Adobe: Because more things make us ask WTF than just code



  • So, if I'm reading this story correctly,  anyone who is currently using an old version of Photoshop (older than the current 5.x) will not be able to directly upgrade to the next new version (presumably CS 6).  Instead they will have to first buy a copy of the current version 5.x before being able to upgrade (and pay for) the next new version.  Or pay full retail price for the new version.  Fortunately, I'm using the current 5.x version so it doesn't look like I would be affected by the new "pay through the nose twice" policy.  However, the current version works perfectly fine for me and I'm not much of a "must have the latest and greatest" anyway -- especially after convincing my boss to buy me a copy and then finding out that the highly touted "content aware fill" feature is a complete scam.

    Like we really need another reason to hate Adobe.



  • @El_Heffe said:

    and then finding out that the highly touted "content aware fill" feature is a complete scam
     

    i think many people would be interested in details on this, could you provide some?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    @El_Heffe said:

    and then finding out that the highly touted "content aware fill" feature is a complete scam
     

    i think many people would be interested in details on this, could you provide some?

    The dream



    The apparent reality



  • I'm still using 3.0.5 which has served me fine. I think I bought it in the early 1990s. The one thing that has always kept me from upgrading is the cost.



  • The purpose of "upgrade" sales is to reward user who pays every year for the new version by having them pay less per version. If you are an irregular customer (don't plan on upgrade to all version) why would they provide you the same reward?

    I have an old version of DOS here, however i paid full price when i bought windows 7, why?



  • @PJH said:

    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    @El_Heffe said:

    and then finding out that the highly touted "content aware fill" feature is a complete scam
     

    i think many people would be interested in details on this, could you provide some?

    The dream



    The apparent reality

    I love people who use a 5 minute video with awful music to explain something they could have explained in 5 screenshots and a bit of text.

    Content Aware Fill is definitely in the "if it sounds too good to be true, it's not" category. I don't even know why people thought it would work like in the demo.


  • Garbage Person

    Content-aware fill works GREAT in the situations it was designed to be used in (that is, cleaning up small artifacts that screw with your utopian vision - pieces of trash on the otherwise pristine empty ground, lens flares, etc. There has to be a lot of local reference material in the image for it to work with, which is where most people fall down trying to use it. It isn't going to work AT ALL in busy images, like the stupid weeaboo shit in that video. The sort of stupid minor shit that takes AGES to clean up by hand and consumes time that should be spent airbrushing and bending women). Of course, Adobe's marketing department decided it was capable of wholesale removal of people from complicated action shots.

     

    Most of the pre-launch demonstration was simple examples like that, with the occasional "this is pushing the limits of what it can technically do, and in order for it to work you're going to have to retouch by hand anyway" example. Unfortuantely, for marketing reasons, only the latter category got widely published and the "you're going to have to retouch by hand anyway" part got left out.



  • @SilentRunner said:

    The one thing that has always kept me from upgrading is the cost.
    I don't mind Photoshop being expensive.   I have always believed that if you aren't willing to buy the best tools then you aren't really serious about what you are doing.  However, this new price policy seems pretty excessive.  One of the great things about computer software is that it never breaks or wears out.  If what you have now does what you need, you can continue using it essentially forever.   I have a feeling it won't take long for Adobe to realize that doubling the price is costing them a lot of sales.



  • @PJH said:

    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    @El_Heffe said:

    and then finding out that the highly touted "content aware fill" feature is a complete scam
     

    i think many people would be interested in details on this, could you provide some?

    The dream

    The apparent reality


    So... much like the GIMP's resynthesiser, then?

     



  • @Watson said:

    @PJH said:

    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    @El_Heffe said:

    and then finding out that the highly touted "content aware fill" feature is a complete scam
     

    i think many people would be interested in details on this, could you provide some?

    The dream

    The apparent reality

    So... much like the GIMP's resynthesiser, then?
    Adobe doesn't have a monopoly on Marketing Bullshit.

     



  • @PJH said:

    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    @El_Heffe said:

    and then finding out that the highly touted "content aware fill" feature is a complete scam
     

    i think many people would be interested in details on this, could you provide some?

    The dream

    The apparent reality

     

    I must agree with Weng, this guys appears to be a spoilt 16-year-old who saw the video and moaned to his parents until they bought him CS5/downloaded it from torrents because he thought content-aware is going to make him a l33t PS w1z4rd. he generally seems to belong into the cathegory of people who give you insane fantasies, declare them to be specifications, and when confronted with "okay, i need this many people, this much time and this much money for that", they give you a blank stare followed with "WUT? But you've got a computer to do it for you!". they generally can't distinguish between tool/technology and magic. i haven't personally tried content-aware, but everything in the demo seems plausible to me, although the "hal, finish my panorama" stretches my imagination a bit it still seems plausible. notice how all of the examples are either small areas surrounded by clearly defined pattern, or isolated elements on simple background. also, i assume it uses the shape of selection as one of main hints to know what to remove (it probably tries to corellate it's shape to shape of element in selection to know what it should remove), while the kid uses strictly rectangular select. i assume it would work much better if he made an attempt to know what magic wand is and use that on the text, for example.

    as i said, i haven't tried it myself, but all i've seen in both videos is plausible/explainable/expected (mis)behaivor to me, resulting in knowing how it works and how to use it in the first case, or thinking of it as magic and having no idea about limits of technology in the second case.

     


  • :belt_onion:

    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    he generally seems to belong into the cathegory of people who give you insane fantasies [snip]

    Like Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law?


  • BINNED

     Yeah, RDJ's couch camouflage was definitely a result of content aware fill.



