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Hey all- I am Foster Brereton and Principal Scientist for this UI effort. Suffice it to say, the article and this thread have had their impact on the people beh

Hey all- I am Foster Brereton and Principal Scientist for this UI effort. Suffice it to say, the article and this thread have had their impact on the people behind the software. We are aware we got a lot of things wrong. As the primary technical lead on the UI migration, a lot of the implementation details ultimately fall up to me. Two things I can tell you: the engineering team does care about Photoshop (I’ve been on the team more than 15 years for a reason) and this migration is far from over for us. These sharp edges are acknowledged, and we are working on them. Some of them are already addressed. I know this will be of little comfort to some. But to the rest, we are still here. If you have any questions I’ll do my best to answer them.

somebehemoth 4mo ago
Why were these sharp edges not discovered in UAT? It seems hard to believe that the people who make Photoshop do not use Photoshop to the degree necessary to notice these regressions. How will you avoid these kinds of problems in future updates as your transition to a modern design continues?
- pwg 4mo ago
  > Why were these sharp edges not discovered in UAT? These kinds of sharp edges should *never* have made it as far as UAT. All of these should have been caught in the first prototype and never made it beyond that point. The fact that they made it all the way to the shipping product shows that too many responsible parties were asleep at the switch.
- PaulDavisThe1st 4mo ago
  > It seems hard to believe that the people who make Photoshop do not use Photoshop to the degree necessary to notice these regressions. Why? The actual people who make Photoshop are programmers, and this is a tool for image editing.
  - PKop 4mo ago
    > the people who make Photoshop Obviously they should have a few power users on payroll that find these obvious regressions quickly, and we can call them part of the team who make Photoshop. I'm not sure why this, and what the lead scientist said is valid justification. Just hire "people that use Photoshop". If they already do this, then the people that make Photoshop use Photoshop to a sufficient degree. But moreover, if one has developed Photoshop for 15 years, I'm pretty sure they are aware of power user table-stakes features. And then one more point: > Why? Because that's what it takes to develop high quality software tools. This shouldn't even be up for debate when charging money for software.
- MontagFTB 4mo ago
  In a word: they were. We do use Photoshop (though not to the level or extent of most users) and noticed the regressions. Shipping software is in perennial tension between getting it perfect and getting it out the door. Going forward, we would like them fixed, too. Personally my hope is the message from user feedback like this is heard loud and clear, and we respond appropriately.
  - Neywiny 4mo ago
    So just to confirm, Photoshop is willing to ship regressed products to paying customers and views that as preferable to just not doing that?
    - freedomben 4mo ago
      I'm far from an adobe fan, but I feel the need to defend them just a little here. Everyone with non-trivial software has to do this to some extent. Perfection just isn't possible. The real measure is in where the company finds the balance. I think Adobe needs to tilt toward the perfection a bit more, but this is not something that people can do unilaterally without buy in from the very top of the chain, which I'm guessing GP is not. Keep in mind that photoshop isn't the near-monopoly that many people think it is, especially in light of generative AI. If they take too long to ship features, it will similarly be criticized by paying customers who feel Photoshop is hobbled.
      - Neywiny 4mo ago
        They said they were principal scientist for this change and voluntarily took partial responsibility. I think if you look at this in a greater context of things were perfectly fine for decades and then they broke then I'm not sure how it's at all defensible. Just looking at the old vs new modals, there aren't even really new features. It's just breaking it
      - pkcoskfiwjfj 4mo ago
