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Comment by perardi | Hacker News Reader

I’ve used Photoshop since before you some of you people were born. (I’m 37, but I started very, very early.) I breathe Photoshop. I live in Photoshop. I am like a surgeon with Photoshop.

And the vast majority of the time, using Photoshop for a design task is gross overkill, or it’s poorly suited to the task in subtle ways.

It never felt right for UI design. They've made nice improvements (hello, Artboards), but it never “feels” quite right. Am I using the right color space and management settings? Can I override that symbol? How do I edit that global color? Oh god, did I rasterize that layer!?

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Not only that, but the SaaS model has not netted any 'killer' features at all. I haven't found a new feature indispensable since at least CS2.

It's the other way around. Photoshop hit the limit for what people needed out of a photo editor, and when they realized fewer and fewer customers were paying for new versions anymore pivoting to a subscription model was the only way to ensure a revenue stream. It's the exact same reason why Microsoft started shoving Office 365 down everyone's throats. What new killer feature has Word added in the last 10 years?

content aware fill

Introduced in cs6 which was before subscription model.

I would say biggest Photoshop feature since subscription was GPU acceleration enhancements. And i guess now the AI image scaling which other software already does better.

It's neat, but I can't say I have ever needed it in production.

if you do compositing and background replacement, it's a huge time saver

Same here, 36. I've been using Adobe products since the beginning of my relation with computers, I guess started with Dreamweaver, and now it is so hard to quit, as I use almost all the CC apps professionally, to make my living.

I mentioned here before on another post, it is mostly because of the long-years offline archive, mockups, and all the resources I can find easily, both offline and online. Recently I get my courage and decided to end my subscription, at the last stage of the process they proposed a two-month free, so I took it. What a shame, but I hope I'll decide the same after these two months.

Adobe is really what Steve Jobs described back than; "rapid energy consumption, computer crashes, poor performance on mobile devices, abysmal security, lack of touch support."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thoughts_on_Flash

I've been using it since v1.0 before the days of layers and editable text. And 1 step undo was all we had. I still remember seeing Knoll brothers named prominently every time you boot up the application. Good times :)

In the same boat. I started using PS in 1998. Never felt right for UI design, but nothing has ever really felt right for me, even Figma/Sketch/etc. I’ve tried them all.

I don’t know precisely what I’m looking for, but they aren’t it.

I feel like the future might involve writing a little bit of code, so you can more easily link properties together and that sort of thing. Maybe a node-based workflow, I'm not sure.

Totally agreed. No one has explored textual interfaces for designers, because everyone assumes “well designers are visual thinkers so they must draw”. I think that’s somewhat reasonable but it’s also blunt and obtuse.

As it happens, I’m currently creating a platform-agnostic DSL specifically for designers. The goal is to give them a parametric language through which they can communicate their designs using their own mental models and verbiage.

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