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Dvorak on 'Rinky-Dink' Software Rant
DigitalDame2 writes "John C. Dvorak explores the trials and tribulations of photo editing software and why it's so difficult to use. Unless you are using these programs full-time, you spend a lot of time trying to figure things out. Is it too much to ask for a simple and powerful software program that can do the 45 things photographers do most in Photoshop?"
"we want simple complexity" - yes, when you can tell me how to do that i'll write you the program.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Christ if Picasa or iPhoto aren't good enough for simple photo enhancing editing then you -do- need to learn how to use professional editing programs like Gimp or Photoshop.
I installed Picasa on a person's computer who is a novice at using machines but wanted to make his photo's look a bit better. He nearly fell of the chair when he saw he could simply drag slider bars for highlighting and colouring changes, as simple as it could be.
Dvoark is a relic.
Weird name, useful utility.
Well, for quick touchups I use the free program paint.net from Washington State University. Quick, simple, some power under the hood (it does layers!) and has more features than I know how to use.
I've downloaded GIMP... had no idea what to do with it so after a couple sessions of randomly pushing buttons left it sit to gather stray 0s and 1s that collect on my HDD much like the dust gathers on my Windows 95 MCP book.
The theory of relativity doesn't work right in Arkansas.
Imagemagick is fast and good for cropping/resizing things from the command line. Simple to do one, simple for batch jobs.
The GIMP does it just fine, of course. I don't know if you use Linux, but ImageMagick is a great command line tool which lets you do almost anything on a number of image file formats; it's a Godsend when you need to do batch processing.
I also used to do simple image editing with ACDSee too (JPEG conversion, resizing, rotating, etc).
Actually, this is why for quick edits, I like to use Paint Shop Pro 5 (ca. 1998); logical, loads fast, most the tools I need, and no bloat. Of course Gimp rocks, but then I have to agree with his complaints.
Imagemagick http://imagemagick.org/ will do it quickly and easily. They're tools (mogrify and convert, especially) are perfect for that sort of job, and you have complete control over every parameter of the final image, without having to navigate a maze of checkboxes.
Especially when converting from one format to another, I've found time and time again that imagemagick succeeds where other software fails.
It's called iPhoto.
Affect the things you can, John. --Scorpy
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Ya know, the unix philosophy suggests that each of these tasks should be a seperate tool.
How we know is more important than what we know.
I dare bet using Notepad to write some text is hard too if you can't read or write.
Why is he expecting graphics applications to be any easier if he doesn't understand the basics of computer graphics?
And using PhotoShop as an example... Why would somebody who just wants to remove red-eye or crop a picture buy a $600 program? PhotoShop is complex because it is meant for professionals. Adobe also has Elements at $90, which DOES have the red-eye and easy cropping he want (and which is NOT an older version of Photoshop with name changed (apparently dvorak never even tried using it, since it blatently ovbious NOT what he describes it to be), but rather a recent version with drastically cut functionality and a "workflow"-like interface).
But apparently he wants something which only requires one button to read his mind and alter the photo accordingly. With great power comes great responsibility. Don't want the responsibility? Then don't demand the power!
But just to quote from the article:
"These programs assume that you are a dolt."
Dvorak... you ARE a dolt.
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Now with Photoshop, most photographers only want to do perhaps a dozen or so functions. You want to make the picture more vibrant, get rid of red-eye, remove an object from the scene, and maybe swap the heads of the people in the picture.
This guys level of expertise is showing. Users just want to remove an object from the scene? One of the hardest things to do in ANY package - I suppose he expects to just click a button, then click the object and voila! It's gone! The closest thing to that function is the selection wizard - and those that use it know how prone to "error" it can be.
Oh, yes, and you want to crop.
What a numpty - it's right there on the toolbar in Photoshop, on the left, third one down. RTFM! And it's one of the easiest tools to use. What do you want? Auto crop? Click a button and the software crops the image for you. Exactly how you want it?
Essentially, you want to optimize the photo.
Start with Ctrl-Shift-L.
Then you can try this.
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He directly/indirectly bashes Apple at least once a month, yet.. as previously stated, iPhoto fits his vision of a utopian photo editor *perfectly*. I use it; it's simple, and just powerful enough to cover the basics of home photo management/editing.
I also agree that Slashdot should stop posting the trash he writes.. he complains about Windows, hates Apple, and is nowhere near smart enough to even *try* using Linux (imagine the articles that would come out of that experience). Why should people care what he has to say? I certainly don't.
Look at post above yours, Nqdiddles: Irfanview rocks. It's more of a viewer than an editor, but has support for all sorts of basic editing, like crop, rotate, filter (a nice basic set built in, and I believe there are more through plugins), resizing (by percentage or by setting width/height in pixels/inches/cm, with option to preserve aspect ratio), and various other basic operations. And it's pretty damn fast.
Telltale Games: Bone, Sam and Max
It's OK. I saw the same thing among a lot of middle-aged men when I taught digital imaging workshops. He's probably tearing his hair out, looking for the "make my blurry picture sharp" filter, then worndering why it looks like shit after he applies "Sharpen Edges" eighteen times.