        Yeah, but there’s a world of difference between “not perfect” and “we rounded a few sliders, and now the modal is a nightmare to use”. Rolling out a new UI for such a staple piece of software is smart. But doing it the way they are doing is absurd. Why even release it when you have basically nothing to show besides a broken modal, rounded sliders and a couple things made thicker? That’s not being mindful, that’s just someone’s unfinished staging build that got pushed to production by mistake. It’s insane that they’re doing this to Photoshop (of all apps). And honestly, quite insaner that anyone would defend anything from Adobe after all the crap they’ve pulled (and continue to pull) over the years. They are wrong. They are going about it the wrong way. And paying customers deserve a hell of a lot more. Adobe OWES us a better treatment. Big time. And unfortunately Photoshop very much is the monopoly many think it is. Those complaining about Photoshop being hobbled because it can’t hallucinate AI slop are not Adobe’s target audience and main source of income. Adobe’s only as crap as it is now exactly because it knows it holds basically the entire graphic design industry in a stranglehold. No other apps are currently even close to Adobe’s in terms of compatibility, functionality and support—unfortunately. I wish someone would come and claim Adobe’s crown, but that is simply not happening.
- qingcharles 4mo ago
  They actually have a very slick and very active beta program. I use the betas 99% of the time, and they are practically weekly updated. I'm surprised something like this wasn't reported en masse very quickly. Maybe it's just not annoying enough -- it doesn't reach the threshold for someone to file an issue. I know it's the sort of regression where I would huff and puff and get on with my day.
  - MontagFTB 4mo ago
    These changes were part of the Beta program. As far as I am aware the response there was not on the same level as this blog post.
PKop 4mo ago
What was the point of this upgrade? Do you not actually use Photoshop yourself, or have people on your team that use Photoshop? Aside from the mea culpa and assurance it will be fixed, user deserve an explanation for why this basic, obvious buggy functionality wasn't discovered immediately during development? Like seriously, you should explain yourself.
sinpif 4mo ago
How many UI migrations has Photoshop gone through over the years?
- MontagFTB 4mo ago
  Well it depends on how you define it. We have done several re-skinnings. This migration is a transition from one framework to another, which we’ve never done before. The reasons to leave the old framework lie on several axes (eng, design, product, etc.)
ManuelKiessling 4mo ago
This is only a tangential question, but anyway: I‘ve read several years ago that since around Photoshop version 4, 99% of the work is about keeping the application UI usable with all these new features, and not about „hard“ technical challenges within the features themselves. Is that true?
- MontagFTB 4mo ago
  There is a lot of effort put in to making the application usable, no question. At the same time, we have added a litany of new features and tools since Photoshop 4, many of which I would describe as extremely technically challenging.
- jacobolus 4mo ago
  That sounds plausible. Most of the features are kind of gimmicky bolt-ons added piecemeal and not really integrated with each-other. They make for cool 10-second demos but then most users ignore them because they aren't part of a coherent system. The result is a menu after menu of gimmicks, like a cabinet of hyper-specialized kitchen tools bought from infomercials. There has been limited product vision about the core abstractions and their basic composability. If you give a skilled user a photoshop version from the early 2000s they'll largely be able to do what they need, because there hasn't really been much fundamental innovative improvement in the past ~25 years.
  - ndiddy 4mo ago
    Microsoft actually does a fairly good job with this. Here's a part of a talk that goes over a single feature in PowerPoint (a slide animation that morphs the contents of one slide into a different slide) and demonstrates how this feature interacts with the enormous existing PowerPoint feature set in interesting ways. https://youtu.be/_3loq22TxSc?t=1409 https://youtu.be/_3loq22TxSc?t=1409 It's obviously a stupid gimmicky feature but whatever team Microsoft put on it were clearly overachievers.
    - esafak 4mo ago
      Thanks for sharing that fascinating video! It seems like a fair bit of work went into it. One criticism I have is that it is undiscoverable and opaque; it is not obvious how it is going to behave. I wonder how many users are aware of it.
notglossy 4mo ago
