Photoshop Annoyances and Fixes.

I just need to write these down for my own reference, so that when I forget how I fixed the problem in a year, I can come back here and look it up.

These are the sorts of Photoshop problems you DO NOT see talked about in popular forums. They are not in any FAQs and they don't affect everybody. But for those poor souls who are at their wits end, hopefully this list can help.

Right now there are only two items on it, because these are just the ones I needed to fix recently, but Photoshop has been plagued by weird little bugs since Adobe retired the rock solid CS line.

And so I humbly present to you:

Solutions to Dumb Photoshop Problems.


Problem 1:

Clicking on Toolbar items doesn't just select a tool, it brings up that tool's popout menu as if you double-clicked it. Except you didn't.

-You go to select, for instance, the lasso or gradient tool, and because you've logged many hundreds of hours in Photoshop time, the action has become an automatic muscle memory function at this point in your life, and.., what's this? Why is the magnetic lasso slapping down control points all over your image? You don't want those. (Does anybody want those?) Or.., why is the whole canvas suddenly filled with whatever colour was in your Paint Bucket? You didn't select the Paint Bucket!

Well.., actually, yeah, you did. You just didn't mean to.

What happened was this; when you clicked once on your desired tool icon, it brought up the popout menu which would normally happen only appear with a double click. Then, since you were already looking ahead to the next thing you were going to do on your canvas, your eyes were not on the tool bar to notice that you'd accidentally selected something from the pop out menu. The end result being a small car crash on your Creative Flow Highway, and because you're running on muscle memory, it means that you're going to crash pretty much every time you get up to speed.

This is one of the most annoying kinds of bug any program can produce; when it interrupts a refined user interface action.

The solution:

I don't know why this works, but it does:

Bring up the old Control Panel. (It's still available in Windows 10 even though it isn't immediately obvious. Spend the time necessary to locate it and then make a shortcut to it on your desktop because it's incredibly handy and you'll need it constantly because Windows 10 has foolishly embraced minimalism and a condescending, "You don't need to fiddle with that" design attitude.) Go into the Mouse Properties.

On the "Double-click speed" slider, set it to the third position down from the fastest setting. For some bloody reason, this prevents the tool selection problem and the toolbar behavior returns to normal.


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2. Lasso and Selection Freezes...

Sometime after the Photoshop CS series was put out to pasture, Adobe in a scramble to upgrade its flagship software to 64 bit standards and work with Microsoft's new OS direction, a whole bunch of once-stable mainstay features collapsed into chaos.

The Selection Tool was one of them.

When using a stylus in conjunction with the Shift, Ctrl and Alt keys to toggle between freehand and polygonal selection modes, Photoshop would frequently freeze up and sometimes even require a full restart to get your computer back online.

This was beyond frustrating! A basic function was now no longer working. -You want to use AI and fuzzy logic to make a lamp post disappear from your photo? Done! -You want to create 'Smart Objects' and export them to Illustrator? You got it! -But should you want to invoke one of the first and most useful functions ever devised for a digital art program by outlining a portion of your photo with some marching ants.., well you can just forget about that, bub! We're going to crash your whole computer for merely suggesting such a thing, (you privileged piece of garbage)! Where do you think you're living? The Future? Sheesh.

The solution:

Well, there isn't any real solution as of yet, but things have gotten a lot better.

The latest version of Photoshop CC 2018 actually sort of works. It only suffers from minor delays while using the lasso function every now and again, but almost never freezes the whole system.

So the solution is simply this: upgrade.



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Anybody else who wants to list their bug annoyances and solutions, please chime in.

 

Ohhhhhhhhhh.
The keyboard has gone dead. The stylus has gone dead, what the smeg is going on?
-oh right, my selection is waiting for a numerical ‘feather’ value and won’t let me do anything until I take care of this crucial (read: useless and undesirable) function.
Ohhh how it makes me want to murder. Murder!
No idea what the fix is.

General gripe: the confusing mess that is the ongoing turf war between the kingdom of the brush presets and the empire of the tool presets. Jeez Louise just figure it out already!

