Friends, I stand before you unabashed and in contempt. I refuse to be an enabler for mindless tolerance any more.
You know it in your heart that this is true. If you have any competence at interface design, you cannot deny it. If you’ve used any of the other packages for design out there, you know that Photoshop has nothing essential or unique except a complete lack of intuitiveness.
My main complaint: I can’t click on something I see to select it. I grant you, layers in Photoshop are all (more or less) bitmaps. And as such, they’re not really objects. But any designer worth his salt is going to use layers, and there’s no easy way to select the layer of something you see on screen. There really should be a simple tool that allows you to click on the canvas, and select the layer that is providing that pixel for viewing. Any other tool can do this, including those that composite layers of bitmaps, not just the vector tools.
Maybe I just missed that option. Still, the layer highlighting is poor when you finally get the one you want. And the UI surrounding the canvas never makes sense. Color selection? Forget it. And even when I think to use Photoshop for photo modification, the task for which is was actually designed, I do much better using something simpler (and designed later) like Photoshop Elements.
I’m convinced that it’s not that I’m stupid. I can use Fireworks. I can use Photopaint. I can use Paintshop Pro. None of these tools have the same first-use irritation that accompanies Photoshop.
People will say that Photoshop has more power, and that’s why everyone uses it. Bull! Show me one thing useful to web design that Photoshop does that you can’t also do with a tool that handles layers in an intelligible way. Most programs can also use Photoshop plugins. There’s really no excuse to stick with Photoshop except that it’s what poor tool you were introduced to when you started designing, and if you took time to switch we’d all be better off.
I can only assume that there’s some amazing features under the hood of Photoshop that do photo compositing or something that I’m never going to need to do that make it worthwhile for photographic designers that leads to this contagion of every designer wanting to provide his web designs in a format that costs $800+ to open properly. Is that why you’re using Photoshop, for photo compositing? Good for you. Keep using Photoshop. None of the designs I need should be using that, thus no designer I work with should be using that.
What I want to know is what marketing fumble led to Corel not having the dominant tool. Each Corel release is at least a year beyond its Adobe counterpart (apart from Flash, which I still think of as a Macromedia product). You don’t need to think overly hard to use Corel interfaces. Comparatively, looking at Photoshop’s bandage toolbar button, I can think of nothing but the impending pain of having to use their crap.
I don’t know what has led to this consensual hallucination that we should just accept designs in Photoshop. It’s ridiculous. I’m going to insist that all of my designs come in as layered Fireworks PNGs from now on.
