P: Pro Retouchers need better Liquify

Anne, there is one other issue. The current Transform process updates only the screen preview and not the full image bit map. When you commit the transform adjustments the full image bit map data is recalculated using an interpolation process. Depending on the size of the image it can take seconds. If this was happening real-time per your request you would have to wait after every single adjustment for the screen preview to update before applying the next adjustment. Even with low-resolution image files this would slow you down much more than just a single double-click.

If you find yourself using the same transforms on multiple images you might try creating an Action and apply it with the Batch processor.

I feel that I should clarify that I personally make composites for ads, do simple photo retouching, and make quick comps for paintings and projects, therefor the high level of quality that professional photographers aim for is not of interest to me. There are many professionals that use Photoshop, and not all of us create a finished product that must print with fine art quality (local newspaper ads for example). I have found it most interesting to get a peek into the concerns of some of you high level printer-perfect users though - and that definitely makes the argument to make the transform confirmation optional rather than getting rid of it. I definitely appreciate the difficulty of the job of the developers for a software that serves the wide variety of users that Photoshop does. 🙂

Your interpolation is probably set to automatic, so you're seeing the new preserve details work its magic. And while that amount of degradation might be acceptable to you, as a professional retoucher, there's no way i could ever live with the behavior described by Anne. 

Having PS resize and re-interpolate a layer ever time a transform handle is moved would be a terrible idea.

Just tested. Open image. Select All. Copy. Paste. Automatic SmartObjects From Paste is Off and neither layer icon has a SmartObject badge. Resize layer smaller. Click commit. Resize layer smaller again. Commit. Resize layer to full width & height. During the embiggening, the preview is blocky, but clicking commit shows the image in expected detail. Looks like the original to me. Setting the top (re-resized) layer to Difference shows mostly black with a few areas indicating a slight color change, so most of the resized image has returned identical to the original layer. I'm surprised it's not perfect, but the original layer was from 14-bit RAW so I forgive some slight differences.

Similar experience using a JPEG copied to the clipboard from a different program. Paste. Resize smaller, larger, smaller, back to as close to normal as I could wiggle it. Commit between each resize. The final version has the detail I expected from the original paste.

Perhaps don't-discard-details was the original purpose of making Transform require a commit, but something clever is preserving the details here today without an explicit SmartObject.

Transformations of non-smart objects are destructive, so it would be a HUGE issue if there wasn't confirmation. 

It's not the history, it's the transform itself. If there was no confirm, each transformation would be applied immediately (and destructively unless you transform a vector or a smart object). Imagine what this would do for the image quality if you transformed too much, and then corrected this.

It has often anoyed me too, but I think I just realized the purpose. This final commit keeps the history panel from recording every single little adjustment. I might adjust the width, height and rotation of an object multiple times to get it just right, maybe a dozen or more adjustments sometimes, and then I click checkmark to say that's it. Now in the history panel I have added only one step, so it's easy to undo and get back to the object as it was before the transform. If every little adjustment was recorded, the history panel could get cluttered with trivia, and lose important earlier steps prematurely.

Thanks for bringing this up. The usefulness of commit the transform has puzzled me many times.

Thank you! That does help.

You can also double-click (or double tap) inside the transform selection to commit it.

It would be helpful to be able to add guides to the liquify workspace. I have a workaround for this, but guides would still be more efficient.