I agree with both of your main points, which have become a theme of mine on here: 1. Adobe seems to be suffering from the increasingly common sort of corporate arrogance, where they decide the user should be forced to do things a certain way. Like trying to force us all to use vector even when it's irrelevant to our work, since print media is deservedly dying and we're mostly doing purely electronic work. 2. The last couple of years of releases have been increasingly unstable, unreliable, and unable to perform even on powerful machines. Each time I have to restart photoshop because of some memory leak, or because the hardware acceleration has turned itself off again (I have the latest drivers for both of my machine's video cards), or whatever I am that much more encouraged to switch to Photoshop alternatives, which I am doing for longer each time. ... View more

I've been using Photoshop for 28 years, and this is the worst performance trouble I remember encountering. I have a powerful machine, with the current drivers for both of my video cards, and plenty of RAM. But I'm having to restart PS several times per day because the image stops updating, or the whole program starts running so slowly that it's useless, or it seems to leak memory until the whole machine is crawling even with PS simply sitting in the background with one relatively small image open. Or PS just dies on its own.   As I said, I've been using it for decades, and so I'm familiar with all the normal suggestions about replacing drivers, having enough RAM, using the correct drive for various things (sometimes a larger one, sometimes an SSD, depending), and so on. This is different.   It started a year or two ago, but with the update to 2021 it snowballed. I really am experimenting with alternatives like Affinity, Clip Studio, and GIMP, when time and task allows it. Any temptation to just stick to photoshop, my preferred graphics tool since 1992, is undone each time I lose work thanks to Photoshop suddenly erroring every time I try to save a medium-sized file, or some other problem as I mentioned above. ... View more

Hahahahahaha! The irony is lost on them. Pixels bad, Pixels BAAAD!  (throws child in pond with the daisies) ... View more

I agree that new "features" should default to off, not on.  Obviously. But it's that culture of arrogance going around the corporate world, where they stupidly think that they know best and can rightfully force us to change how we do things or impose new features on us without our consent. ... View more

View > Show > Pixel Grid turns it off permanently, I think. ... View more

> The problem case that I and many fellow users was that 'layer selection' > was not considered worthy of being an 'undo' or 'step backward' or whatever, > with the result that you would select a layer (note not 'create a layer' ), > draw a line, decide you didn't like it, UNDO and photoshop would 'undo' > you back to before you selected the layer.     I just ran into another frustrating version of this:   I was about to eyedropper an averaged image to get an ambient color for a composite layer, and realized I had another color in the foreground that I absolutely needed and wouldn't be able to easily recreate. But my finger was already clicking.   But Photoshop doesn't count foreground/background color changes in the undo, either. I suppose the reason for this, like others, is that it doesn't change the image at all. Wait, no, that can't be the universal defining principle, because changing visibility doesn't go into the history, either, and that definitely changes the image.   Maddening. I'd rather have to deal with having the extra undo step included than losing a foreground color when using the eyedropper indiscriminately. ... View more

I guess I shouldn't give them any ideas.   They seem to have some kind of "let's take away features we decided they don't need", right now.   [reply edited by moderator]  ... View more

I wonder if he was thinking of Photoshop. One of the thousand reasons I tend to use Photoshop even when Illustrator would probably be more appropriate. Really, graphic work these days is far more likely to be for something other than print media, that being the only situation where Illustrator is clearly superior. Desktop publishing used to be really important, but now it's just a niche market. I can make do with Photoshop as long as it's not gonna be a poster or flyer or something. ... View more

