Will Adobe get it right with Photoshop & Illustrator CS5?
Tuesday, December 29, 2009 at 3:48PM 
Have you upgraded to CS4 yet? Have you found any little changes that you'd like to see changed back or improved? Well as you can guess I recently upgraded and much to my disappointment there are still some things Adobe can't seem to get right. I know there are 2 completely different teams that work on these applications but you'd think at some point, somebody, somewhere would raise their hand and say, "hey guys shouldn't 'this' be this way like it is in the other application?".
I've been using the Adobe suite now for 17 years and have always been a big fan of what they have done with it. Each new upgrade seems to offer something new and improved and gives us a reason to buy it. But sometimes (always) they either leave out or change things that really make me wonder what they were thinking.
The first thing might seem very small but to me it's something I really don't get. In Illustrator CS4 you can go into your preferences and very easily change the background value for your palette windows. They have this very convenient slider built right in that allows you to choose a shade of grey that suits you and your 'preference'. Now switch over to Photoshop CS4, the other program I use daily, all day and try to do the same thing. Oops no luck there! You are STUCK with the grey that they want you to use. Now as you know, there a million different things you can do with Photoshop but something as simple as changing this grey value is something I can't do and don't understand why. Did someone in the Adobe universe notice this? Is it 'that' hard to give us a nice little slider like the one in Illustrator?
Ok so moving onto something Photoshop can do that Illustrator can't BUT should. Being an illustrator I LOVE the fact that we can now rotate the screen within Photoshop so that the screen can fit the contours of my hand as I'm drawing, this is awesome and of course something Painter has had for years, come on Adobe why did it take so long. Ok I digress. So switch back over to our friend Illustrator and try to do that, oops no luck again. While I'm an illustrator who likes to use Photoshop to illustrate things I also use Illustrator to do package design and I can't tell you the number of times a package requires me to have the art upside down on my page. NOW, wouldn't it be sooooo nice to be able to rotate that screen so that I don't have to select all my art and rotate it to design that side of the package? Yeah I think so!
So I'll close with one more 'little' thing that's just a question of consistency within one application for me and probably doesn't bother anyone else. In Photoshop you can easily select more than one layer and hit delete and poof those selected layers are gone. In my work flow I have the need to use lots of paths and usually have several paths in a given document. So let's say I want to delete more than one path at the same time. You'd think I'd be able to select them all (like layers) and then hit that good ol' delete button again, but oops one more time, no luck with that one either. You have to click on a path and then delete each one, one by one. If you have several paths, this gets annoying. Please fix this Adobe.
Ok, so having said that, aaahhh I feel much better now, there are a ton of new features and changes Adobe has made to these two applications that are wonderful but I just wish they would fix these few things, oh and maybe the new Artboard Tool in Illustrator and the way the selection process has changed when you mask something, the docking windows option I can't turn off (but can in Photoshop), the...........Ok I'll stop.
So what new feature do you wish they would fix or add going forward for CS5? I'd love to hear your ideas.
Adobe, CS4, CS5, Design, Illustration, Illustrator, Photoshop in Adobe, Illustrator, Photoshop
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