On the Luminous Landscape forum, around the time that Adobe was converting everything to a subscription-based model and people were thinking about the future of Photoshop, there was a thread started by Jeff Schewe asking forum members what they would want the new, futuristic version of photoshop to be. Or something to that effect - the thread was called " If Thomas designed a new Photoshop for photographers now..." Thomas being Thomas Knoll.
I suggested that photoshop be redesigned to include a node-based workflow, where you essentially build workflows out of nodes to accomplish whatever processing you want - this approach could include all sorts of logic to abstract the processing pipeline to whatever level of file handling you want. It would be much more rational and interactive than the current Smart Object kludge. It is nothing new - there are several video and 3D modeling and rendering applications that already use this approach.
Hopefully Adobe will spend some time and effort on the abstract, workflow pipeline and completely redesign their essential tools to take advantage of modern input and output devices, GPU and CPU power and large digital files.
Here is the post in the thread:
http://forum.luminous-landscape.com …78240.msg628951#msg628951
and here is the text of my post:
I would like to see a "new" version of "photoshop" substantially change the workflow paradigm, whatever the resulting toolset is. Specifically, I think we, as image processing folks, tend to work on an image sequentially - whatever that sequence is. Open raw image > make adjustments > send to Photoshop > apply adjustment layers with masks > reduce image size > output sharpen, etc.
Whatever. The idea is, there is a sequence to the workflow and, often, portions of that sequence require revisiting, revision, branching into a new variation, etc.
I think a node-based workflow, where one can piece together these operations in a logical flow, and revisit, rearrange, preview and create variations, with a real-time preview of any and all node outputs, would be a nice paradigm shift. I would have no problem working on a "smart preview" version of an image, from raw conversion, all the way to output sharpening at final resolution, with the ability to render portions of it all along the node chain to see a 100% res sample to check my work. Once my node chain is set up and I like the preview of the resulting changes, I could render a full-res version. This is pretty standard for many render/modeling applications and video/compositing. There is no reason why 2d image workflow has to be any different.
I think that 2D image workflow could benefit from this approach as well because it would promote variation - just create a branch off of the workflow and develop it separately. It would ease automation - you can visualize your process and simply add an input node as a directory of images in front of your established chain of nodes to batch process images. It could leverage the nascent "Smart Preview" raw technology that appears to be developing for the Cloud sync and smart device editing workflow. THis node-based workflow fully preserves the "non-destructive" aspect of editing - the node-based edits are "parametric" until you finally commit to rendering them as full-res output - the original image is untouched, even if you chose to make pixel-based changes - this could be a node where a rendered proxy is part of the workflow, etc.. You could add output nodes along the way to render draft images of the stages of the edits, instead of having to save sequential PSDs to potentially have to revisit and revise. The entire creative process is archived and editable - you could have template node structures for commonly used tasks, or commonly shot lighting conditions, looks, etc. You could even save that entire node chain as ... you guessed it, a node, for use in other more complex chains - this would be like an action, but more flexible.
Of course, I would hope people could write their own nodes and third-party developers could write all sorts of "plug-ins" (nodes) or adapt currently existing products into a node-based form. I see Lightroom as a node in this paradigm.
I apologize if this has already been mentioned in this thread, I know I am not inventing anything new here. However, if there is to be a new photoshop, or yet-to-be-named image editor, I think a new workflow approach is in order and would save huge amounts of time and effort in the image processing workflow.
best - thanks jeff for starting this thread - I appreciate the chance to participate.
kirk
I believe that this will require a completely new version of Photoshop, redesigned from the ground up. I would be very impressed with Adobe if they committed the time and resources to doing this, instead of adding new, sometimes gimmicky features to the kludged together code that is Photoshop. Lightroom (ACR) would just be a NODE in the workflow, and the heavy lifting would be done in the context of Photoshop.
Anyway, one can always dream.
kirk
