Archive for November, 2009

Photoshop Suggestions

November 9, 2009

Here’s some of the stuff I’d love to see in the next version of Photoshop, CS5.

  • Fractal Interpolation. Here’s a good example of what I’m talking about… http://meesoft.logicnet.dk/Analyzer/help/help3.htm
  • A pen tool that allows dynamically feathered paths.It would be great to be able to dynamically feather a path in Photoshop. Take the image to the right for example. It would be difficult to select this shape with the Pen Tool, since it’s a vector tool. After the path is created, you would have to manually blur the edges of the selection using Lens Blur or the blur tool. This is not ideal. It would be great to have the ability to go back and use some sort of bezier curves to dynamically feather a path after creating it.
  • Fully-fledged font manager. Alphabetical sorting just isn’t good enough. Adobe should create a program that takes all the fonts in your computer, compares them to an online database, and downloads detailed information about each font. If you were looking for a script font, all you would have to do is pick the tag “script” from a list, and voila—All of your script fonts would show up. It could even have the ability to suggest new fonts… you could think of it like Apple Geunis for font selection. I know it would be a feat, but well worth it. It would need to be pretty easy for people to submit new fonts to Adobe’s database, so that all virtually all fonts can be in their database. The manager would also need to open up in seconds to be useful. If it takes as long as Adobe Bridge does to open, it will be useless.
  • Sub-pixel text rendering. I know it’s not the best idea to embed sub-pixel rendered text in an image because people with old CRTs would see it funny, but I think it would be great to at least have the option.
  • Liquify breaks out of the box. There is absolutely no reason that Liquify (which has been spelt wrong since day one… shouldn’t it be Liquefy?) should open up in it’s own window. TADA!Liquify
  • Add and Subtract Blending Modes. See here.
  • Leading in relative terms. Defining a block of text’s leading using pixels is frustrating, especially when you spend time tweaking font sizes. You’ll always have to go back and dial in a new leading number. If there was some sort of relative leading, perhaps in pixels or ems, it would make life oh, so much easier.
  • Normal blending mode in Layer Styles by default. When creating a drop shadow or a glow, Photoshop picks blending modes like Screen and Multiply. This can be quite confusing to beginners. “Why can’t I see my black glow? Why isn’t my white drop shadow working?”
  • Open a GIF image and retain frames. You can create an animated image in Photoshop and save it as a gif. If you open an animated gif file however, Photoshop proceeds to tell you that it can only open the first frame? Why???

What do you think?

Helvetica and Windows 7, why can’t we get along?

November 4, 2009

At work, I’ve been upgraded to a new 64-bit Windows 7 computer and was stunned to find out that Helvetica was not installed. Seriously? Helvetica is one of the very few default computer fonts that “everybody” seems to have. I couldn’t be more disappointed. I know it’s generally heralded that Helvetica is primarily a Mac font. Even so… I’ve always had it.

Sure, the new bundled ClearType fonts are crisp… but only Windows users are going to have these. They’re not free fonts. Unless a font comes pre-installed on all future operating systems, it’s not going to have widespread adoption.

Microsoft’s ClearType technology completely fails with most fonts larger than 14 point size. Most large fonts are aliased and have jagged edges. A great example: YouTube. Video titles look absolutely horrid in my opinion. I was hoping Windows 7 would fix this problem. Nope.

Helvetica is one of my favourite web fonts—especially at large sizes. I’m not entirely sure why some fonts, like Helvetica, completely ignore the ClearType rules and get rendered with old-fashioned, non-sub-pixel rendering. At least it looks good big though!

I’m also sad that Safari has defaulted to Windows ClearType, rather than using Mac’s own sub-pixel rendering system. Luckily, you can still turn it back on.

Back to my core issue: no Helvetica? I tried to download it but it isn’t available for free. You’d hope that the default weight of Helvetica would be free by now, but nope.

I couldn’t be more depressed. Well, of course I could… but it’s disappointing nonetheless.