The New Photoshop: What We Need in a Proper Next-Generation Digital Design Tool

This is a forum topic for discussing the article "The New Photoshop: What We Need in a Proper Next-Generation Digital Design Tool":

http://www.elated.com/articles/the-new-photoshop/

Photoshop has become the de facto imaging standard, but it's arguably not well suited to web design work. In this article, Simon imagines what a next-generation digital design application would look like.

"Two single pixel straight horizontal lines, created seconds apart. Why has the second one got antialiasing applied, leading to a second row of translucent pixels? No, I don't know either."

Ooh, me, me! It's because one of your lines is on a pixel boundary, and the other one isn't. Photoshop is resolution-independent under the hood, so when you draw a line it doesn't necessarily line up with the pixels in the document.

In Photoshop CS3 you can fix this by checking the "Snap to pixels" checkbox in the shape options for rectangles and rounded rectangles - although, inexplicably, not for lines or anything else. (They may have fixed this in CS4/5, I dunno.)

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Matt Doyle, Elated
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Ah that's worth knowing! Thanks!

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On the vector anti-aliasing topic:

This drove me nuts for awhile, too. After some rather exhaustive searching I've found that there are several ways to address this:

1. Make sure you are at 100% zoom (no more, no less) when drawing, moving, or transforming a vector shape. Not always convenient, especially for smaller shapes.

2. Use the "snap to pixels" method that Matt posted above. Be aware that you will still get anti-aliasing of you try to transform the shape at anything other than 100% zoom, though. But, with the snap to pixels option turned on you can re size the shape without anti-aliasing it by using the white arrow tool to select and drag points.

3. Turn on the grid (cmd/ctrl+' or view>show>grid) and select "snap to grid" from the view>snap to> menu. Setting the grid to 1 pixel increments will give the finest control using this method. (under preferences>grids, guides & slices...) I like setting it to grid line every 10 pixels and 10 subdivisions, but there are a lot of combinations that will get the same result.

[Edited by Gaber on 07-Jul-11 12:11]

Good thoughts Gaber. Haven't tried the grid idea, so I'll give that a go, thanks!

Simon

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Update: @michaelbuddy on twitter suggests we may have an overly maccy bias, and that we should big up Xara Designer Pro 7 (http://www.xara.com/us/products/designer/).

Xara is a venerable app. I remember using it in the mid-90s to illustrate a children's book a friend was working on, and it was an absolute pleasure at the time. Then owned by Corel, it's now been spun off into a separate company.

There's a couple of things that trouble me looking at it now though:

1) That interface. It's just.. nasty. If I'm sitting in front of something all day, I do not want it to be that. Sorry. I know this is subjective, but still.

2) It's not marketed as a pro app, which suggests that the developers don't have the confidence in the product to compete in the pro marketplace. The site feels prosumer at best.

The thing is, Xara might be brilliant under the hood, but with the interface and marketing acting as a ball and chain around its foot, it's never going to be a pro tool.

Neither is this a Mac/PC thing. For a really, really brilliant pro design tool I'd switch platforms I think. It's about the work after all. I'm afraid this doesn't even make me want to download a demo onto the office Windows box

Simon

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@simon: I thought Xara was more of a vector editor, so not really a Photoshop successor? I remember using it in the 90s too - it was by far the nicest, easiest-to-use vector editor around.

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Matt Doyle, Elated
3rd Edition of my jQuery Mobile book out now! Learn to build mobile web apps. Free sample chapter: http://store.elated.com/

@matt. That's true in some respects, but for our purposes, for a design tool, vectors are where it's at.

Simon

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Simon,
I'm a big fan of Xara, but I do understand your reservations. I don't have nearly the experience that you do, but I do remember using something called Aldus Freehand 3.1 in the mid to late 90's (who owns that now?). I made maps with it at the time and thought it was a great tool (for its day). I got back into graphics about 5 years ago, this time mostly for website stuff and happened onto Xara 3 at the time. I fell in love with its relative simplicity. I've tried the CS4 suite I'd take Xara over Illustrator in a heart-beat. I do use Photoshop because the selection tools do things that no other program can. Still over-all I think the Adobe line is vastly over-rated. Back to Xara, I agree with your observations about the current interface and marketing. It seems to me that they are becoming a "Jack of All Trades" type of product, when I wish that they would just put their resources into being a great vector graphics program.

@JohnnyA . Freehand was great. It was bought by Macromedia, then went in turn to Adobe, who promptly killed it to boost Illustrator's sales.

Simon

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