  • @El_Heffe said:

    I don't mind Photoshop being expensive.   I have always believed that if you aren't willing to buy the best tools then you aren't really serious about what you are doing.  However, this new price policy seems pretty excessive.  One of the great things about computer software is that it never breaks or wears out.  If what you have now does what you need, you can continue using it essentially forever.   I have a feeling it won't take long for Adobe to realize that doubling the price is costing them a lot of sales.

     

    I don't even know what you're trying to say here.  They haven't doubled the price for people who are willing to buy the best tools.  They have removed the discount for people who are not serious enough about what they're doing to upgrade regularly anyway.  Most of the people this will "affect" won't even notice, because the old version they have does what they need so they can continue using it essentially forever!

     Seriously, THERE IS NO WTF HERE.  What Adobe is doing is INDUSTRY STANDARD PRACTICE.  Even Microsoft does it too!  Why couldn't I upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows 7?  Oh, right, because this is how software upgrades WORK.

     



  • @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    i haven't personally tried content-aware
    I have.  Many times.  Being a reasonable person, I approached it with the assumption that Content-Aware Fill isn't magic and doesn't work wonders.  However, I also assumed that it would actually work.  I do a lot of touch-up work similar to what is shown in the demos and and I can tell you from first-hand experience that it is complete shit.



  • @Iago said:

    Seriously, THERE IS NO WTF HERE.  What Adobe is doing is INDUSTRY STANDARD PRACTICE.  Even Microsoft does it too!  Why couldn't I upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows 7?  Oh, right, because this is how software upgrades WORK.

    I RAGE over standard software package upgrade pricing policies! RAGE!!!



  • @El_Heffe said:

    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:
    i haven't personally tried content-aware
    I have.  Many times.  Being a reasonable person, I approached it with the assumption that Content-Aware Fill isn't magic and doesn't work wonders.  However, I also assumed that it would actually work.  I do a lot of touch-up work similar to what is shown in the demos and and I can tell you from first-hand experience that it is complete shit.
     

    i would definitely like watching a demonstration video from you than from some... well, than from the guy who made the video linked above. any chance you'd do that?



  • @heterodox said:

    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:
    he generally seems to belong into the cathegory of people who give you insane fantasies [snip]

    Like Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law?

     

    nope, i meant more like Kent Hovind


  • BINNED

    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    @heterodox said:

    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:
    he generally seems to belong into the cathegory of people who give you insane fantasies [snip]

    Like Robert Downey, Jr. and Jude Law?

     

    nope, i meant more like Kent Hovind [title text: warning: batshit crazy bullshit that will destroy your hope for humanity once and for all ahead]

     

    You should have put the spoilers in clear text, I didn't read the pop up before clicking. Now I'll have to go punch something or someone.

     



  • @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    nope, i meant more like Kent Hovind

    We got ourselves another runner up for the stupidest man on earth title.

    I wonder if he would be interested in using SSDS to manage all the videos he has made.

    And spread the word more efficiently you know.



  • @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    i would definitely like watching a demonstration video from you
     

    Yes. Demonstration or your claim is null.



  • @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    notice how all of the examples are either small areas surrounded by clearly defined pattern, or isolated elements on simple background. also, i assume it uses the shape of selection as one of main hints to know what to remove (it probably tries to corellate it's shape to shape of element in selection to know what it should remove),
     

    The basic idea is that what lies outside the selection region is correct - and in particular, the stuff on the boundary of the selection. Fun With Statistics then follows to build up a description of the texture lying in the vicinity of the boundary, and then the interior of the selection is filled in with stuff with a similar statistical profile. So for any hope of sensible results, your selection has to hew close to what you want removed.

    I don't have access to the internals of Adobe's implementation, of course, but the doctoral thesis of the GIMP Resynthesizer plugin's author describes how that one works (and the source is on github). "Content-aware deletion" is really a special case of a more general class of texture-inpainting operations (the case where the source image is the same as the target image and the feature map is a simple bilevel mask (modulo feathering)).

    I've been using it on and off for a few years; I'm no expert and it's a wild and cantankerous thing when you start to push it. Sometimes it's very very good; sometimes it's cubist vomit and the effort to make it behave isn't outweighed by the payoff.

     



  • @PJH said:

    @SEMI-HYBRID code said:

    @El_Heffe said:

    and then finding out that the highly touted "content aware fill" feature is a complete scam
     

    i think many people would be interested in details on this, could you provide some?

    The dream



    The apparent reality

    I agree that that video isn't using CA the way it should be used (with selections etc.) nor for the things it should be used.

    [url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQbw2eX8LAQ&feature=related]This video[/url] shows a much clearer image. (literally, since it is in 720p instead of that crappy 360p where you can't even see if he selected the options right)


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @dtech said:

    <A title=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQbw2eX8LAQ&feature=related
    href="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQbw2eX8LAQ&feature=related"
    target=_blank>This video shows a much clearer image.
    Looks just like those x-ray spec's that used to be advertised in comics....



  • @dtech said:

    @PJH said:


    The apparent reality

    I agree that that video isn't using CA the way it should be used (with selections etc.) nor for the things it should be used.

    To be honest, I barely glanced at that video. The narration method is such a heinous crime against bandwidth that I couldn't bear to watch any more.

     



  • @Watson said:

    @dtech said:

    @PJH said:


    The apparent reality

    I agree that that video isn't using CA the way it should be used (with selections etc.) nor for the things it should be used.

    To be honest, I barely glanced at that video. The narration method is such a heinous crime against bandwidth that I couldn't bear to watch any more.

     

    the whole video is pretty much crime against bandwith so you missed nothing. i recommend watching the video that dtech linked, it clearly shows both pros and cons of the tool and is much more bandwith- and time-efficient

     


Log in to reply