PhotoWalkPro

Yesterday I came across a new website that is really starting to buzz amongst Adobe product users.  The site is called Dear Adobe and its whole purpose is to give dissatisfied Adobe customers a place to voice vent their spleens.  The site has a blog but the real action is in the gripes and Top 100 sections.  The Gripes section allows you to vote on a current gripe or list your own to add to the list.  The Top 100 is pretty self-explanatory, its a compiled list of, you guessed it, the top 100 gripes.  You can also check out the top gripes by application.  I thought I would take a look at and give comment to the two applications that I am most familiar with, Photoshop and Lightroom.

Photoshop Gripes -

1. Stop creating new features and make your software fast, stable and straightforward.

From what I saw at the last Photoshop World, this has been Adobe’s main focus.  I hope they continue that course with CS4.

2. For the next version, please could you stop adding features and work on performance and stability instead?

Just like number 1, Adobe seems to be focused on improving current tools instead of adding new ones.

3. Why does Photoshop cost as much as a pre-owned small car? Drop the price please!!

I have to agree with this one.  It’s painful to keep reaching into the wallet every 18 months, especially when you add Lightroom to the mix.  The fact that they raised their upgrade prices didn’t help.  And forget buying the Extended version.
4. Make my 2009 Photoshop faster than Photoshop 3.5

I think that’s an overstatement.  At least from a photographer’s point of view, as image sizes keep growing from a few MBs to 40+MBs, it’s hard to expect the software to react as quickly.  That’s a lot of pixels to push around.
5. Better font browser in Photoshop, please?

Boy, did they ever nail this one on the head.  Those little, tiny font samples in the drop-down are no way to select a font.
6. Enable auto-recover for Photoshop, so when it inevitably crashes for the 9th time today I can get back to the corporate schlock I was working on.

While this sounds like a nice feature, I can’t really say that I have that many problems with Photoshop crashes.  It is usually one of the most stable applications I run, Mac or PC.
7. Please either make the vector tools in Photoshop work like completely like Illustrator, or just leave them out. Their half-assedness is aggravating.

Thankfully I don’t have to work with vector tools so this isn’t really a problem for me.  Having used some other Adobe apps, I can say that there is some inconsistencies with like tools between apps.
8. Please make photoshop give my ram back when I quit.

Once again, I am happy to say that I haven’t suffered from this particular problem.  I am thinking that it would really suck to be a programmer though.
9. Let me change the opacity on multiple layers at once!

You can do this, sort of, if you place the layers into a group, you can lower the opacity of the group.  What you can’t do is select multiple layers and lower them all at once without grouping. 
10. Why can’t Photoshop be a drag n’ drop install on OS X, like most other apps? Too much garbage that no one uses anyway.

I’m all for this one.  Installing and uninstalling Photoshop on a Mac is a royal pain.  I know they can do better than this.

Lightroom Gripes -

1. Please rationalise you prices around the globe. $99 to update to Lightroom 2 is not 99 Euros. Be fair to those who use your products outside the US.

I would have to agree with my European friends on this one.  99 Euros is about $142.  That hardly seems fair.  

2. Why do you take so long to get started?

I have also noticed an extreme lag in start-up time.  I would like to see some improvement in this area.  I know that Bridge starts much faster than it used to and since Lightroom is essentially a database, I think there is much room for improvement.

3. Why the hell do I have to pay again for Lightroom 2.0 the same price I had to pay for 1.0? Why cannot I upgrade my Educational license for heavens sake !!!!

I’m not sure about the whole reason behind this unless they aren’t giving a decreased price-break on an update version for educational license holders.  If they are going to give an educational price-break for the full version, why not for the upgrade?

4. The performance of Lightroom 2 is a freaking joke. Fix it please.

I don’t have any performance issues with the exception of the slow start-up times.  Perhaps they aren’t using multiple catalogs which do tend to drain performance when you get too many images in them.

5. Make lightrooms localized adjustments faster. and while you’re at it, localised color would be nice to be applied before wb,toning and all the other ‘global’ adjustments. ok, one more, you’ve asked for it: build a database for lenses and cameras to automatically reduce vignetting/abberations/distortions/..

I like the lens database idea although it would be a nightmare to keep up with all the lenses out there and build profiles for them.  Perhaps allowing for custom lens profiling that could be saved and applied automatically would be nice.  I think that the localized color is getting a little silly.  Now you are trying to do local adjustments which is what Photoshop is for. 

6. F*****g drop the “Photoshop” from “Photoshop Lightroom”. It’s simply ridiculous.

While I don’t necessarily agree with the choice of language, at least in a public forum, I do agree with the sentiment.  Do we really need the Photoshop moniker attached?  I think it actually creates confusion against novices.

7. Fix those scrolling issues in Lighroom with multi-monitor systems!

I wish I had this problem.  Sadly I am using just one monitor, and usually my laptop.

8. Lightroom rocks. Thank you!

Wow, nice to know there is a little love out there for such a great app.

9. Lightroom is not $100 better than Aperture. Price it accordingly.

Lightroom is about $279 as opposed to $199 for Aperture.  I seem to remember Apple launching Aperture for about $500 fo what was a pretty pathetic application at the time.  Aperture has made great improvements but I don’t think it is better than Lightroom.  That being said, I think they are both over-priced.

10. Love Lightroom, but 2.0 crashes, has partial UI failures, hangs for twenty seconds, … for all the features, it can’t have seen more then ten minutes of beta test. Give me a 2.0.1 that corrects the things that weren’t broken in 1.4.1 ASAP, then start looking at how to actually take advantage of Beta programs.

Actually, Lightroom has gone through months of extensive beta testing.  I know this because I was a beta tester from the beginning.  I have yet to have any crashes with my system and Lightroom 2.0 so I can’t attest to the crashes that some are experiencing.  I do know that Adobe will probably release a fix pretty quick once they identify the issue.  I say this after watching them address bugs in the beta with great speed.

So there you have it, the Top 10 for each product.  Some of them I agreed with and others, not so much.  I do know that Adobe has taken notice (as witnessed in John Nack’s blog) and they are conversing with the site owners to look at all the issues being raised.  This could be because they are a very conscientious business that is concerned about their end-user satisfaction or simply that they don’t want bad press on the eve of their CS4 roll-out.  I would like to think it’s the former.

If you would like to check out the entire list for every Adobe app you can start reading here.

Related posts:

1. Adobe Updates TOU for Photoshop Express
2. Buying a New Camera? Better Check Your Version of Photoshop
3. Bridge vs. Lightroom
4. Does Adobe really want your images?
5. Using the New Topaz Fusion For Adobe Lightroom

This entry was posted on Friday, September 5th, 2008 at 12:05 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.