> That's the dreaded 'q' key for quick mask is it?   That one's annoying — and even after 29 years of using PhotoShop I still don't even use it and only vaguely know why anyone would —but at least it shows up in the undo history. But backslash is "toggle layer mask" (which I also don't use), and does NOT show up in undo, so you can't turn it back off until you figure out how it was turned on. Or you close and reopen the file, which of course loses the entire edit history, which is a terrible thing.   Speaking of which...all this new workflow sugar they're needlessly adding, and they still haven't given us a way to save the actual history. Not a text file of the steps taken to send to a micromanaging client, but to actually be able to reload the history with the file to resume editing. I don't care how many gigs of space it takes up on the drive, I want that. Way more important than adding an eighth way for me to select things for compositing.   Sadly, I modify PhotoShop as little as possible, as I'm a consultant and sometimes I'm using a client's machine. Same reason I stopped using the dvorak keyboard layout, even though I could type 120 WPM on it: I need to be used to using the default things a computer has, so that I'm not fumbling around when it's not my own machine. Comcast and Caesar's Palace, for example, sent a laptop they expected me to use, for security reasons or whatever. I don't always have time to reconfigure everything in order to be productive with my custom setup.   I can use [ and ] without looking, because of my level of touch typing...except:   The same thing happened when the ergonomic keyboard I'd used off and on for 15 years died. I bought a fancy optical gaming keyboard, they don't make those ergonomic, and suddenly couldn't touch type without glancing down and orienting my hands each time. That keyboard also had the numpad on the left (which is WAY better, both for photoshop and gaming), and just when I got used to those things that keyboard failed. Never buying another keyboad made by Bloody. Now I have a Razer, but the numpad's on the normal side and I constantly place my fingers too far to the right unless I think about it. Then I type in some amazing, alien language. ... View more

So it's not just I who find it harder to set a correctly-shaped arrowhead for a line?   Oh, the other day I realized that one stupid change they made in that department is:   Now you cannot make the arrowhead a percentage of the line size. I tried changing it from 32px to 250%, and it rejected it. We can ONLY configure the arrowhead in pixels, making it less dynamic and throwing in more steps when we're changing line thickness more than once per image.   And that's yet another completely unnecessary loss of feature. ... View more

> The problem was what Adobe decided counts > as 'step backward' and what counts as 'undo'.    This horrible chat board interface doesn't include an ability to clearly quote, so I'm using the old usenet  style.    You make an interesting point. To this day I'm not certain which side I'm on. I do have to remember that my hiding a layer does not count as an undo step. I skip backward and suddenly the layer has vanished. What puzzles me most about that, though, is how sometimes going back DOES seem to know what layer to hide/unhide, and I'm not clear on why. That happened to me today, where I was repeatedly stepping backward, sometimes with a shortcut and sometimes by clicking the history, and realized that I only had to fix layer visibility part of the time.   And yes, the layer mask selection thing is maddening. And if they did fix that, maybe they could also make it smarter about which one should be selected after certain actions. I forget the specifics except when it's happening, but sometimes I have an intuitive expectation that I should now be on the actual layer, get frustrated because things aren't changing right, then realize that I'm on the mask.   Oh, and then how about some actual indication that Photoshop decided to ignore click on the screen because window focus was actually on one of my other monitors and I didn't realize it. That, too, can produce a cascade of mistakes. Getting back to the point of undo stream, I now have a mental list of keyboard shortcuts that don't count as undo because they're just interface, not edits, but which radically change the image I'm working on...and then I didn't know what key I'd bumped in order to toggle the display back. Like backslash to toggle layer mask. Why is my whole image pink? Why won't it stop being pink when I hit control-z? What did I do?  That one interrupted my work for a LONG time when I first encountered it. And then I didn't accidentally do it again for so long that I didn't remember how to fix it the next time it happened. ... View more

Until recently, new versions had more good than bad, I agree. But in the last couple of years, Photoshop has not only grown more buggy and unstable, but these relatively minor changes have been so disruptive that it hasn't been worth the increasingly flashy graphic sugar of new features that are alternate ways to do existing things. Of course those often turn out to be good, but it's not worth the cost of the bad changes of late.  What's with this new obsession corporations have for taking away features they've decided we shouldn't want? Every new version of Android now fills me with dread instead of excitement. What will they now conclude users really shouldn't have access to, for our own good? New Farcebook versions, instead of just being inconvenient, almost always strip away important features and settings. And you're mistaken about multi-step undo. That's been going on for thirty-plus years. Oh, not if you're a victim of MacOS, I suppose, but for the vast majority of GUI users it's been normal all along. Add that to the long list of features Mac users got late and yet somehow think were new, or unnecessary. I remember when System 7 came out with exciting new features like background printing and full-color icons that had been around forever in Windows. Anyway, it was indeed a debate at Adobe for whether to do the toggle, or step backward as the control-Z default, at the beginning. And the wrong one won, back then. As is illustrated by this oblivious attempt to correct their mistake a couple of decades too late.   ... View more

