Adobe Fails | Changes, Glitches, and Poor Decisions
This video is available Free for Everyone.
Running Time: 10 minutes
As big a deal as Adobe Photoshop is in the world of retouching today, there are and always will be, errors inside the program—from minor inconveniences to glaring mistakes that are bordering on ridiculous. While the rest of the world can just shake their heads and wonder if someone over at Adobe was drunk when the blunder happened, we’re here to break these mistakes down for you so that you will know how to cope. Here are the most common Adobe Photoshop fails that you should be aware of.
Case in point: When Adobe released CC 2015.0 back in June 2015, the Healing Brush was suddenly adding salt speckles along the outside of all the Cloning that it was doing. The tool was clearly not cleaning up imperfections as it should be, but rather, it was making things worse. The only way to reverse this at the time was to create a script hack that would revert the Healing Brush back to the way it was in 2014. It’s hard to believe that a mess as huge as that one could slip through whoever was doing quality control over there, but it just goes to show you that these seemingly obvious slip-ups can happen to the best of us.
Now, while you’re thinking we can all just shrug it off and move on with our lives, there’s more. Lightroom 2015.2 came out in October 2015, and this time, it was the Import menu that got whacked. While I normally just use the simple Drag-and-Drop method when importing, it’s still a humongous drawback when they decided to drop out a big chunk of options from the core interface. Photographers and retouchers in turn united in outrage over the blatant violation of the way they worked. Because Adobe messed around with the interface, methodical workflows were disrupted, effectively pissing off users everywhere. It was almost like the company was once again on a mission to drive their customers away; back when they charged $30 a month for the single program every month.
It doesn’t stop there. When Photoshop 2015.1 was released, they decided to include a diffusion menu item with variable sliders; Legacy Healing Brush, you will be sorely missed. Even worse is that the Liquify tool got dragged into the mess. What’s screwed up was that when it’s used in 16-bit images, it renders horribly in areas where you apply the tool. Given that the problems stem from graphics acceleration issues, it’s still incredibly frustrating that while the old Liquify tool used to work on my ten-year-old PC, the new one no longer does.
Sure, upgrading for speed is no big deal, but as a paid professional who is expected to do it right the first time, I simply can’t afford to waste time tinkering around with poorly designed interface changes. Another example (not covered in the video) was the introduction Camera Raw v9.5 which changed the color of the interface to Dark Grey. Seemingly minor, the results are huge because our eyes adjust differently to the Light and Dark interfaces. This leads to vastly different retouching results.
Now, before you think that I’m complaining just for the heck of it, look back at the filtering menu on top in Lightroom 5. Note that another filtering menu at the bottom was introduced in Lightroom 4, 3, and so on. The point is that legacy filters are there for no reason—it’s almost as if they arbitrarily decided to change things just because they were bored and wanted to shake things up. The only thing we’re asking for here is for Adobe to give us a checkbox to revert back to whatever previous version works best for us. Backward compatibility is everything, and if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.
Given that Adobe isn’t the only culprit here (Samsung, Windows, and Apple are all guilty of updating things that shouldn’t be changed), it’s still completely crippling for these companies to disrupt our systematically established workflows, especially for those of us who are paid by the hour.
Another example of changing the interface options for no good reason was when a later version of CC 2015 altered the tone of the the lighter colored background in earlier version of CC 2015. It is completely disruptive to a standard workflow when simple things, that haven’t chnaged in 10 years, are suddenly uprooted for no good reason. This is turning paying customers into alpha testers, and that is simply not acceptable.
Another example not covered in the video, is when Adobe decided to remove PDF Presentation from CS5; only to be returned in when customers complained for version CS6. Not to mention when they added the Oil Paint Filter added for CC 2013 only to have it removed in 2014. I mean, WTF?!?
Now that we’ve run through some of the worst Adobe Photoshop and some Lightroom fails, I hope that you are more emboldened to take a stand against companies changing everything just because they feel like it.
Head on over to www.TheArtofRetouching.com to check out the RIGHT ways to use your tools, and for more in-depth videos on how to make you a better photo retoucher. Here, you can find more Behind the Retouching videos, Emergency Retouching for Beginners, as well as the Portraits, Camera Raw, and Smart Objects for the more advanced users.
You don’t even have to look to the skies to master these techniques. There are also loads more tutorial videos on the right sidebar, where you can learn about Cloning, Masking, and so much more in my full Photoshop Basic 1, Photoshop Basic 2, and Photoshop Intermediate Courses.
