No 'Automate>PDF Presentation' may see me dump CS5

[Dave Addo]

I've moved from Photoshop CS3 to CS5 and have just found Adobe in their (lack of) wisdom have removed the File>Automate>PDF Presentation feature and replaced it with the lame Output option in Bridge.  Unfortunately, that doesn't do what I want.  I can't see any option for outputting my files at 100% print size, just a selection of presets like '2-up greeting card', 'triptych' or 'maximum size'.  Then you just get a 'quality' (ie resolution) setting.

In CS3 I could go File>Automate>PDF Presentation and select multiple files, then create a press-ready file from that.  I often create print advertisements where there are, say, half a dozen variants to run over a period of 6 months.  From CS3, I could send the printer a single file with all the adverts in the order they were to run in.  Similarly, I could send my client a single proof file with all the ads in at real-size.

Have I missed something in the Bridge Output module, or is it really as lame as it appears?

I realise in CS5 I can still 'save as' and get all the necessary pre-press settings that way, but only for a single file at a time.  The Bridge Output mess is useless for this from my point of view

I thought when software vendors release new versions, they are supposed to include new features, not remove valuable existing ones.  Flashy stuff like content aware fill is fun, but removing basic, useful productivity features seems bizarre.  I could sort of understand that thinking in a consumer product like Elements, but not in professional software like PS.

This basically leaves me with two options.  Work in CS5, then close my files, then reopen them in CS3 to create my PDFs - or dump CS5 altogether and revert to using CS3 for everything.

I had a glimmer of hope on reading on this page: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/840/cpsid_84020.html

"Optional plug-ins not installed in Photoshop CS5 and downloadable online

    * PDF Presentation and Web Photo Gallery can be found in Bridge CS5 in the Adobe Output Model (AOM). If you want to download the Photoshop CS5 versions of PDF Presentation and Web Photo Gallery, please see the following document for information: go.adobe.com/kb/ts_cpsid_82824_en-us. This download package will contain the plug-in along with Optional Plug-ins Read Me. "

However, when you get to the download page, these are the only optional plugins available:

    * Picture Package (ContactSheetII)
    * ExtractPlus (Windows-only)
    * PatternMaker
    * PhotomergeUI
    * Web Photo Gallery (WebContactSheetII) plus presets
    * Script for Layer Comps to Web Photo Gallery
    * Texture presets for Texturizer
    * TWAIN

You guessed it - the one I wanted is the one that's missing!  (though at least TWAIN is there - another "why on earth did they remove that").

Anyone got any suggestions, other than going back to CS3 and never wasting money on another Adobe "upgrade" again??

Dave

[Guest]

The reason is that it is not enough that you spent $700 on Photoshop - Adobe also wants you to buy Adobe Acrobat which does the PDF Merge.

[akiley]

I ran into the same problem.   I hit F1 for help and there claims to be a picture package plugin.  The web site gives you the runaround.  The link for the program takes you to an area that doesn't have picture package.  Not sure if picture package does a PDF from multiple images anyway.

It's seem to basic a fuction and I'm very upset they removed this.  Lucky I left CS3 on my computer.  Imagine, I have to go backward to get my work done.  Lost an hour trying to figure this all out.  Sorry Adobe, this is NOT going to help your future sales.  This is not the only issue either.

... Akiley

[mikecinephoto]

AMEN.  I just did the same thing and am still dumbfounded at how horrible CS5 is.

Removal of the PDF presentation

Elimination of Contact Sheet\

No way to command-click to create anchor points in Curves adjustment layers

The keyboard shortcuts are changed for scrolling through color channels, and CANNOT BE CHANGED when dealing with adjustment layers

these things add a HUGE amount of time to my workflow.  Seriously idiotic.

[Guest]

You didn't download the 30 day trial to find this out?

[mikecinephoto]

I shouldn't have to!!

This is software meant for a production environment.  They shouldn't be taking away standard features or interrupting set workflows!

If efficiency is a goal, then stop elimination options.  OR, if you change things, at least allow the user to bring the workflow/keyboard controls/outputs back to what they're familiar with.

[Guest]

I have left CS2 on my PC so I can use it for Automate Pdf presentation etc  CS5 and CS2 are installed in different locations, so they don't interfere with each other at all

[Guest]

Everybody has a different workflow.