With all due respect, the customer doesn’t care. You served a raw turkey on Thanksgiving and act like there is nothing that could be done to remedy this. Under no circumstances was leaving it in the oven longer an option for some reason. You knew it was raw, so why did you serve it? I keep seeing the same issue over and over again with other companies as well. “Sorry you are disappointed but our internal processes, or we had to do this because of deadlines, yadda yadda, blah blah.” Does anyone stop and think why they are developing or shipping a product? Its not for you to have an overly complicated development, build, or review process. It’s not for you to hit your quota of installed upgrades or versions shipped per quarter. It’s for people to use your product. Your product has utility, and the customer is your client, not the other way around.
- bcjdjsndon 4mo ago
  [flagged]
tobr 4mo ago
Kudos for engaging! It’s been a while since I used Photoshop on a daily basis, but my impression was always that the UI felt a bit stuck in time. Like no one had thought about how to make little things in the UI better in a way that improves daily work. You’d see new ideas crammed in on top, but very little refinement of what was already there. (Is the ”Wind” filter still only possible to apply left or right, not up or down?) I think a nice outcome of this would be if Adobe recognized how much these things matter to power users, and that it’s possible to improve existing workflows without disrupting them, and without just adding something new that sits awkwardly side by side with the existing features. Maybe rather than fixing the issues that were introduced, you could aim for something that is thoroughly better, as you need to work through everything anyway.
- MontagFTB 4mo ago
  Thank you for the constructive feedback. I agree power users are a "keystone species" and improving their workflows will benefit everyone. Improving existing workflows without disrupting them is extremely hard to do, and often "improvement" is in the eye of the beholder. To be clear, I am not excusing issues within the application that we must fix. The team is working hard across multiple departments to gain consensus on how best to move Photoshop forward, including gathering feedback from users.
  - pkcoskfiwjfj 4mo ago
    Clearly broken and unfinished modals such as those in the blog post don’t require much more than a couple of devs to fix, and yet this behaviour is still present in the latest version shipped to customers. I find it hard to believe that the team is “working hard” to gain consensus on how best to move forward when such simple things make it to production. Does anyone at Adobe ACTUALLY use Photoshop? Didn’t anyone stop for a moment to think that shipping in such a taste was a terrible idea?
    - InsideOutSanta 4mo ago
      Yeah, I understand how difficult working at a company like Adobe can be. But it's still hard for me to sympathize when these dialogs that don't contain much more than a bunch of text fields and buttons are just halfway done and then shipped. It's not like focusing on the first field when a dialog opens requires months of work. I'm genuinely confused by how this stuff happens; I feel like a regression like this should have been caught in the first PR review and fixed. Are there OKRs for converting as many dialogs as possible to the new UI library? Or how does that happen?
egypturnash 4mo ago
I’m an artist who spends most of her time in Illustrator. Should I be expecting a UI rework to this “Spectrum Design Language” too, or is that team’s obsession with AI garbage going to take precedent? I’m sure not looking forwards to it, there’s stuff that was “redesigned” the last time this happened a decade or so back that’s still the absolute shittiest thing that works and hasn’t changed at all from then.
- dkdokdoefjej 4mo ago
  > Should I be expecting a UI rework to this “Spectrum Design Language” too, or is that team’s obsession with AI garbage going to take precedent? Take a guess…
qingcharles 4mo ago
Why does Camera Raw in Photoshop always open as some weird full-screen dialog box? I want it maximized, but as its a dialog it covers even the task bar, and lacks the usual window controls. If I'm doing denoise, which can take minutes, then I have to try and alt-tab the whole app into the background just to see the taskbar. Also, for as long as I've been using Camera Raw, on every PC, the mouse lags like absolute crazy on the crop tab, to the point where I have given up using it.

