Thoughts on things

OK, time to get this blog-thingy off the ground. And what better way to do it than with a rant?

I love Photoshop. I’ve used it for many years, and with each upgrade I have marveled at its new features. From the context-sensitive options bar in Photoshop 6 to the incredible auto align/blend-commands in CS3, I’ve had something to enjoy with every new release. But but there is one part of the interface that hasn’t changed much since it was introduced in version 3, and it’s really starting to show its age. The layers palette must go.

Let’s loose the layers

Of course, it hasn’t been completely ignored all these years. We have gotten adjustment layers, vector layers, text layers, layer groups, layer sets, layer effects, more advanced masking, and in CS3, smart objects. But with all this functionality, the layers palette still lacks a whole lot of flexibility and elegance.

Smart objects brought along something I had wanted for a really long time: Non-destructible filters and transformations. Using this feature, though, is incredible clunky. When you convert a layer or a group of layers to a smart object they will appear as a single layer, and to edit it, you must open it as a separate document, edit it, and save it. This unnecessarily breaks up the workflow, and feels like a “work-around” type solution.

I want flexibility. I want to create a single layer, and have it appear in different parts of my document, and have them all update dynamically. I want to be able to use the alpha-channel of any layer as a mask for another layer. I find it incredible that before CS3, there was no way to create an adjustment layer that didn’t apply to every single layer below it. And I might add, Illustrator had non-destructible Photoshop filters before Photoshop did.

Enter nodes

A while ago, I played around with Shake, and it felt like a revelation. Suddenly Photoshop felt horribly old-fashioned and awkward. Because in Shake, everything is done with nodes.

For the less-enlightened, Shake is a high-end compositing and motion graphics application, which has been used in pretty much all the CG-shots in most movies for the last few years. It is incredibly powerful, and still manages to be very usable.

Nodes 101

If you import a photo into Shake, that photo will become a node. If you adjust the photo in any way, that adjustment will become a node. The photo-node is connected to the adjustment-node via what Shake calls a “noodle”, and the resulting output is, logically, the photo with the adjustments added. What is significant is that any action performed in Shake leaves the original files completely untouched—the parameters of each node can be adjusted on the fly, and you don’t have to open and save a separate document to perform something as trivial as a non-destructive transform.

To merge nodes together, you use a “layer”-node (this is where the terms get a bit confusing), which accepts several inputs and displays them nicely atop each other, optionally with various blending modes enabled.

But that’s not all. You can drag several noodles out of a node, which means that a single node can exist in multiple locations in the same document, with different adjustments applied. In addition, every node has an input for a mask, which means that any node can be the mask of any other node.

Add node grouping and the ability to view the output from one node while adjusting the preferences of another, and you’ve got an incredible flexible system, that can handle just about any image-related task you throw at it.

Options

So, if you want to use nodes, what are your options? Of course, you can just use Shake. But as mentioned, Shake is geared towards advanced video compositing, and using it to edit images would be far from streamlined, as it lacks much of what Photoshop has, not to mention what a huge overkill it would be.

NakedLight is a promising node-based image editor for Mac OS X that’s currently in public beta. But by simplifying the node-based interface, they have missed one of the main points of using nodes—multiple inputs and outputs. So while this is a promising application with a great new interface, it wouldn’t stand up to the needs of a professional.

So, I’m back to the main point: I want nodes in Photoshop. When I was beta-testing Photoshop CS3, I lamented the clunkiness of Smart Objects on the forums, and proposed dropping layers in favor of nodes. I got a very positive reply from the head of product development, saying that he actually agreed with me. Perhaps they had been asking too much of the good old layers palette, and this was something they were interested in doing (in addition to the layers) in CS4 or CS5.

So I’m still crossing my fingers.