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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!
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.
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.
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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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.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"
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
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.
Also, he implied the "Are you sure you want to do this?" message boxes
I always thought those should be replaced by
You really shouldn't be doing this
[Fuck my stuff up] [Oops, forget about it]
May contain traces of nut.
Made from the freshest electrons.
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
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.
> 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.
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
Wow! See what happens when geeks try to overly exam things. The default view mode of iPhoto is "Browse" photos. Its the main thing that 90% of it's users do, with very little concept of editing or anything else.
Basically you open up iPhoto, you'll see the little flash of text saying, loading photos if you have thousands of them like me (if you don't you probably won't see it). You'll see the photos for which over folder or album that you select in thumbnail mode. There's a slider, to make photos larger slide the bar to the right (the icons larger at that end), to make the photos smaller (so you can see more per page (slide the bar to the left (the icons smaller on that end).
Photo navigation is handled by your arrow keys. You can go forward, backward, by using the left/right or the up/down arrows. If you want to see the photo even larger, you can click on the button that says "Desktop" and make it fit on your desktop. Though if your going through an entire row, obviously, slideshow mode in fullscreen display is far better.
Sometimes when your looking for things to be complicated, simple is just too easy. I get a lot of people who switch from Windows to Macs who ask questions about how to do this or that. That's when you really start noticing how much software has trained people to do ill conceived work-arounds that become the standard way of thinking.
I was just of this yesterday, when I was reading about this 10yr Windows user who just purchased one of the new thinner iMacs. He was discussing its grace, beauty, and overall ease of use, but then he rants about the lack of software. He wanted to load the machine up with anti-virus, spyware/malware, firewall and other security software. All perfectly fine, and available in the multitudes, for Windows. But for the Mac, you have your 5-10 main selections of anti-virus software, your built-in firewall or some UNIX base tools for those who want more control, but the category of spyware/malware software doesn't really exist.
He went on and on about the lack of developers, without ever given consideration to the fact that the category is so under-developed because it doesn't need to exist on the Mac platform. At least not yet. Typically, pop-up blockers in Safari, Firefox and other major OS X browsers, is more than enough to prevent spyware/malware (at least the kinds that most PC users think of).
Software doesn't self install on a Mac, it pops up a window requiring authentication and authorization. Which prevents the self-installation of most spyware that PC users experience. For those who want extra protection, they can block ads and banners, or purchase software like Little Snitch that will track outgoing communication from your computer, and a number of other little speciality tools. But they are specialty tools, because their for people who wish to knowingly esculate their security in specific manners.
Some things aren't required, and even more things are just simplier than you believe on a Mac machine. Even I sometimes have to take a step back and look for the simple with some of Apple's tools, becauuse my brains cluttered with the 10 or 25 step process.
Dvforak is talking about personal photography. iPhoto, wich I use almost on a daily basis, does not fit the bill.
What Dvorak wants (but was scared to name it because it's only a Mac thing), is Aperture.
Yeah, digikam has some pretty good tools for photo management and touch ups. I saw a tutorial for removing red eye in gimp, And it was way too complicated. Complaining about how difficult it is to use a high level professional tool is a little short sighted. Most people couldn't start up autocad and start drawing out a house. Most people couldn't start up visual studio, and program their own operating system. Why would anybody expect to be able to start up photoshop and instantly be transformed into a graphical genius.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.