Feedback, please: Potential Web/drawing features in Photoshop

Photoshop’s vector shapes & layer effects (strokes, gradients, etc.) are mainstays of Web & mobile design work, but they haven’t gotten updated in a while. If the Photoshop team were to improve this area of the app, what improvements would you find the most important?

The following list isn’t exhaustive, but it includes popular requests we’ve heard. It would be great to get your feedback via this quick survey. We can’t do everything (certainly all at once, anyway), so please let us know what matters most.

Enable “real” vector shapes (stroke & fill directly editable, without reliance on layer effects or a dialog box) Support dashed- and dotted-line strokes Enable smart shapes: Preserve corner roundness when scaling rounded rectangles Support other parameterized shapes (e.g. stars with an adjustable number of points; lines with arrowheads) Make various layer effects enhancements:

Apply effects at the layer group level﻿﻿ Re-order effects Duplicate effects (e.g. apply multiple strokes per layer) ﻿Enable panel-based editing of effects (instead of relying on a dialog box) Add/edit effects on multiple selected layers at once Make graphical styles “live” (i.e. if edit the style definition, all styled objects update) Enable layer search (i.e. type to filter by layer name or attributes) Improve snap-to-pixel behavior Improve text rendering Export text & graphical styles as CSS Support guide sets (e.g. for grid layouts) Support linked files (i.e. edit one file to update buttons, icons, etc. across multiple PSDs)

Notes:

We want to know what’s more important than other things, so please bear that in mind when assigning relative ratings. (That is, don’t make everything “extremely important” or “not important.”)

Please don’t tell me that Photoshop should never be improved ﻿vis-à-vis Web & mobile design, and that everyone should use Fireworks (or Illustrator or whatever). You may be completely right about those apps, but it’s just not relevant to this survey.

Inevitably there’s some amount of overlap among these items (e.g. applying effects at the layer group level would offer an alternative to applying multiple copies of one effect on a layer; for example, you could stroke a layer, then add another stroke on a group containing that layer).

Many thanks in advance,

J.

Posted by John Nack at 2:59 PM on September 14, 2010