The 30 day trial is there so people can download it to try it out. If you would have downloaded the trial and used it for 30 days you would have discovered all the problems you wrote about and would have saved you a lot of money.

I downloaded the trial PS CS5 and after 30 days there was nothing really added to make me want to upgrade from PS CS4 extended. All I am saying is that the 30 day trial is there for people to check out for free, to see if they have a need for it and nothing is broken where it will be a show stopper for their business and such.

I do agree with your opinions.

[MouRogers]

I'm absolutely dumbfounded by Adobe's decision to remove these basic, bread-and-butter features. It seems that Adobe has no perspective that the software it makes are tools that people have invested tens of thousands of hours mastering and depend on for their livelihood. Yes, we're locked into these tools because of their ubiquity (and in the case of PS, superiority), and I won't cry wolf and threaten to use something else, but god, talk about sewing the seeds of ill-will amongst your customers...

[PDFerguson]

The reason behind moving PDF Presentation to Bridge is that Bridge is designed for working with collections of files, whereas Photoshop is primarily used to edit individual files. One of the constant struggles we face in Photoshop is trying to keep it from overwhelming people with its complexity, and moving PDF Presentation was an attempt to help in this effort by moving one isolated feature out of Photoshop. Creating multi-page, multi-document PDFs belongs in Bridge, and quite honestly, never did belong in Photoshop.

That said, we do listen to customers, and we do try to be responsive to issues like this. I realize some people are unhappy with this decision, but I believe it is an opportunity for Adobe to make PDF Presentation even better and more useful within Bridge. If you have specific suggestions, I strongly urge you to let us know, either here or on the Bridge forum.

[MouRogers]

Thanks; I genuinely appreciate the reply. I've never really used Bridge before, with the exception of launching it by accident via keyboard shortcut, cursing and force quitting it. It's a big, one-window interface that takes over the screen with a different UI than the Finder, which to me is so crazy, that an application for file management would ask you to learn an entirely different interface for navigating your file system -- tiny scroll bars, no sidebar favourites, no column view (!!). It destroys flow and totally takes me out of what I'm doing.

Anyway. What I would like to be able to do is create a PDF presentation using the files I currently have open in Photoshop, without saving them. Maybe Bridge can do it, but I can't figure it out.

Sorry for the ranting -- Photoshop is obviously a great piece of software overall, and your team is doing a great job. But I do feel like ever since the "Suite" philosophy was introduced with CS1, ideological decisions have been trumping pragmatic ones. You'd be much better off paving cowpaths than trying to enforce a 'right' way of doing things, imho.

[JJMack]

PDFerguson wrote:

That said, we do listen to customers, and we do try to be responsive to issues like this. I realize some people are unhappy with this decision, but I believe it is an opportunity for Adobe to make PDF Presentation even better and more useful within Bridge. If you have specific suggestions, I strongly urge you to let us know, either here or on the Bridge forum.

The old HTML Photoshop Web Photo Galleries templates could easily be customize for ones web site.  The newer Flash Base Web Based galleries both in  Photoshop CS3 and Bridge CS5 can not be customized well.  The only way to customized galleries well is to use Photoshop Scripting where one can get at images meta data and create Web Galleries with required information like links, e-mail,  titles, descriptions, exif and create customized xml files for the capable flash web gallery viewers like Airtight's SimpleViewer which is also distributed with Photoshop.  Adobe's SimpleViewer Web Flash support is very limited to say the least.   Does Adobe plan to enhance the Bridge Web Gallery support, add descent customization compared to the limited dialog that now exists. Maybe add some type of user scripting or action exit during the creation of the XML control file so the user can add perhaps a cdata statement for each  image in the gallery.

Currently I have modified one of Jeffrey Tranberry's (Adobe employee) scripts the he created for Airtight's web site to generated Flash web galleries.  Modified to create the XML and HTML files I need for Web Flash galleries like Ws-Slideshow and Simpleviewer.  I have tried other Airtight viewers but they do not proforrm well when you have a lot of images for a web gallery.

Scripting can not be used from the Bridge when generating Web Photo Galleries so customization is limited to only what Adobe provides which is poor at best. Currently Photoshop is more powerful then the Bridge when is come to multi document web galleries.

[mikecinephoto]

Please understand that many people, myself included, build an entire, very specific workflow around the tools that are supposed to be developed to make our lives easier.  We all have fast turnarounds, from shooting to presenting to clients, and every time you guys change something like this, we have to completely readjust our workflow, which takes time.

