You know, it’s one of those days… It’s amazing how many people actually try to make a living in the media business, when they have not the slightest clue about how to use their programs nor even the most basic concepts of digital imaging or general principles. Let’s see what we have today.

First, we have this gentlemen who tries to tell me that the problem cannot be his Mac or the third-party hardware, because obviously using a Mac is such a sad thing that you only can select from a few thousand components and Steve Jobs being like unto the mighty God, he all tests them himself and writes each and every driver and bug fixes for OS X, ensuring that the only other evil forces must come from the outside, including After Effects CS5. That is, as he keeps saying in his iPad or whatever presentations and the recent HTML5 vs. Flash debate, everything is perfect in Apple land until someone else enters.

Their own users having reached a point where they are drawing similar conclusions is a sad thing indeed, so any attempt at seriously figuring out driver issues or potential file I/O problems in a 64bit environment become meaningless. If that weren’t enough, he tries to pull a fast one telling me I’m not his wife. I’m glad I am not! You know, the way my luck runs, he’s older than 45, overweight, has hair all over his body, bad teeth, a small dick and generally looks like he spent a night in the garbage dump… Exactly the kind of man I wouldn’t even consider for a blowjob, even if he were the last male human being on this planet.

Next on the list is this kid, who tries to get smart with me on whether or not to uninstall older versions once CS5 has been installed. Granted, I could have just said to leave it on his drives instead of pointing out the slightly foolish nature of his question, but you know what – since when is posting on forums an excuse to leave your brains and common sense in the laundry machine?

Highlight of my day, however, is being called a cunt, asshole and all these other nice things. That wouldn’t be so bad in itself, but the person posting apparently qualifies as what Americans call Trailer Trash – the posts were so full of bad grammar and general poor use of the English language, it makes any recent OECD studies about the US being at the forefront of education sound like an urban legend.

What’s most disappointing about any of those matters, is how long it takes for any of the moderators to lock those threads or even remove those posts once reported as abuse. I should know, I’ve been chastised a number of times for less. So I guess it’s a useless feature after all, is it?

*sigh* Adobe really doesn’t know how to do these things. After their blogs had been mostly offline for 2 months now after some ill-conceived attempt to convert to WordPress prematurely, they are back, but what do we get? They actually made them even more ugly and more useless than ever before! I say: Damn you, Adobe! Really, it’s bad enough that you are boring us to death with Julianne Kost‘s repetition of the Photoshop manual, equally boring ponderings on Captivate and LiveCycle, weird ideas by product managers and pointless comments on usability and open source software, but the least you could do is to make it look nice and pleasing and actually have a proper navigation…. *argh*

Mmh, yeah, while I still think Photoshop is a hopeless case in many ways (but then again, that is just as true for other Adobe apps), at least it gets some fixes every now and then, such as has happened today. On the other hand, if you need to issue a patch 2 months after release that fixes an issue in one of your most advertised key features (Content Aware Fill), my faith crumbles again. But well, at least now my 3D gizmo has correct hardware antialiasing. *hooray* There seems no hope in sight for the various other 3D drawing issues, though. I also can’t help but notice the number of critical issues on Mac, which convinces me even more that using one is no good idea these days. It’s funny how the situation is just the reverse of what we had in the mid-90′s, where you couldn’t sell a PC to some people even if you bundled it with a Ferrari! In any case, if that little bugger of Adobe notifier doesn’t remind you that there are some updates available, it never hurts to go to your Help menu and check for updates. Maybe after that the world is a better place for some people at least….

It’s now 30 years of the World Wide Web, everybody goes crazy over HTML5 vs. Flash and yet, in the end, putting together web content still sucks. We are still here, elaborately crafting hierarchies of tags in the vain hopes that our pages look good in every browser, use the legacy GIF format for displaying animated icons and cursors, dabble with JavaScript all the time just to get us some photo galleries… Now I knew what I was getting into when I designed my first web page in 1995, but going back and working on my current site always makes me wonder if I will live to see the day when Dreamweaver really will be smart enough to handle all kinds of PHP and allow full access to all CSS properties. and yes, it also would help hugely, if Photoshop, now also 20 years old, would not require you to go into 4 level deep modal dialogs just to edit a gradient layer style while building icons. What a major hokum!

Since these things usually fly below the radar, I think it’s worth mentioning that every After Effects user’s favorite documentation guy and regular forum reply machine, Todd Kopriva, in his second, secret life as a motor biker only known as Kopriva-Man™, has now been honored (or punished?) with doing the same for Premiere Pro. This can only be good, as the After Effects help is probably one of the most comprehensive ones for any conventional Adobe product, rich with additional info and comments and sets a very high standard. Something you won’t find in neglected places like the Illustrator help, for sure. Now the only problem is that I’m still waiting for one of those fancy HP Z-800 workstations so I can actually work with Premiere Pro CS5 and whip around stuff in realtime and have a reason to actually go to the online help…

In other news, Photoshop CS4 is having some problems with a few file types and you may wish to apply this security update. Personally, I really do not understand why people turn their program in a garbage dump by loading tons of extra brushes, gradients and swatches, but apparently it’s not that uncommon and anyone with a sense for security should probably act before that Valentine’s Day brush set you downloaded last year, but never used so far, unleashes some not so pleasant guests when you use it now.

Someone at the Photoshop team must really love me, or else they wouldn’t add bugs to their features that I can write about. Yes, it’s one more round of Photoshop 3D making a mess. A user just reported that because rendering in CS5 took forever he wanted to move back to CS4 and lo and behold – he couldn’t. His textures were locked and uneditable and changing render settings would not do anything. So really, how can anyone not arrive at the conclusion that this is a total fuck-up?

And the story continues… A user on the Adobe forums just reported, that he couldn’t open a 3DS file in CS5, that will import without trouble in CS4. This is getting better and better – in a very gloomy and negative sense. It’s weird, to say the least, that a huge company like Adobe, who should have a repository with Gigabytes of test files (and enough money to buy a license of any 3D program on this planet to create even more test files) can’t manage to properly support a 20 year old 3D file format. