I'm usually not the one to complain about visual changes to software, but with a power tool such as Photoshop, such changes need to be very well thought out and crafted. With Photoshop CS6, I don't think that is the case. I feel the layers palette was much easier to scan in CS5, because the icons and the separating lines are much better defined.
In CS6, they all blend into the background of the layers palette and the separating lines between layers in the layer palette, while slightly less subtle and more prominent, are really just more distracting than helpful. I think the lines between layers in CS5 layers palette was much easier to scan and it worked really well with many nested groups (where the white part of the line to the left indicated (roughly) the position of the layer within groups).
As someone who works with documents that can have thousands of layers, this change is really quite painful. Something like the layers palette should always be optimized for very fast scanning and visibility and I feel Adobe missed that point with CS6.
My suggestion is to make the icons and the bounding borders of the layer thumbnail stand out better and use the same concept of the separating line between layers that CS5 uses (where part of the line is a different color, which indicates the position in the grouping hierarchy).
Additionally, with darker layouts, the contrast between the layer box and the layer name label is too strong and as a result, makes the actual layer type and associated parameters less visible at a glance. Generally speaking, the name of the layer is always less important than what kind of a layer it is, so the layer name should visually be less prevalent.
Thank you for your time,
Riho Kroll
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