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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?"
Which is why I use MSPaint.
MS PAINT 4 LYFE!
"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....
For the love of god, PLEASE stop posting articles from dvorak. It is just sadistic.
People may want only 12 things available, but each person may want a different 12 things. When you put several versions of the "45 things" list together, you get Photoshop. Or, uh, Microsoft Works. Except it doesn't, you see.
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.
...but then again, it's a Mac program, and you can't be a tech writer and like something Apple has produced unless you're biased.
Yaz.
http://picasa.google.com/index.html
It's free and easy to use and doesn't install any crap / spyware.
He wants to do something that is fundamentally complex, which is edit photos. Okay, he wants to remove red eye? He's going to have to tell the program where to remove the red eye from. He wants to crop the photo? Is the program supposed to know how? What about rotating, changing the brightness, etc.
Of course it's complex. What does he expect? A miracle? Artificial intelligence?
The best, easiest software is Picasa. It's interface is pretty simple, and I recommend it to all my tech unsavvy friends, and it seems to work.
The comment is at least 100% funny. The fact that it makes fun of the subject of the article rather than making fun of Dvorak makes it even funnier and somewhat refreshing. MS Paint is an alternative for Photoshop, regardless of its simplicity and ugliness. Kids can use all of MS Paint's functions while many adults struggle to use Photoshop.
I'll be your candy shop of infinite deliciousity if you'll be my discotheque of endless rump-shaking.
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.
He should really try iPhoto.
I think it matches the description perfectly.
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.
From the article
"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" After all, all these things are easy to describe, so they must be easy to make as a one-click tool, right?
ha!
As someone who uses Photoshop for a wide variety of things, the very thought of trying to boil down any one of these, with the possible exception of the red-eye, to a simple one or two step tool is ludicrous
You want to make the picture more vibrant? Well, what type of colour range exists? What part of the picture are you trying to emphasize? What colour standard (RGB, CMYK, etc) is it in? These are a half dozen different tools for this for a reason, a different situation calls for a different tool.
Remove an object from the scene? Well, what types of objects are around it? What is behind it? How do the shadows affect the rest of the image? The very thought of approaching this without a dozen different tools is silly. A half dozen selection tools alone. See, in Star Trek they can hit the 'delete things' button, the computer magically makes up background, but this is real life. Ditto for the 'let's swap heads'. After all, you saw a kid doing it in a computer commercial once, so it has to be easy. Almost all the same problems, and a couple more as well.
Yes, it would be nice, but at some point the skills are necessary. If you want a more basic package Adobe and a handful of others make things like Adobe Elements which take care of a lot of this, but are still a more complex level of program. However, this is one of those things that where how complex the process is and how complicated the end result looks have nothing to do with each other. Get off it and learn the tools for the job.
One thing that doesn't seem to need making any easier is to write ill-informed IT commentary columns.
This sort of complaint would sound silly in another context. Imagine writing to a medical magazine about how "neurosurgery is too complicated" and they should make it easier to understand. Or rocket science? "They should make the 10 most common kinds of rockets easier to design".
I'm all for cleaning up and improving some of the actively user-hostile interfaces you come across but this kind of complaint really does sound like "complicated things should be easy and require no thought or effort".
Ironically, some of the programs that are aimed at newbies are very difficult to use because they're inflexible and patronisingly assume the user is a dolt. Better software will help people up the learning curve so they can do more complex things with their photos than they originally knew were possible.
Ame
If anything, I kind of wish that certain "things photographers do most" were MORE difficult to find: I'm one of the art moderators on Elfwood (a big sci-fi/fantasy art web site), and let's just say that the world would be a better place if budding young artists did not immediately pull out the lens flare filter every time they needed a fairy or extra magical sparkle in their work.
Personally, though, I prefer using Painter Classic for general digital art because I find it more comfortable to use. It's not exactly photo-oriented like Photoshop is, but it can still be used for photo manipulation. I use The GIMP occasionally as well, but I can't figure out how to make it recognize my tablet's pressure sensitivity, so I don't use it very often.
It's called iPhoto.