somebehemoth 4mo ago

Why were these sharp edges not discovered in UAT? It seems hard to believe that the people who make Photoshop do not use Photoshop to the degree necessary to notice these regressions. How will you avoid these kinds of problems in future updates as your transition to a modern design continues?

pwg 4mo ago
> Why were these sharp edges not discovered in UAT? These kinds of sharp edges should *never* have made it as far as UAT. All of these should have been caught in the first prototype and never made it beyond that point. The fact that they made it all the way to the shipping product shows that too many responsible parties were asleep at the switch.
PaulDavisThe1st 4mo ago
> It seems hard to believe that the people who make Photoshop do not use Photoshop to the degree necessary to notice these regressions. Why? The actual people who make Photoshop are programmers, and this is a tool for image editing.
- PKop 4mo ago
  > the people who make Photoshop Obviously they should have a few power users on payroll that find these obvious regressions quickly, and we can call them part of the team who make Photoshop. I'm not sure why this, and what the lead scientist said is valid justification. Just hire "people that use Photoshop". If they already do this, then the people that make Photoshop use Photoshop to a sufficient degree. But moreover, if one has developed Photoshop for 15 years, I'm pretty sure they are aware of power user table-stakes features. And then one more point: > Why? Because that's what it takes to develop high quality software tools. This shouldn't even be up for debate when charging money for software.
MontagFTB 4mo ago
In a word: they were. We do use Photoshop (though not to the level or extent of most users) and noticed the regressions. Shipping software is in perennial tension between getting it perfect and getting it out the door. Going forward, we would like them fixed, too. Personally my hope is the message from user feedback like this is heard loud and clear, and we respond appropriately.
- Neywiny 4mo ago
  So just to confirm, Photoshop is willing to ship regressed products to paying customers and views that as preferable to just not doing that?
  - freedomben 4mo ago
    I'm far from an adobe fan, but I feel the need to defend them just a little here. Everyone with non-trivial software has to do this to some extent. Perfection just isn't possible. The real measure is in where the company finds the balance. I think Adobe needs to tilt toward the perfection a bit more, but this is not something that people can do unilaterally without buy in from the very top of the chain, which I'm guessing GP is not. Keep in mind that photoshop isn't the near-monopoly that many people think it is, especially in light of generative AI. If they take too long to ship features, it will similarly be criticized by paying customers who feel Photoshop is hobbled.
    - Neywiny 4mo ago
      They said they were principal scientist for this change and voluntarily took partial responsibility. I think if you look at this in a greater context of things were perfectly fine for decades and then they broke then I'm not sure how it's at all defensible. Just looking at the old vs new modals, there aren't even really new features. It's just breaking it
    - pkcoskfiwjfj 4mo ago
      Yeah, but there’s a world of difference between “not perfect” and “we rounded a few sliders, and now the modal is a nightmare to use”. Rolling out a new UI for such a staple piece of software is smart. But doing it the way they are doing is absurd. Why even release it when you have basically nothing to show besides a broken modal, rounded sliders and a couple things made thicker? That’s not being mindful, that’s just someone’s unfinished staging build that got pushed to production by mistake. It’s insane that they’re doing this to Photoshop (of all apps). And honestly, quite insaner that anyone would defend anything from Adobe after all the crap they’ve pulled (and continue to pull) over the years. They are wrong. They are going about it the wrong way. And paying customers deserve a hell of a lot more. Adobe OWES us a better treatment. Big time. And unfortunately Photoshop very much is the monopoly many think it is. Those complaining about Photoshop being hobbled because it can’t hallucinate AI slop are not Adobe’s target audience and main source of income. Adobe’s only as crap as it is now exactly because it knows it holds basically the entire graphic design industry in a stranglehold. No other apps are currently even close to Adobe’s in terms of compatibility, functionality and support—unfortunately. I wish someone would come and claim Adobe’s crown, but that is simply not happening.
qingcharles 4mo ago
They actually have a very slick and very active beta program. I use the betas 99% of the time, and they are practically weekly updated. I'm surprised something like this wasn't reported en masse very quickly. Maybe it's just not annoying enough -- it doesn't reach the threshold for someone to file an issue. I know it's the sort of regression where I would huff and puff and get on with my day.
- MontagFTB 4mo ago
  These changes were part of the Beta program. As far as I am aware the response there was not on the same level as this blog post.

PKop 4mo ago

What was the point of this upgrade? Do you not actually use Photoshop yourself, or have people on your team that use Photoshop? Aside from the mea culpa and assurance it will be fixed, user deserve an explanation for why this basic, obvious buggy functionality wasn't discovered immediately during development? Like seriously, you should explain yourself.

sinpif 4mo ago

How many UI migrations has Photoshop gone through over the years?

MontagFTB 4mo ago
Well it depends on how you define it. We have done several re-skinnings. This migration is a transition from one framework to another, which we’ve never done before. The reasons to leave the old framework lie on several axes (eng, design, product, etc.)

ManuelKiessling 4mo ago

This is only a tangential question, but anyway: I‘ve read several years ago that since around Photoshop version 4, 99% of the work is about keeping the application UI usable with all these new features, and not about „hard“ technical challenges within the features themselves. Is that true?

MontagFTB 4mo ago
There is a lot of effort put in to making the application usable, no question. At the same time, we have added a litany of new features and tools since Photoshop 4, many of which I would describe as extremely technically challenging.
jacobolus 4mo ago
That sounds plausible. Most of the features are kind of gimmicky bolt-ons added piecemeal and not really integrated with each-other. They make for cool 10-second demos but then most users ignore them because they aren't part of a coherent system. The result is a menu after menu of gimmicks, like a cabinet of hyper-specialized kitchen tools bought from infomercials. There has been limited product vision about the core abstractions and their basic composability. If you give a skilled user a photoshop version from the early 2000s they'll largely be able to do what they need, because there hasn't really been much fundamental innovative improvement in the past ~25 years.
- ndiddy 4mo ago
  Microsoft actually does a fairly good job with this. Here's a part of a talk that goes over a single feature in PowerPoint (a slide animation that morphs the contents of one slide into a different slide) and demonstrates how this feature interacts with the enormous existing PowerPoint feature set in interesting ways. https://youtu.be/_3loq22TxSc?t=1409 https://youtu.be/_3loq22TxSc?t=1409 It's obviously a stupid gimmicky feature but whatever team Microsoft put on it were clearly overachievers.
  - esafak 4mo ago
    Thanks for sharing that fascinating video! It seems like a fair bit of work went into it. One criticism I have is that it is undiscoverable and opaque; it is not obvious how it is going to behave. I wonder how many users are aware of it.

