to open the creative possibilities for some other filters that are "stuck" in one direction: wind, charcoal, or have limited controls, like graphic pen.

J

J453

Legend

Check out what we've done with Blur Gallery filters and the new and improved Lighting Effects in CS6.

On canvas previews and dialog-less interfaces.