GIVE THEM WHAT THEY WANT
Recently, I was looking through some of my old blog
posts, and I found one from back in 2008 called “How
to Fix the Next version of Anything.” In that post,
I posed the idea that Adobe should ask the community
which features they wanted next in Photoshop. As
part of this idea, Adobe’s engineers would have to
agree in advance that whichever top 10 features were
requested by the Photoshop community, they’d add
those features next, before taking on any other pet
projects, or adding those things we didn’t know we
wanted until they added them. They wouldn’t have
to stop adding those other features, but they’d have
to address those top 10 most-requested ones first.
In the post I expanded this same idea to any product:
If you gave your users the big things they really wanted,
you’d have an incredibly happy user base.
I loved the idea, but some of Adobe’s engineers
were, shall we say, less enthusiastic. One wrote to
me with the famous alleged quote from Henry Ford:
“If I had asked people what they wanted, they would
have said faster horses.”
In that post, I listed a bunch of features I’d love to
see added to Photoshop and, while a couple of them
have been added since then, most of them (13 years
later) still haven’t. Many of them were low-hanging fruit
like interface improvements; there were no features
that required super-crazy math or Cirque du Soleil-style
coding acrobatics. Here are some of the ones I listed
that still haven’t made it into Photoshop:- I want to see all filters get a user interface make-
over so they’re more like the Smart Sharpen filter,
with a very large preview, the ability to save your
favorite settings to a pop-up menu, and basic
and advanced modes to hide features most folks
won’t ever use. - I want a “Do-the-last-step-again” keyboard short-
cut that will do whatever I just did again. If I add
the Shift key to the shortcut, I want it to do my
two last steps again. If I add the Option (PC: Alt)
key, it does my last three steps again. It’s like
an instant, temporary action, built on the fly as
I work. - I want a better Color Picker, one where I can click
on it, and a list of my favorite colors pops down.
That way, I can choose a new color with just one
click-hold-and-release, and not have to bring up
a separate dialog, or keep a panel open. - I want the Info panel readout built right into both
Curves and Levels so I don’t have to have two
panels open to do one job. - I want Adobe to hire an absolute kick-butt, high-
end designer to go and replace every default layer
style preset, every default action, every default
shape, and every default brush with brand-new,
kick-butt, really usable ones. - I want better filters. I want a Clouds filter that
actually looks like clouds. I want a Glass filter that
makes things really look like glass. I want a Dust
& Scratches filter that really removes dust and
scratches, and I want a Fibers filter that looks
like real fibers.
I’m sure you have your own wish list of Photoshop
features, and I’d love to see your ideas if you want to
share them over in the KelbyOne Community; I bet
I’ll see some I hadn’t thought of, but would love to
have added.
I did a similar wish list for Lightroom back in 2010,
and a decent amount of the ones on that list have
actually made their way into Lightroom, but there are
still a few “biggies” on that list that haven’t found their
way in there yet. You can read that list by clicking here.
(I wrote it back when we were still on Lightroom 3, so
this was my Lightroom 4 wish list.)
Even if I don’t get any of the things on my wish list
in 2021, we’ll still get lots of new features, tweaks, and
enhancements that will make Photoshop and Lightroom
even better than before, and that’s a really good thing
for us all. Now, if I could just get the Smart Sharpen
interface added to the Unsharp Mask filter, well...
Here’s wishing you a way, way crazy better year
than last year, and here’s to better and brighter days,
and lots of cool new features in the coming year. Stay
happy and healthy, and we’ll chat again next month.
All my best,Scott Kelby
KelbyOne President & CEO
Editor & PublisherKelbyOne
A NOTE FROM SCOTT
KELBYONE.COM