There’s some point at which a program becomes sufficiently functional and usable that it becomes a “go to” application. You can have all the functionality in the world but a crummy user interface (e.g. The GIMP) and no-one will use you if they have access to anything decent. Similarly, you can have an absolutely fabulous interface, but if you don’t have some key, specific feature(s) then, again, no-one will use you (e.g. iMovie ’08).
Of course, needs and tastes vary. I’m sure some people are very happy with The GIMP (I can only assume because they are hardened open source zealots with no taste) or iMovie ’08, but I think that most people will tend to reach a frustration point with a piece of software, and then give up. I’m not sure whether being more experienced or familiar with other software has much effect beyond a certain point, either. While I may know how to use dozens of word-processors, and my demands of word-processors may be greater, I’m also likely to be able to figure out stranger user interfaces and be better at finding work-arounds.
Today on a whim I decided to redesign Photoline’s abominable icon.
Photoline’s current icon. Judge for yourself.
I’ve had very nice things to say about Photoline in the past. Of the potential low-priced Photoshop replacements out there it is by far the most functional and stable. Unfortunately, compared to Photoshop CS3 it’s still a sad joke, as we shall see.
I was determined to use Photoline for all the 2d bitmap editing in creating the new icon (and I did) but I encountered enormous frustration along the way. Indeed, the 3d modeling took perhaps half an hour, while messing around trying to produce the screen image was an exercise in frustration.
First, I found an image of a Nikon D3 to use for the computer display. The idea was simply to pull the camera out of the background, stylize it a bit (exaggerate the contrast), remove branding information, rotate it, and then put it against a Mac desktop picture. Simple.
Deep etching (knocking out the background of an image) is one of those things graphic designers do constantly, and Photoline’s magic wand worked reasonably well. If I were doing this seriously (e.g. for someone paying me) I would have used a bezier path to perform the selection (I haven’t tried this in Photoline yet) but I wasn’t, so I didn’t. Photoline did OK selecting the white background, although there was an unsightly fringe, and Photoline doesn’t have Photoshop’s tools for cleaning up the edges of images (e.g. Remove White Matte), but I’m getting ahead of myself…
Note: I went back and verified that Photoline fully supports bezier selections.
Having selected what I didn’t want, I would just invert the selection in Photoshop (command-I, a command etched into any serious Photoshop user’s brain). But not only is this not command-I in Photoline, it turns out to be buried under Tool > Mask > Invert Mask. There’s no Selection menu. Oh, and a Mask and a Selection are very different things. This is just terrible, but easily fixed. There’s no question that Photoline’s menus could use some better naming and organization.
Importing the backdrop was nasty. I couldn’t just drag the document into the window I was working in or drag the layer from one document window to another (or layer palette to window) as I would in Photoshop. (Oddly enough, despite not being very Mac-like, Photoline actually looks much more polished on the Mac than on Windows.) So having opened the file and copy-and-pasted the image into my working document, I overwrote the camera layer. What? After a lot of random fiddling I got it to work, but was never sure how. Whenever you paste something into Photoshop (except for vector objects copied from elsewhere in Photoshop) you get a new layer — a wise decision, I think.
This is the halftone effect I had intended to go for, but sadly Photoline doesn’t have that filter.
Stylizing the image turned out to be a royal pain. First, I wanted to use a non-destructive Levels or Curves filter on the camera but I couldn’t figure out how to restrict it to just the Camera layer (and not the background). So I ended up having to use a destructive filter. Oh, how very Photoshop 6. The next thing I had planned to do was turn the camera into a halftone image with gigantic dots, but Photoline doesn’t have that filter. Indeed, Photolines filters are bizarrely organized into two menus and eight submenus. The term “Filter” and “Effect” are used interchangeably despite the fact that Effects are quite clearly intended to refer specifically to what Photoshop calls Layer Styles. Some of Photoline’s “Effects” are just filters, others aren’t. Ugh.
I eventually concluded that there was nothing stylish I could do to the D3 image that didn’t make me puke, and that the D3 is kind of butt ugly anyway, and that DSLRs, being black, don’t make for very interesting photographs.
So I decided to knock together a stylized camera manually, and to use the (to my eye) more attractive D80 as my basis. So I googled a suitable photo, imported it into Illustrator, and quickly produced the graphic image I wanted. I then saved the vector artwork as SVG and tried to import it into Photoline.
Important Note: at this point I do Photoline a grave disservice. Had I not been frustrated at this point I might have tried using Photoline’s vector tools to do what I ended up doing in Illustrator. I went back and tried to do this and found the tools pretty decent (indeed, in some ways superior to Photoshop’s vector tools, although — of course — no match for Illustrator’s).
No dice.
Photoline, which rivals GraphicConverter in terms of supported graphic file formats, and has fairly strong vector tools, apparently can’t load or save SVGs. So back to Illustrator and I saved as PDF (Acrobat 4.x). Photoline opened this, and I could see the image, but I couldn’t select it properly, or scale it (it was tiny), or rotate it. So back to Illustrator again, and I save as PNG at a suitable resolution. Now, I know Photoline can import PNGs, but when I rotate the PNG the quality of the rotated image terrible. I guess I’ve just gotten to taking Photoshop’s incredibly well-implemented bitmap rotation for granted. (And on the Mac you also get Core Image which is equally excellent, but Photoline is cross-platform and doesn’t use Core Image, I guess.)
Important Note: I went back and checked this, and it turns out that Photoline by default rotates a layer as an object (so the pixels aren’t changed, the entire layer is rotated) and uses quick and dirty rendering to show the results. You can right-click on a layer and click “Fix Layer” to burn the results into the bitmap, which produces results equal in quality to Photoshop. So Photoline’s equivalent of Photoshop’s layer transform tool is non-modal and non-destructive. So this is actually a case where Photoline exceeds Photoshop in functionality, and while it may not be obvious to a Photoshop user what’s going on, it’s not like the Photoline’s UI — in this case — is any worse than Photoshop’s, just different.
So, back once more to Illustrator where I pre-rotate the image and export as PNG. And I’m done.
Photoshop CS4? If Photoline were Photoshop, my icon would have looked like this.
Except that all I’d managed to achieve in Photoline is to stick one alpha-channeled image in front of another. This isn’t Rocket Science. Heck, I could have done either in Pixelmator or Acorn (or heck, possibly even the Iris beta). I could probably do it in QuickTime Pro (QuickTime Player is a pretty darn good compositing tool). Still, having gone back over some of my greatest problems with Photoline in this little project, I find that two major issues turn out to Photoline’s advantage. While it may not be able to import SVG, it has excellent internal vector tools, and its apparently poor layer transform tool turns out to be better (modeless and non-destructive until you’re ready) than Photoshop’s.
Lessons Learned
Some of my problems definitely resulted from Photoline’s poorly organized (and named) menus, and some other UI nastiness (e.g. the PDF import is a disaster). Most of the problems either stemmed from unfamiliarity with Photoline’s slightly different (and sometimes better) ways of doing things, and my wanting Photoline to be Photoshop, which it’s not and it’s unfair to expect it to have, for example, a specific cool filter from Photoshop (although, darn it, Core Image provides it too). I think it’s safe to say that if I were as familiar with Photoline as I am with Photoshop I’d probably be very nearly as capable and productive as I am with Photoshop. That said, Photoshop is part of a highly integrated ecosystem and in the end it’s simply a superior tool. But Photoline’s near-instantaneous launches are pretty damn easy to like.