SB2 specific: thanks for rotating my canvas all the time!
Fix: none.

 

I promised myself that when Adobe got its act together and fixed a bunch of broken items in their tool box that I would finally retire my outdated working copies of ancient Photoshop and consent to buying a subscription to their license model.

Well, true to my word...

Now downloading some creative cloud items and feeling ambivalent about it all.

 

I remember being all excited about CC: "Oooh, i'll get more frequent updates! I love updates"
update 1 : improvements to camera RAW, new camera models, AI based tools for amateurs.
update 2 : improvements to camera RAW, new camera models, AI based tools for amateurs.
...
update infinity -1: improvements to camera RAW, new camera models, AI based tools for amateurs.
"oh man, I hate updates"

 

My biggest gripe is one you covered already, specifically with making stacked selections with polygonal selection tool.

I do agree though I would love it if they would just simplify and combine the brushes options into a very cohesive brush menu. The Brush tool presets are powerful but sometimes is really annoying switching back and forth between a tool preset and a brush abr as the tool preset will just leave odd things changed for your abr brushes, like blending mode etc.
My concern would be of course that they would "dumb down" features if they combined the 2. If they could pull off simplifying the user experience with brushes without actually downgrading it I would be happy.

 

I was wondering, could this brush manager mitigate the problems with brushes and tools in Photoshop?
https://anastasiy.com/magicsquire
I never tried it because it launched exactly when I stopped using Photoshop in favour of Clip Studio, but I used to use his colour picker and it was great.

 

never seen this! looks pretty awesome I might just have to give it a shot!

 

Cut & Paste thoughts from a device specific thread which I thought belonged here...

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Photoshop drove me off using it for any tasks where pressure sense was important long ago. And their touch interface is frustrating and buggy. (It sometimes allows you to pan the canvas around at will, other times it only lets you move it along fixed axes, up/down, left/right.) And things like pinch zoom and rotate come and go with each CC update. Right now, I can get pinch zoom to work, but rotate only works with the mouse. It's really bad.

When I use Clip Studio Paint, all of that stuff is seamless and perfectly intuitive, with excellent palm rejection, etc.

It amazes me that Adobe doesn't prioritize fixing their touch GUI, especially given their recent push into the tablet space. That initiative is going to fall flat unless they get their user control issues taken care of. It's arguably the most important element of their software; the tools used to manipulate data within the program need to actually work as expected and keep up with GUI evolution. I mean, so what if your software does wonderful math transformations which are better than anybody else's in the industry? -If you need to do them through a command line interface, then your software is going to get dumped. And honestly, not having a perfectly tune touch and pen GUI when users can just hop over to some other piece of software is not that far off from haughtily telling users to just use a command line.

Their pen input seems to have not improved at all since I walked away from it several years ago. It's okay-ish for air-brush style painting and drawing, but the problems really stand out when you go with hard-edged line tools. Pressure is still spotty and line fall-off still results in a chunky pressure gradient. They've got some sort of smoothing algorithm now available, but it's confusing and doesn't seem to work.

I think part of the problem is that way back when screen rotation was being added across the board to paint programs, Adobe decided to embrace GPUs to provide those sorts of features rather than just making them a part of the regular Intel Processor task list. That probably made sense at the time, (it was well over ten years ago, and CPU speeds were still slow enough to create hiccups when real time effects were desired, so it made sense to outsource these new kinds of computations to other chipsets designed specifically for quick graphics responses.).

The problem is that this resulted in wildly differing experiences for users depending on their particular hardware and the age of the GPU in their machine, an issue which plagues Adobe to this day. There are countless flavors of GPU out there, and standards are sketchy at best exactly because improvements are leveraging experimental approaches to graphics manipulation. -And when people complain about how crappy Photoshop is, the Adobe help gurus and forum admins get frustrated and say it's not their fault and tell you to take it up with whoever supplied your graphics card. -Which while a fair assessment on a certain level, doesn't address the core problem, (Photoshop isn't working!), and only raises ire among users.

Clip Studio Paint is where it's at. It can make your stylus and touch screen sing!