Need an incentive to continue Photoshop subscription.

[kirkr5689]

Any rumors of cool tools in development?   I am not especially satisfied customer.   Looks like Photoshop is trying to detour all the current necessities of pro users working in  CG field  and  satisfy mass market of photography related professions only.   So we all working in games and FX have to look for more advanced alternatives.   I am not especially keen of all those node based stuff too and would love to continue with Photoshop even for a price of slightly lesser flexibility. But I can't really. Not any more.    So Photoshop already became just a secondary tool to check photos sometimes.   Even those linked layers while being cool in theory hardly work for my tasks. Too slow, needing a re-save all the time, taking forever in 16 and 32 bit mode.

So in a word I need some incentive . A prospect of new cool tools to compose images.   Depth channel support?  "Smart" dynamic masks?   inter layer/object  dependencies.   Maybe  the content aware  fill working in sync on multiple images/property channels ?  New patch tool    with rescale, rotation and mesh deform capabilities? 

  Looked at project Felix, it proclaims to be an easy compositing  tool , right what I need actually,   but  I am genuinely amazed by how useless and toyish it is.

[Randy Hufford]

If you are a photographer or imaging specialist, You NEED photoshop. If this is not your specialty than you do not need to  get it. I am a photographer and I cannot do my job without it. I am talking about basis not even all of the new stuff. Want to see alot of wow effects go to https://photoshopcafe.com/  or to https://members.kelbyone.com/course-category/photoshop/

[rayek.elfin · Accepted solution]

Hey Kirk, I've seen your threads on the Affinity and PhotoLine forums.

Yeah, the thing is that image editors don't specialize in CG/VFX compositing or preparing game graphics or 3d model texturing workflows. They all have limitations in these areas.

To be fair, though, there is a valid reason why node-based compositing software was widely adopted in the VFX industry: a layer-based approach becomes unwieldy to maintain and manage at an exponential rate for somewhat more complex jobs. With a node editor it is SO simple to re-use parts, and group a standardized noodle into a single node that takes care of a singular task - no need for slow and cumbersome layers/smart objects, actions, etc.

I worked in After Effects for compositing jobs years and years ago, and MAN what a bother it was. All that pre-comping, and links between layers that would become undecipherable after a while. Just took so much time.

For regular single-image photo editing it might be a bit overkill, but to be honest even for some of those jobs I switched to node-based editing, because it is just far more flexible and efficient (depending).

It would be nice if those node-based editors would accommodate some kind of simple layer node to speed up things, though. On the other hand, it is quite simple to create a layer node yourself.

Anyway, just download Natron, Fusion, the free version of Nuke, or even Blender, and get used to the workflow. Layers don't work that well for more involved CG compositing work, in my opinion.

[kirkr5689]

   Thanks for  advices guys.  I am not a photographer but I do work with and create images a lot. I am a game artist.  Blender is my favorite  3d tool  actually and I appreciate a lot free Fusion and Natron options.  My main tool to work with images is Substance Designer currently so I am well aware of all advantages node approach gives.  

   But to be honest any node based soft lacks that feeling of a brush in your hand and a canvas surface right beneath your fingerprints.  You have to put a node after node while in regular  image soft it's just a swift hotkeys you push subconsciously like a piano player.       Brushes are usually terrible.  Tools are focused on video compositing and FX , not art creating/hand painting  and once you need something special you have to construct your own tools yourself.    And they never really turn  truly convenient up to PS level  or you get something slow as hell.  All those nodes easily turn into even more indecipherable mess, a Gordian knot you can't read in your own files till you start to waste your time documenting each part of the graph.

   In a word I would keep nodes for special tasks   and  continue to do my work in PS if I can.   But I can't . I need a proper depth channel support.   Content aware fill is so cool but 100% useless since I need it working in sync on rgb image and depth image together.  With the patch tool I could use actions at least ( also a tremendous pain in the ...) but not with content aware .

   Wonder what Adobe is going to do with a trend Apple set by the depth info recorded by iphone.  I bet it's soon be an integral part of every photo.   

   Years ago my favorite image soft was Painter.  It had the integrated depth channel from ancient times. Crazy thing is  you can't even export it from there without obscure Blender addon one guy did  and can't do anything useful beyond  impasto effects.   

[rayek.elfin]

kirkr5689  wrote

My main tool to work with images is Substance Designer currently so I am well aware of all advantages node approach gives.  

   But to be honest any node based soft lacks that feeling of a brush in your hand and a canvas surface right beneath your fingerprints.  You have to put a node after node while in regular  image soft it's just a swift hotkeys you push subconsciously like a piano player.       Brushes are usually terrible.  Tools are focused on video compositing and FX , not art creating/hand painting 

   In a word I would keep nodes for special tasks   and  continue to do my work in PS if I can.   But I can't . I need a proper depth channel support.   Content aware fill is so cool but 100% useless since I need it working in sync on rgb image and depth image together.  With the patch tool I could use actions at least ( also a tremendous pain in the ...) but not with content aware .

What about Substance Painter or 3DCoat? 3DCoat has depth channel support, as far as I am aware. And works with regular layers.

[kirkr5689]

    I love 3d coat, use it from its very beginning.  Even it's brush system is more advanced than Photoshop one since you can use many different brush dabs alternatively within same stroke and a proper separate dub for each material channel .

    There is one huge problem although. Same as in Substance Painter and Mari.

You can't brush paint and at the same time re-compose anything.  Can't move a layer/object around. Re-scale one single object non destructively, adjust the height up and down easily.    All 3 programs are focused toward making  textures for unique object unwrap and it's ok there.  You usually don't need to move anything on a leg or a face of a character.

    But what if it's a scene background , any environment art in general.  Those programs are getting instantly useless.  Would love we had something like Substance Painter or 3d coat being more like a traditional vector editor  with ever editable  vector brush strokes and bitmap filled vector shapes blending to  each other through Z depth combine.

  Alternatives are Nuke and Fusion  but here we are again , a space shuttle we are going to hit a nail with.   While I would just prefer something like Corel Painter where I  could do something really useful with depth channel, where brushes could be depth aware  and could be painting only in crevices for example or within certain depth  and where I could populate an image with thousands  3d tree renders planted in a ground properly  and intersecting each other according to its depth info without gazillion masks to adjust.  Something like what modern game engines  can do within its frame buffer and a speed of light.

   I hoped project Felix could be something like that.  Is it?  Maybe I missed something? I got an impression it's only good for compositing teapots from 3d max.

[@mj]

You will need to decide if it offers you value or not.

I know you're not a photographer, but Adobe's $10 a month Photoshop/Lightroom offering is hard to beat.

You can ignore Lightroom and use Photoshop for your CG work.

What alternatives would you consider?