by Jason Snell
Adobe out of Photoshop
Marcin Wichary’s new blog Unsung is great, and you should read it. Today, it brought me some fresh existential user-interface horror, in the form of Adobe’s new “Modern User Interface,” which Adobe describes this way:
Modern User Interface modifies the appearance of some control bars and dialogs to be more consistent with other Creative Cloud applications through adoption of Spectrum, Adobe’s multi-platform design system. We plan to modernize the entire user interface over future updates.
Wichary’s reaction to this was very much the same as mine:
On the surface, it feels like a lateral move. I do not personally find the new design language (Spectrum) attractive, or even particularly “modern.” The gestalt remains off and things are still generally misaligned – they’re just misaligned in net new ways.
Like Wichary, Cabel Sasser, and many other people, I have been using Photoshop since John Sculley was the CEO of Apple. Longtime users can be brutally resistant to change, but I would like to think that I remain open-minded. One can’t have used Photoshop for more than three decades without having adapted to change and found utility in the new features Adobe has added over the years. I’ve used generative fill. I’ve used AI-enhanced edge detection. I’m hip and with it.
But, as Wichary detected, what Adobe is doing with the Modern User Interface is not to make a new, improved, modern interface. Adobe’s own description gives it away: It’s a hammering of all of Adobe’s user interfaces so they look alike, across Creative Cloud. It’s a “multi-platform design system,” which means in addition to Adobe being committed to “modernizing” Photoshop by making it look like Premiere, it’s also going to make it look the same on the Mac as Windows.
Already, Photoshop desperately wants to run in single-window mode, with multiple documents opening in a single uberwindow—in other words, the stink of Windows. Fortunately, you can turn that feature off, and I have. I also recognize that plenty of creative apps that I have not been using for three decades—Affinity Designer comes to mind—prefer to stick all their toolbars and floating palettes in a single-window workspace, and load documents inside it. I don’t like it, but I can put up with it there. But it’s just not how I use Photoshop.
What frustrates me the most about moves like this Spectrum business, is that companies like to imply that changes of this sort are of benefit to their customers. But they aren’t. They are for the benefit of Adobe, which can standardize its interface across platforms and its own apps. I’m a Mac user who uses Photoshop. Forgive me if I do not care, not one bit, about how Photoshop looks on Windows or how Premiere looks anywhere.
That all said, of course, this decision could benefit Photoshop users, because Adobe could put in the work to make the app better while also fulfilling its own corporate goals of homogeneity.
Ha ha ha. Sorry. I tried to write that with a straight face.
The screenshots in this article—and all the images and videos in Wichary’s blog post—are horrific. The new Canvas Size dialog box doesn’t use Mac-standard type; it’s misaligned1, so the result is woefully ugly and feels wrong in a Mac context.
But as Wichary points out, the true crime is that the “modern” Canvas Size box is also incompetently implemented. Real Photoshop heads know you can enter a new canvas size simply by opening the dialog and typing the width number in pixels, pressing Tab, typing the height number in pixels, and pressing Return. The new dialog has no focus, so you have to click. Tab moves you to the measurement unit (Pixels, generally), not the next pixel count. Clicking in the dialog doesn’t select the pixel count, so you have to backspace or select all to delete it. And if you delete the entire number so that there’s nothing in the box, Photoshop displays a modal error message you have to click through, and then sets the number to 1.
Look, I am a reasonable person who is never going to advocate for nameless, faceless employees at some corporation to be fired for incompetence. But what I will say is that this sort of stuff should never have been exposed to anyone outside of Adobe, and that the people who think shipping this sort of thing is fine deserve a very stern talking-to. That is, if there’s anyone left at Adobe who cares about anything.
- The Current Size pixel counts are hilariously aligned to the left edge of the text-entry box below them, rather than perfectly aligned to the actual text, as in the classic version. ↩