I think the Output function in Bridge is clunky and half-finished at best, and it still doesn't address the need for making a contact sheet or PDF presentation from open documents.

If I'm pitching a client and need to use files from multiple jobs, I now have to create an album in Bridge, using ONLY the saved versions of files.  I can't edit anything, otherwise I have to save an additional version, and add that to the album.  This is a huge pain in the ass.

Or, what if I want to create contact sheets, but turn some of the images black and white?  Forget the hassle of having to create in Bridge then import to Photoshop, but what if it's multiple pages?  I can't re-export as a PDF.  Completely screwed.

I understand that things were done because they made sense to the programmers, but I think there needs to be more consultation with working photographers.

[PDFerguson]

mikecinephoto wrote:

Please understand that many people, myself included, build an entire, very specific workflow around the tools that are supposed to be developed to make our lives easier.  We all have fast turnarounds, from shooting to presenting to clients, and every time you guys change something like this, we have to completely readjust our workflow, which takes time.

I think the Output function in Bridge is clunky and half-finished at best, and it still doesn't address the need for making a contact sheet or PDF presentation from open documents.

If I'm pitching a client and need to use files from multiple jobs, I now have to create an album in Bridge, using ONLY the saved versions of files.  I can't edit anything, otherwise I have to save an additional version, and add that to the album.  This is a huge pain in the ***.

Or, what if I want to create contact sheets, but turn some of the images black and white?  Forget the hassle of having to create in Bridge then import to Photoshop, but what if it's multiple pages?  I can't re-export as a PDF.  Completely screwed.

I understand that things were done because they made sense to the programmers, but I think there needs to be more consultation with working photographers.

If the decision were made by the programmers, I can assure you the feature would have been left exactly where it was; that would mean zero work for us. I wrote nearly all the PDF code in Photoshop, and ripping out all my hard work on PDF Presentation was not exactly a thrill.

I appreciate the concerns you raised (and you're not the first to express frustration about this), but decisions like this are not made in a vacuum. We hear complaints constantly about the ever-growing size and complexity of the application, the long launch times, etc. and there does reach a point where decisions about what to do about it must be made. While there is a temptation to keep adding things into Photoshop, it is not always the right thing to do (and frankly, we programmers are as guilty of this as anyone). Photoshop is one application out of many in the Creative Suite, and finding the right balance among those applications about where features belong necessarily involves compromises and hard choices.

[PECourtejoie]

Mr PDFerguson, so the plug-in is not even available as a separate download? The help files should be corrected, then...

[PDFerguson]

No, starting in Photoshop CS2, all PDF functionality moved into the application, there is no PDF plugin anymore. This was done to support the PDF features added in CS2, such as PDF smart objects, rasterizing multiple pages, lossless raster image extraction, password protection, downsampling support, PDF Presets, etc.

I will make a note to have the help file information updated.

[PECourtejoie]

My bad, it is not the help files, but the knowledgebase article (ref in post one of this thread) that should be corrected.

[JJMack]

Users expect new release to be compatible with previous versions of a software  product.  When it is not you break users code and force them to change to how they have to work its very unprofessional.  As you are part of the Adobe programming team it should be part of you job to make your companies policy makers understand user expectations.  Your not doing and good job and Adobe programmers are not doing a good job with regression testing and have introduced many bugs in the last two releases CS4 and CS5.  I skipped CS4 for when I read you were putting in GPU support I knew there would be many bugs added related to video card support. I was not expecting GUI changes that would break code or have old featured that work now have bugs because of new features added that should not have effect the old feature that worked.  CS3 is still the best version of Photoshop around IMO....

[PDFerguson]

JJ, thanks for your comments. As I said earlier, we do take feedback like this very seriously, and we do strive to make Photoshop as good as it can be. I'm sure you can appreciate that Photoshop is a huge effort, requiring hundreds of programmers, testers, UI designers, tech writers, and product managers. And unlike "the good old days", Photoshop is not simply a standalone application anymore, but is part of the larger set of applications that make up the Creative Suite (which adds many more technical and marketing voices to the mix.)

