This is great, and can give fantastic results quickly. But no matter which frequency you’re editing, at the end of the day, you’re still destroying the image. Both of the Frequencies can be achieved by using Smart Filters but after that you’re stuck. Using the Clone Stamp or the Healing Brush will rasterise the image and there’s no going back.

Solution #9

Like the Blur Gallery and Shake Reduction before, a new, well thought-out feature should be considered. What makes Liquify so special is the fact that despite being a Smart Filter, it can alter the underlying Image in practically infinite amount of ways, as opposed to the traditional Smart Filters like Gaussian Blur or Unsharp Mask, where you’re limited by the sliders/given values. Liquify, however, gives you a GPU-accelerated playground where you can smudge and smash your image as much as you want, losslessly.

The same approach should be taken with Frequency separation, and I’ve made a quick mock-up below.

Emphasis on “quick”

Something along these lines — build a separate workspace to concentrate into, have the typical tools you’d use in Frequency Separation, and output everything without losing quality.

The true power of Liquify lies in the fact that you won’t lose any data when you use it as a Smart Filter. Frequency Separation as a dedicated tool has some pretty deep implications and could very well be a game-changer.

Problem #10

Render filters.

Adobe Photoshop CC 2014 brought three new render filters to the table. Flame, Picture Frame and Tree. Each one of them is unresponsive, can not be treated as Smart Objects, their UI is a mess and your color sampling options are limited.

Let’s start with the Tree filter.

Tree

You only get the System color picker and you can’t sample your swatches. You can’t sample anything from the document, really.

After two seconds of waiting, I was able to select a custom color for the leaves through the System color picker. You have no option to change this. There is no live preview, so if you think that a particular color is fine, you have to close the color picker, wait for your preview to change and then see what it looks like. Three clicks and three seconds. To see a color get changed.

There’s no undo either, so when you choose a color you might like, better write it down.

The settings in the dialog are confusing and limited. You have 34 Base Tree types and 16 Leaves types. You can’t create or edit the base trees nor leaves yourself by traditional means.

The controls give no context, and you’re limited to arbitrary ranges. Light direction ranges from 0 to 180, Leaves amount is 0–100, Leaves Size is 0–200, Branches Height is 70–300, Branch thickness is 0–200 and Arrangement is 0–100. They are all sliders and lack a unit. None of the textbox values can be set with the arrow keys (optionally combined with the shift key) either, but the sliders do a jerky motion if you select one (you get no indicator anyway.)

Finally, your preview is a small window. So, as with problem #5, you have no idea what you’re doing. Because these filters can’t be used as Smart Filters, you’re ultimately stuck with what you have.

Flame

That’s probably a nice flame, but I can’t see past 402 × 402 pixels on a black background.

The same problems are present with the Flame filter as with the Tree Filter. The values are all sliders with arbitrary ranges, everything is slow and your color picker is always the system picker. Your preview window is a tiny box with a black background so if you want to have black flames, you will have to do it blind.

The flame filter requires you to make a Work Path, so one could think that once you’ve hit “OK”, you would still be able to edit the work path and the flame would move with it. This isn’t the case. As with the Tree Filter, you’re stuck with what you accepted.

Picture Frame

Not much to say here.

Most of the same problems are present with the Picture Frame Filter, too. The user interface is a mess, the units are given without context, your preview is a small window, everything is slow and once changes are committed you’re stuck with what you have. The margin and the scale sliders can only be set so high, and the final output doesn’t always match with what you see in the preview, not to mention the “Arrangement” slider (1–200) is a set of 200 different types of borders, so if you’re looking for a specific one, you must go through every single value. You’d think you can draw a curve like in the Bevel setting in the Blending Options menu, but no.

Additionally, the preview window in all of these filters is always an RGB-parsed image. If you’re in any other color mode, the preview is misleading.

Solution #10

Before I propose a solution, I must emphasise that these features are subpar at best. The program has shipped with these three filters, made by the people at Adobe, marketed as official new features, but upon closer inspection they don’t seem to be more than an afterthought. The reason behind the strange UI, unresponsiveness and raster-only output is that these aren’t true features, coded, compiled and incorporated to the Photoshop’s core, but in fact JSX scripts in the Photoshop > Presets > Deco folder.

You read that right, User Experience Designer.

I’m speechless. But as I was saying, the solution…

First off, re-program the filters from scratch.

From what I gather, Photoshop is mostly done with C++. Having some things open is great and the scripts that have shipped with the program since 2003 are nice, little things. People have made wonderful stuff with scripts, and some are well worth the money. These three filters aren’t.

These are official features made by the same team that has access to Photoshop’s source code. Either do it properly or don’t do it at all. Why not put the best programmers on the job to guarantee the features to be as robust as possible and truly integrated within the program? The usual stuff: being able to edit the Objects afterwards, being able to sample colors properly, having a “preview” button… I don’t think the same level of versatility and speed can be achieved with mere scripts.

Second, re-design the User Interface.

This should be obvious. I’m sure this mock-up I made is far more intuitive than the current Tree filter.