My dream art program
Photoshop has gotten unwieldy, slow, and unstable. It has a lot of features I’ve grown to rely on but sometimes I feel like they just get in the way.
Photoshop has gotten unwieldy, slow, and unstable. It has a lot of features I’ve grown to rely on but sometimes I feel like they just get in the way.
After playing with Strike I’ve come to realize that my relationship with art programs has gotten pretty dysfunctional.
So here’s a list of things that I’d love to see in a drawing program.
- Pressure sensitivity
- Layers, ideally with blend modes and layer opacity
- Text layers:
- The ability to edit and move the text around as live objects (without having to switch tools)
- Multi-line text with alignment (left/right/center/justified) controls
- Multi-font/style/color support within a single object
- Outlines as part of the font/style/color1
- Quick selection tools (lasso, polygonal lasso, magic wand) and operations to perform on them:
- Move/copy
- Transform
- Fill
- Save flattened copy (what Photoshop calls “Save for Web”)
- Brush shapes (circle, square, triangle, arbitrary bitmap, etc.)
Things that are nice to have but not vital:
- Layer masks (and nested layer groups)
- Shape layers/masks (which can do a stroke and/or fill)
- Complex brush dynamics:
- Dynamic attributes (flow, opacity, color, rotation, offset, etc.) controlled by pressure/tilt/rotation/jitter
- Random shape selection
- Advanced text layout:
- Baseline adjustment
- Kerning/tracking adjustment
- Ligature selection
- Wrap-to-shape
- Path following
- Pattern brushes (particularly with halftone and dither support)2
Things that I’m finding really don’t matter, and if anything cause more problems than they solve:
- Antialiased tools (better to just work at a higher resolution and let downsampling take care of it)
- Storyboard/panel/page layout support
Now I have all these ideas in my head for yet another project I have no time or energy for. Sigh.
Incidentally, Photoshop doesn’t have this. ↩
This might actually work even better done as a blend mode, like providing a halftone/dither/whatever pattern that gets applied based on the layer’s opacity/color or something, maybe. That would allow for much easier auditioning of different patterns, at least. ↩
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