John Warnock, one of the co-founders of Adobe, used to tell the engineering teams that Adobe's customers will forgive them when they change something, if once users get over the initial discomfort of having their workflow disrupted, they find their new workflow is actually better. It sounds like this a case where the new workflow is not better. What I am hearing from you and others on this thread is that the Bridge implementation of PDF Presentation and Contact Sheet are not as functional or useable as the previous Photoshop versions of these, in part because scriptability is important to people's workflows. While I can't speculate on exactly how or when we might address your concerns, I can promise to raise this issue within Adobe to make sure the appropriate people are aware of it.

[Michael_L_Hale]

PDFerguson, I want to thank you for your comments. It is nice to hear an Adobe employee acknowledge that there are some legitimate user concerns over the features that where removed from Photoshop in CS4. Here are the concerns I have.

1. Contact Sheet, Picture Package, Web Galleries,and PDFPresentation could all be scripted. Like Paul Riggott, I am active in the Photoshop scripting community and have had to advise users or clients to not upgrade or to downgrade if they wished to automate the functionally those scripts/plug-in provided.

2. Although Contact Sheet and Picture Package are still available as an optional download, it seems clear that there will come a time when they are not. Bridge does not offer Picture Package's functionally.

3. Some of the features of Contact Sheet were merged with PDFPresentation in the Bridge Output Module. Contact Sheet has the option to create a multi-layer document that can be saved in any format. Bridge only saves as a flatten PDF. Photoshop also had an advantage when dealing with images from multiple folder when creating contacts sheets or PDF.

4. Web Galleries were easier to customize.

I think that saying 'Photoshop is not a multiple image app' is a lame reason for removing these features. However I understand the reason for the move to Bridge and am not asking that these be put back into Photoshop. I am asking that I be able to do what I was able to do with CS3 in CS6( or whatever it will be called ).

[mikecinephoto]

Were you able to address this with the development team?

[PDFerguson]

Hi Mike,

I have been discussing this with the Photoshop engineering management as I promised. I don't have anything to report yet, but am continuing to push the issue. If you or anyone else reading this thread has feedback about PDF Presentation or Layer Comps to PDF, please post them here. I'm specifically looking for how this affects your workflows and/or decisions about upgrading Adobe software.

Paul

[GeorgeReis]

I have been rather vocal about this in the past, so I think my views are already known. But, to reiterate here, this feature was used ALOT by those in forensics (including police, sheriff, and other government agencies). The feature was perfect for making court presentations - in which a multi-layered document would be created - some layers would be photographs of a scene, piece of evidence, or frames from a video; some layers would be annotations - circles, arrows, etc.; and some would be text to identify the people and objects, Then, layer comps created, and exported directly to a multi-page PDF document. These could end up being documents from two to several hundred pages. Without Layer Comps to PDF, the Comps are exported to individual files (sometimes hundreds) then those are merged into a single multi-page document, taking more steps and creating potentially hundreds of files that some agencies cannot then delete (because of their protocols). Additionally, it is not as easy to create a document the exact size of the original images and make a multi-page PDF that has the same dimensions and is uncompressed with the Output Module as it was with Layer Comps to PDF.

Although I personally upgrade with each cycle, I know may police agencies who I consult with or who have taken my training have not upgraded since CS3 because of this issue. Others (including myself) keep CS3 on our machines just for this feature.

George

[PDFerguson]

Thanks, George,  that's exactly the sort of information I'm looking for. I appreciate you taking time to write this up, and will use your comments to help build a case for resolving this.

Paul

[Guest]

I am one of the many users George mentioned in his post who has used Photoshop in my forensic work for over a decade.  Although we have upgraded a few machines in the lab to CS4 extended we also left CS3 on those machines, and we have not upgraded some others since CS3 because of this very issue.  I have no plans to upgrade to CS5 in the lab at the moment either, as there are no significant changes that effect my workflow; a few efficiency improvements and some cool "wow", but nothing that substantially impacts us.

I'm a forensic video analyst, not a forensic photographer, so unlike George's workflow I do not use bridge regularly.  Forcing me to create additional files (sometimes hundreds) and launch an entirely separate program to accomplish Layer Comps to PDF is rather cumbersome and time consuming.  Personally, if I'm in a situation where I only have CS4 or CS5 I skip the limited PDF capability from Bridge and simply go to Acrobat to create the PDF.  In either case it requires more time and resources, so I am one of the many who would greatly appreciate seeing automate to PDF and Layer Comps to PDF return.

Thanks for listening.