Yes, their handling of free transform on shift was idiotic. From the beginning:   It was dumb for it to have defaulted to free transform in the first place. They were right to regret having done so.   But once everyone was used to it, they were locked in, and no matter how much they wanted to, they never should've reversed it. They should only have added the option to reverse it in settings. For it to suddenly do the opposite without our being warned was lunacy.   To this day, I am absolutely certain that every once in a while I slightly mess up the aspect ratio of some layer because while I forget to NOT hold shift, my movements are precise enough that it LOOKS like the ratio was preserved. So then a font or image is slightly wrong in shape.   In that case, putting it back as an optional setting is not really a solution, though. I can't risk needing to work on another machine and getting it backward yet again. So I am stuck using the default, lest I continue to have the opposite habit.   As for undo/step backward, same problem:   It should've done step backward by default. Not because Illustrator did it (the obsession with making Photoshop work like its ugly kid sister is the reason we're in THIS mess, now), but because that's more like how undo works for EVERY major program. You can undo back through steps in all Office products, most programming IDEs, et cetera, via control-z.   But, having done it the stupid way and left it thus long enough for habits to develop, in a tool that takes years to master so that most of its users have BEEN using it for years, suddenly reversing it was beyond oblivious to the needs of the real world.   All three of these are examples of ivory tower dunderheadedness. Of isolation from the needs of real life. ... View more

Your URL is community.ADOBE.com   If posts here are not addressing Adobe, they shouldn't let their domain name be used for the site.   It's pretty absurd for you to constantly be having to disclaim the domain name that you belong to.     ... View more

@mark_dahm I want to make clear the minimum criteria for this to be solved: The tool must show a line identical to the final product, while it's being drawn. We have to be able to preview it before commiting the line, so that we see exactly what it will look like in the end. When it is committed, it must lay the line as pixels onto the target layer, even if it's a layer with other pixels on it, if that's what we intend.   Any "fix" that doesn't restore our precision and speed of workflow in these two ways will not even be a reasonable compromise. As far as I know, those are the deal-breakers. For example, I am not aware of anyone really worried about restoring the pixel line being a rectangle, unless that's what's necessary to meet the two above criteria in a timely manner. ... View more

Again, Adobe bureaucrats are trying to say these are solutions, there is no problem, and we should all move on. So we must make clear that these are worthless to the pros and they need to fix the actual problem. ... View more

Unfortunately, the two "workarounds" you have named were suggested by the Adobe bureaucrats who then marked this problem "resolved".    It is imperative to establish clearly that they should no more expect us to be satisfied with this state of affairs than we'd be happy with taking in nutrition by a rectal broth enema because Adobe removed the ability to open our pixel-based mouths.  ... View more

Just to be clear, this is worthless as a "solution", because we cannot see the line before committing it. We all knew how to do what you describe already, but sometimes we divert our workflow to use the line tool instead, because we need the ability to click a start point, then move the endpoint all around and look at what will work best. Which requires both the ability to move it around, and the ability to see what it looks like while doing so. I just ran into this problem yesterday, for the nth time. ... View more

As I just said elsewhere, it's absurd that this message board doesn't let us edit our posts, a fancy new technology that good message boards have supported for over two decades. ... View more

I hate how this forum's interface is so clunky that, among other things, we cannot edit our previous posts. A feature common on message boards for the past 24 years or so. ... View more

This in no way solves the problem at hand.   Among the problems it does not address:   We need to be able to see the line. I don't want the half-pixel path line to show me where I'm drawing, but the actual n-pixel line that will be there when I finish. This is imperative for quick and accurate changes. Someone wrote here whose job is to make graphics for gems. I've done that before. He wants to strengthen the edges of a gem with the line tool, and this requires moving the line a few pixels this way and that, to see what is most precise, before dropping it.  We need to draw the line in one motion, and be done. Many of us use Photoshop professionally. We are either under deadlines like many of the animators who've posted here, or the more projects we get done the more money we're making. We learn all the keyboard shortcuts, we write macros and scripts, we pay a fortune for pen tablets, et cetera, because it speeds our workflow. We know a half dozen ways to do the same thing, and pick the exact one that will be fastest in each situation. Drawing the line and then rasterizing manually is a hurdle that slows you down. It's like literal hurdles in a race. The world record hundred meter hurdles is one third slower than the world record hundred meter dash.   ... View more

