When I Think About You I Touch My…Screen

Given that I won’t be buying one (and I didn’t win one in a recent giveaway, dammit), for me, the most interesting aspect of the Microsoft Surface Pro 3 announcement last month was the appearance by someone from Adobe showing off an upcoming version of Photoshop featuring some touch-related enhancements to the venerable image-editing program.
This week, Adobe Creative Cloud Subscribers (like me) were presented with the option of downloading Adobe Photoshop CC 2014, which delivers those enhancements.
…once you figure out how to enable them, anyway.
I had hoped that when I installed in on my Surface Pro 2 it would recognize that touch was available and right off the bat it would be optimized for touch.
Nope.  Doing some digging online revealed that you have to navigate to Edit>Preferences>Experimental Features, check the box for “Use Touch Gestures (Windows only),” close Photoshop, and open it again.
There’s also an option to scale up the interface (more on that in a bit) to make it more finger-friendly, and something related to 3D printing, but I don’t have a 3D printer, so that part was irrelevant for me.
The touch features work pretty much how you would expect them to:  you can pan and zoom and rotate the canvas.
That may not seem like much, but considering that previous versions lacked even those capabilities, it’s a marked – and welcome – improvement.
I’m especially glad to see the ability to rotate the canvas freely by placing two fingers on the screen and turning them in the direction you want to rotate the canvas, as it’s a feature that’s available in Manga Studio that I utilize frequently.
However, I do have some quibbles with Adobe’s implementation.  In Manga Studio there are options for performing the same function via on-screen menu buttons if you’re not working on a touch-enabled screen, including a button for restoring the canvas – or paper, as it’s called in MS – to its original orientation.
No such buttons exist in Photoshop CC 2014, at least as far as I’ve been able to determine.  Also, it was not immediately apparent that there was a way to snap the canvas back into the original orientation (attempting to do so via touch requires more precision than I’m able to manage), but I did find that clicking on the Crop tool will cause it to snap back.
It is possible to rotate the canvas through menu options, but it’s less efficient than the approach that MS takes, which provides a wider larger selection of set increments and a slighter to allow you to rotate in arbitrary increments.  The buttons in MS rotate by 15 degree increments, whereas Ps gives you the option of 90 degrees clockwise or counter-clockwise, and an “Arbitrary” option which presents you with another menu for choosing the increments.
The other quibble I have is that in order to pan you have to use two fingers – in MS, you only need one – which wouldn’t be a problem except that it’s very easy to accidentally rotate the canvas, or to zoom in or out.
As for the scaling, the new Ps allows you to scale up the UI by 200%.  That does make things more finger-friendly, but it seems like a bit much.  125-150% might work a little better, though the optimal solution would be to allow you to choose from several options.
Of course, it’s clear that, based on their presence at Microsoft’s launch event, that Adobe is thinking primarily in terms of higher-resolution displays.  I have no doubt that the 200% scaling works very well with the Surface Pro 3’s 2,160 x 1,440 resolution.
Stepping outside of the limitations with the Adobe product, I’ll mention again that Windows 8.1 could benefit from either more built-in gestures, or the ability to create custom gestures, as while using Photoshop CC 2014 with the UI scaled up I found myself wishing that there were an easy way to quickly clear some of the clutter that the enlarged UI brings with it, freeing up more screen real estate for the canvas.
There is a mechanism for that in Ps itself; hitting the Tab key will show/hide all tool palettes and menus, but that’s of little use if you’re using your Surface device in tablet mode without the keyboard cover attached.  Granted, you could invoke the on-screen keyboard, hit Tab, then close the keyboard, but that’s more effort than is necessary considering that they’re could be a gesture – say, a three-finger tap – that could serve to mimic hitting the Tab key.
Similarly, there could be gestures to perform other commands, such as Copy and Paste, Undo, and Redo.
Windows does have a feature called “Flicks,” which allow you to perform navigation and editing tasks via pen (not touch) gestures, but so far I’ve found them to be rather inadequate for use in any sort of drawing or image-editing software.
On a positive side, palm rejection works extremely well in Ps, primarily because Ps won’t allow you to use anything bout the pen (or mouse) for drawing and editing tasks on the canvas, at least, not that I’ve found.  So, unlike MS (or Sketchbook Express/Pro) there’s never a danger of errant lines showing up on your work should the built-in palm rejection experience any sort of hiccup, or should you place your palm on the canvas while the pen is too far from the screen to register.
Overall, it’s a positive step from Adobe, and I’m willing to cut them a lot of slack given that the touch support it still labeled “experimental.”
There have been some other enhancements to Photoshop as part of the update, but so far I haven’t really managed to delve into them, as the support for touch was the one that I was most interested in trying.

Poor Craftsman

They say it’s a poor craftsman who blames his tools.
To which I say, “So?”
I don’t necessarily disagree with the point.  After all, some people are poor craftsmen.  What of it?
That being said, sometimes poor craftsmanship can be exacerbated by poor tools, or at least inconsistent tools.
As an “artist,” I do most of my work in Photoshop, in large part because it’s what I’m most familiar with.  After all, I’ve been working in it for almost 15 years, and for several of those years I did so in a professional capacity.
Beyond that, it’s a very powerful tool, both for image manipulation and adjustment, and for image creation.  It has many tools that work very much like their real-world equivalents, all of which have additional capabilities that can’t be matched – at least not easily – through the use of more traditional tools and media.
Paired up with my Wacom Cintiq, it makes the experience of creating art (“art”) in a digital medium a much more natural experience.  (It also makes it really damned expensive, but that’s beside the point.)
That said, it’s not without its limitations.
Some of them are just inherent to a digital workflow, or to the various peculiarities of the Photoshop interface and its rather steep learning curve.  However, while there are still things I’m learning about what Photoshop can do after 15 years – particularly as new versions come along and add new features, or change the way existing features are accessed – for the most part I’ve adapted to those peculiarities in one way or another.
Lately, though, I’ve been running into a lot of new frustrations that have been pushing me into areas that lead to accusations of poor craftsmanship.
I’m not sure where the fault lies – I’m sure there’s plenty of blame to go around – but I often say that the cause is rarely as important as the effect, and effect has been pretty damned annoying.
So it doesn’t matter to me if the problem is with Photoshop, with Windows, with the Wacom drivers, with my video card’s drivers, or with all of them.
To give you an idea of what I’m talking about, I’ll use an analogy based on working in traditional media.

Imagine that you have a piece of paper and a pencil and you sit down at a desk to draw something.  Frequently, as you touch the tip of the pencil to the paper, the color of the desk you’re working on will suddenly change color.  What was brown is now green.  Now it’s brown again.  It’s distracting, and annoying, but not completely disruptive, given that your focus is on the paper.
However, every so often, the paper itself suddenly turns completely transparent.
And all the while your pencil keeps periodically transforming itself into a leaky fountain pen.

Poor craftsman or not, I think you’d be justified in complaining about your tools.

I Bounty Hunt For Jabba Hut To Finance My Vette

I don't know who of you out there (other than Scott, of course) is familiar with the online comic strip Penny Arcade, but even if you aren't this video of artist Mike “Gabe” Krahulik inking a sketch of Boba Fett in Photoshop is interesting to watch.
The soundtrack - featuring hip hop songs that have music sampled from Queen songs - is very NSFW (and also pretty shitty), so your best bet is to watch it muted.
Not sure why he chose that particular music instead of the MC Chris nerdcore classic Fett's Vette, which would have been much more appropriate...