notglossy 4mo ago

With all due respect, the customer doesn’t care. You served a raw turkey on Thanksgiving and act like there is nothing that could be done to remedy this. Under no circumstances was leaving it in the oven longer an option for some reason. You knew it was raw, so why did you serve it? I keep seeing the same issue over and over again with other companies as well. “Sorry you are disappointed but our internal processes, or we had to do this because of deadlines, yadda yadda, blah blah.” Does anyone stop and think why they are developing or shipping a product? Its not for you to have an overly complicated development, build, or review process. It’s not for you to hit your quota of installed upgrades or versions shipped per quarter. It’s for people to use your product. Your product has utility, and the customer is your client, not the other way around.

bcjdjsndon 4mo ago
[flagged]

tobr 4mo ago

Kudos for engaging! It’s been a while since I used Photoshop on a daily basis, but my impression was always that the UI felt a bit stuck in time. Like no one had thought about how to make little things in the UI better in a way that improves daily work. You’d see new ideas crammed in on top, but very little refinement of what was already there. (Is the ”Wind” filter still only possible to apply left or right, not up or down?) I think a nice outcome of this would be if Adobe recognized how much these things matter to power users, and that it’s possible to improve existing workflows without disrupting them, and without just adding something new that sits awkwardly side by side with the existing features. Maybe rather than fixing the issues that were introduced, you could aim for something that is thoroughly better, as you need to work through everything anyway.

MontagFTB 4mo ago
Thank you for the constructive feedback. I agree power users are a "keystone species" and improving their workflows will benefit everyone. Improving existing workflows without disrupting them is extremely hard to do, and often "improvement" is in the eye of the beholder. To be clear, I am not excusing issues within the application that we must fix. The team is working hard across multiple departments to gain consensus on how best to move Photoshop forward, including gathering feedback from users.
- pkcoskfiwjfj 4mo ago
  Clearly broken and unfinished modals such as those in the blog post don’t require much more than a couple of devs to fix, and yet this behaviour is still present in the latest version shipped to customers. I find it hard to believe that the team is “working hard” to gain consensus on how best to move forward when such simple things make it to production. Does anyone at Adobe ACTUALLY use Photoshop? Didn’t anyone stop for a moment to think that shipping in such a taste was a terrible idea?
  - InsideOutSanta 4mo ago
    Yeah, I understand how difficult working at a company like Adobe can be. But it's still hard for me to sympathize when these dialogs that don't contain much more than a bunch of text fields and buttons are just halfway done and then shipped. It's not like focusing on the first field when a dialog opens requires months of work. I'm genuinely confused by how this stuff happens; I feel like a regression like this should have been caught in the first PR review and fixed. Are there OKRs for converting as many dialogs as possible to the new UI library? Or how does that happen?

egypturnash 4mo ago

I’m an artist who spends most of her time in Illustrator. Should I be expecting a UI rework to this “Spectrum Design Language” too, or is that team’s obsession with AI garbage going to take precedent? I’m sure not looking forwards to it, there’s stuff that was “redesigned” the last time this happened a decade or so back that’s still the absolute shittiest thing that works and hasn’t changed at all from then.

dkdokdoefjej 4mo ago
> Should I be expecting a UI rework to this “Spectrum Design Language” too, or is that team’s obsession with AI garbage going to take precedent? Take a guess…

qingcharles 4mo ago

Why does Camera Raw in Photoshop always open as some weird full-screen dialog box? I want it maximized, but as its a dialog it covers even the task bar, and lacks the usual window controls. If I'm doing denoise, which can take minutes, then I have to try and alt-tab the whole app into the background just to see the taskbar. Also, for as long as I've been using Camera Raw, on every PC, the mouse lags like absolute crazy on the crop tab, to the point where I have given up using it.