I agree. I'm a professional graphic artist with clients in both media and politics, as well as a consultant both corporate and private, and I have already run into more than one task where this change breaks my workflow. Aside from having wasted a huge amount of time even figuring out how the new system "works", and workarounds for what I need to do.   This change — and the way Adobe marked the problem as solved simply by telling us "it's not a bug, we did it on purpose, so you guys can suck it" (in slightly different words) — is why I'm trying out three alternatives to Photoshop:   Affinity (my favorite so far) Pretty much everything Photoshop does, lacking only the recent bells and whistles that all do things that were already possible. The complex range of tools is organized in a self-explanatory way that's easy to figure out Believe it or not, faster and more stable than PS has been in the last year or two CLIP Studio Interface is strongly similar to Photoshop Largely the same tools, lacking nothing really important GIMP Open source, been around for over twenty years Not only does all the normal Photoshop stuff, but has a wide array of plugins that can do most of the rest, even a few things PS does not. This is thanks to it being open source since the mid nineties. Free. Because open source. But worth a separate mention. ... View more

Is Procreate an alternative to Photoshop? We've been discussing alternatives, mainly Affinity, and Clip Studio. I like Affinity the most, so far. It can do most of what PS does that matters, and is actually faster and more stable. ... View more

Yes, I've installed both Affinity and Clip Studio, and I was shocked at how complete Affinity looks, at first glance. Its interface is immediately understandable, the tools organized in a way that let me quickly see it could do pretty much everything PS does, at least on a fundamental level. Clip Studio looks okay, in fact it even more resembles Photoshop, but that means that what it can do isn't as obvious, because frankly Photoshop (which I've used for 28 years) has a rather obscure interface. But I'm glad that GIMP isn't my only option. It looks like Affinity may even have more features...though I do need to update and re-examine GIMP, which I haven't used in a while. ... View more

The work I'm doing right now reminded me of your comment. I need to make the corner of a white-painted room more obvious, after having reconstructed it by removing objects therein. Doing it as a shape that will only be stroked after I commit, and that will have to be rasterized afterward for further blending, is much slower and less accurate.   Actually, since I wrote that line I went back and did the same change in a completely different way, slower and more troublesome. This is not acceptable. ... View more

I disagree about this not being the place for that. We've been informed that Adobe has yet again undermined our use of their product on purpose, and they've failed to respond to our objections even with discussion...so then it's logical for us to discuss alternatives.   How much of what PS does can Affinity Photo do? Is it focused solely on photos, or can it do other things? Does it have either layers or something equivalent?  ... View more

Yes, I still use the "Legacy" web save, because with typical corporate arrogance they excluded some functionality from the "Export" feature. For example, the only meta data option is Copyright and Contact Data. What would make them think that I shouldn't be allowed to save all meta data in my image? I often want it to be searchable, for myself or a client. Many image upload websites use meta tags for searches, and so do search engines like Google.   I suppose, once again, that they're blindered by outdated DTP ideas that really don't matter for the vast majority of PS users, including the professional ones. ... View more

I just reinstalled GIMP, which ultimately can do all of the same things, but without the more recent gimmicks that are essentially just ways of doing those things through automation. But because it lacks those things, it runs MUCH faster. And is incalculably more stable. I'm so tired of Photoshop crashing, or mysteriously not updated part of the image, forcing me to restart it, or a dozen other bugs like that. And the lag...I have a very powerful machine, one adequate for modern games, and yet sometimes I have to restart it to get Photoshop to keep up with my pointer or pen. Again, some bug just makes it mysteriously laggy. Does anyone know of another alternative that is equal to or better than GIMP? ... View more

The closest I know of to Photoshop is GIMP. I've used it here and there over the years, and it can do everything that Photoshop does, but without some of the fancy automation that comprises most of Photoshop's new features for the last decade or two. So it can do everything, but sometimes you have to do it the way we did in Photoshop in the late nineties. Oh, and it does have a ton of plugins that probably take up that slack,  but I've never used it enough to get into those. Mostly I've used GIMP when actually working on-site somewhere that didn't have Photoshop. But mostly I insist on working off-site (for the last fifteen years), ergo have my own PS. ... View more

> Adobe added a Trangle shape toot to the Shift+U shortcuts   Oh, good, because we sometimes need triangles, and the polygon tool didn't already exist!   As another little "eff you" to the userbase, notice that we don't have any way to edit these posts after we make them? Any decent community board does, of course. But this isn't one of those. Or am I missing how to do it? The little "...More" link is empty. Just opens a blank line, as if someone started building a context menu and then forgot to write the control to populate it. ... View more