Photoshop is actually very easy to use, if you understand the basics of selecting, masking, and layering.
- Select an area you want to affect, apply a change.
- Mask areas you do not want to change - at different opacities, if necessary.
- Layer changes to create different effects as desired.
Photoshop is a professional's tool. Aperture is a professional's tool. Framemaker is a professional's tool.Word is rinky-dink software.
TextEdit is a utility.
It's time for Dvorak to retire. He's the cranky old man with hairy ears down the block of computer industry journalism.
He obviously hasn't used Paint.NET. http://www.eecs.wsu.edu/paint.net
/. ?
And does anyone even read his column when it's not on the front page of
The whole concept and attitude towards icons and hieroglyphs is actually counterrevolutionary - it's a language that is hardly 'user friendly.' This type of machine was developed by hardware hackers working out of Xerox's Palo Alto Research Center. It has yet to find popular success. There seems to be some mysterious user resistance to this type of machine.
Curious. I too find Photoshop too difficult, as I am not an artist but a coder. However, I needed to touch up a photo for my parents, so downloaded the GIMP to give it a go. I found it incredibly easy to use, and managed to complete my task inside 10 minutes, and this after trying with Photoshop for nearly an hour. And yes, I am running windows (need to, as my job involves windows programming, and I need to keep up to date)
> It organizes all your photos in some crazy scheme on the disk
... are "months" -- and each month has "days" inside. This is the easiest way to organize things until you name the photos and add them to albums.)
By date? (the "2005" is not a random number... it's the year. The subfolders 01 02 03
> It can't recognize duplicate photos and it will stupidly re-download all your photos every time unless you delete them from the camera
I haven't had this problem. iPhoto says something like P12312312.jpg is a duplicate. Skip? [Yes, No, Yes To All]. Click Yes To All.
My other car is first.
Now compare Tuxpaint to MS Paint and you that these two programs are in no way equivalents. MS Paint is not for children, just an image editor preserved from 1995 that is so appalling by todays standards it is only used by children. Tuxpaint IS meant for children (and has the bright colours and gimmicks - I love that magic star brush). What Linux needs is a speedy lightweight photo viewer with the simplest, most handy photo editing facilities. No need for brushes or active editing, just the standard brightness/contrast/rotate/crop/resize/balance tools that are needed to touch up photos, and are lacked (or badly implemented) in MS paint. Similar to that Google Photo program. What I stress is important though, is this program must be speedy enough to be used as the standard photo viewer. It takes a moment for me to view a photo in GNOME, but then it takes 30 seconds to load the GIMP, when all I want to do is rotate it or adjust the balance. Yes I can use mogrify, but the average user just needs to quickly go through their 50 photos when they download them and then rotate and rebalance them individually in the most speedy way thewy can.
Photoshop can do each of the things you've mentioned, in some cases, there are multiple ways of doing each of those things.
IrfanView does all the scaling/red eye removal/etc you could ever want. It has no actual brush tools, but a lot of processing stuff. Plus, it loads extremely fast, reads and saves like 150 image formats (pulled out of my arse), and is an excellent replacement for Microsoft's crappy default image viewer.
Paint actually does a lot of what I want. I can hit Printscreen, open Paint, and then paste the image into a new file. After that, I can crop and then save as a bitmap ot jpeg.
If they'd add some decent red-eye reduction in there, I'd never need PhotoShop.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
When I could not find my Photoshop installation CD's, I got very cross and met my deadline using Digital Image Suite from Microsoft and guess what - I prefer it over Photoshop. Sure Photoshop has some nice deep stuff but for personal photography the usability of Digital Image Suite was just more appropriate.
ArcSoft PhotoStudio (5.5 is the current version) came with my camera. This is actually a decent product that does the basics that a photographer (not a computer graphics wizard) would want to do. It even comes as a full install of the product in the camera box.
This is so much better than then adware which came with my cheaper camera which made me spit in anger when it started spitting out "to use this feature, pull out your credit card and bend over". Note to manufacturers: either bundle something like ArcSoft PhotoStudio or don't bother wasting space on my drive. I don't mind paying for the bundle *if* I get something I can actually use. Pretending I got something I can use and then "timing out" in 15 days or disabling random menu items is a sure way to the bit bucket and unending hatred for your company.
Sig under construction since 1998.
As the maker of WinImages, as you can imagine I'm rather biased towards it, but either of these would more than satisfy the needs of the vast majority of photo editing folk. Not only can one find the basic features one needs to edit photos, there are other features available you can't get in Photoshop — and they are useful, to the point, and powerful in the context of photo editing. Some examples include PSP's handling of brushes, which is vastly superior to Photoshop's, and WinImage's approach to area selection, which likewise makes Photoshop look like a horse and buggy.
You have to keep in mind that Dvorak is paid to rant. He takes advantage of the ignorance of his readers by asserting that the market is free of tools, when that is in fact not the case at all.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
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