Affect the things you can, John. --Scorpy
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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.
dnuof eruc rof aixelsid
I don't understand why people like iPhoto. It's quirky and awkward. It organizes all your photos in some crazy scheme on the disk (like the iPod!), it can't do much besides crop, and its "magic button" approach to colour fixing generally produces worse pictures than what you started with. It can't recognize duplicate photos and it will stupidly re-download all your photos every time unless you delete them from the camera - HELLO! The only redeeming feature of this program is the ability to zoom in and out on your entire photo collection, and that's a gimmick. Whoopie.
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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.
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The reason photo editing is difficult to use, is because photo editing is difficult to do.
The fundamental problem with photo software is that computers don't have a clue about what they are doing so they can't help you. You may just wan't to make the subject stand out from the background, but the computer can't tell the difference between a cat and an orange so you have to describe exactly where the subject is. Magic wand tools are a help, but there not that good because even when you've defined the outline of an object accurately the computer doesn't have a clue what it is so you still have to describe exactly what you want to do with it.
In this respect photo editors are tools, not aids and must require training.
Compare this to a PIM tool where the defining a data object is as easy as typing text into a text box. The computer knows what you mean when you gesture to remove an ex-girlfriend from an address book because you have told it what an entry is and how to delete it. We're many years from being able to say "remove my ex-girlfriend from all of my old photos" and have it work as effectively.
One of the best rules of thumb in computer science is if its hard from computers its easy for humans, and vice versa. Nothing emphasises this more than dealing with images and objects.
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Having helped a lot of friends out with Photoshop, it seems to me that the biggest problem that people face when trying to do things is translating what they want to do into "photoshop" speak. Really I think this is perhaps the most common type of usability problems in software today.
The vast majority of the time when someone asks me for help with Photoshop the conversation usually goes along the lines of: "Hey, how can I remove a blemish in photoshop" "Use the Clone-Brush tool" or "Hey, how can I fix the color on this old photo I scaned" "Adjust the color balance", or "How can I darken this bit of the image to make a shadow" "burn tool" etc.
It's not that these people are stupid, it's just that photoshop uses a lot of jargon that people aren't really familiar with.
The second biggest problem I think is that people who haven't done a lot of digital editing don't tend to think in terms of things like layers, fill, opacity, etc. Instead people have the tendancy to see the image like a sheet of paper.
Aside from these two big problems, the most common thing I see people have trouble with is selecting things out of an image- mainly because people spend an hour meticulously trying to select what they want to cut out instead of using the magic wand to select the background- invert selection and be done with it. Doing so is simply non-obvious to people.
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Amen,
What is he doing using a $600 professional software package to edit photos anyway! This is not a program for your parents to edit their home home holiday snaps on, but a design tool that is very good at what is does.
I have very few compliants about how complex this software is to use and most of them involve finding and editing muliple layers which shouldn't be a concern if you are editing photos.
Its sounds to me that Picasa would be more to his liking or even MSPaint (and I'm not joking)
"In a time of universal deceit - telling the truth is a revolutionary act." - George Orwell
This is a good example of why some programs are better for certain tasks as others. From experience, I rarely use photoshop for simple tasks like cropping or resizing. Small things like that tend to be used in Paint Shop Pro, mostly because it takes a split second to load compared to photoshop. However, if I want to do long-term image manipulation; photoshop, gimp, and open canvas are normally my choice ( in that order ). If i'm working on something that involves drawings or painted art, I tend to use Open Canvas. IMHO Photoshop is becoming somewhat bloated with plugins and useless features.
The point is, software and hardware today are hard to use. The even more important part is: they're sold under the explicit _lie_ that they're oh-so-easy, and even your grandma could just plug one in and do everything right away.
If I step out of the nerd "well, duh, of course it's complicated, and anyway you're an idiot if you can't write your own program to do that instead of bothering me" mentality, and try to use them myself, as a simple user... the fact is, most of these programs are a right pain in the butt.
The user just has some seemingly simple concept, like "I want to remove the red eye" or "I want to recolor this red dress (e.g., a texture for The Sims 2) to blue, but FFS, leave the gold necklace alone. I don't want that turning purple." (I'm using that as an example, because that's one thing that _I_ got frustrated with in The Gimp. Anything short of manually tracing the outline myself, pixel-accurate, just didn't work right. The fuzzy select tool for example, just loved to go nuts and select the shoes too when I only wanted to change the dress, or and/or select random pixels from other parts of the texture.)
From a non-technical person's point of view, as in, every-day casual conversation, it's as simple a request as it can be: "I want that dress in blue." If you went to a clothing store with your GF and asked the store assistant "is that one available in blue too?", the store assistant would understand _exactly_ what you mean. You wouldn't have to go through all the hoops that these programs make you go through.
Tha problem is, yes, that it ends up, in your own words, "something that is fundamentally complex". And that's not what marketting told the user when they took his/her money. If they told the user "see, we have this fundamentally complex tool, and you need a college degree to use it", only then we'd really have the right to tell the user "well, duh, what did you expect?" At the moment he/she's led to expect the exact opposite.
And, to answer your question, what the average user expects is just that a product he's bought actually fulfills those promises that marketroids made. No more. If they said photo editing would be easy and intuitive, he expects it to be easy and intuitive, not something fundamentally complex.
And it's not an unreasonable expectation anyway. If I sold you any other product under explicit claims as to what it does and doesn't, you'd expect it to meet those claims.
E.g., if I sold someone a bicycle under the claim that it's such a new and improved model that even someone completely untrained can use it, they'd have all the right in the world to expect just that: that if they put their untrained kid on it, that kid won't fall over. Asking then "well, duh, what did you expect? a miracle? AI?" is missing the whole point. It's not their business to know how a bycicle would stay up with someone untrained on it. It could involve gyroscopes, or a computer, or whatever. It's not their job to know that. They bought a product under an explicit claim, they expect it to live up to that claim. That's all.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Everyone is hung up on his, perhaps, ill advised comments on Photoshop. But his comments on Palm Desktop versus Outlook are spot on. Too often user interfaces are designed by techies, for techies, without regard for how it will actually be used by knowledgeable users. Interestingly, it is the same argument which the commercial software lobby use to beat FOSS, ignoring how poor their own products usually are in the same way.
So rather than getting bogged down in photo editing software, I'd be far more interested in people citing examples of software which has a well thought out UI, which allows simple things to be done without either having to master a lot of complexity or have the software use a condescending tone (the "rinky-dink" Dvorak talks about).
I'll start with Noteworthy Composer: for fine output I'll work with Lilypond, but for quickly jotting down a bit of music and preparing a presentable printout and midi stream it "does exactly what it says on the tin."
The last scintilla of doubt just rode out of town
This guy Dvorak is good - he's like the king of trolls. He includes just enough sense to keep people reading, brings up several age-old arguments and leaves enough obvious gaps and errors in his articles for Slashdotters to leap on.
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.
PhotoShop is an arrogant software lacking competition. In 1995, I was a working professionnaly for a printshop and using a software called Aldus PhotoStyler. This software was absolutely outstanding with many simple features that Photoshop still does not have today:
... the swirl.
- Magic wand that can select based on hue (perfect for green screen)
- Magic wand with a threshold that you can adjust AFTER you have clicked.
- A color picker that can average a region.
- A pixel accurate crop box.
Those were really useful features that I still lack today. PhotoStyler was a professionnal tool costing more than 800$ and worth every penny. PhotoStyler was that feature rich. I was doing only the basic things but it was doing it well. It didn't had the fancy swirl effect but I never had a customer who required a swirl.
What happened to PhotoStyler? I was bought by Adobe and discontinued. It was a superior software at that time and it was the only way for Adobe to continue selling PhotoShop.
The guys who coded PhotoStyler decided to restart again and came up with Ulead PhotoImpact but that product not as good as the original PhotoStyler. They decided to target home users instead of professionals because of PhotoShop dominance and removed important features like CMYK support and added tons of useless features (for professionals) like a button makers and
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.
Real men edit their .jpgs from the command line by feeding hex values and pixel coordinates. EVERYTHING else is rinky-dink.
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
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.
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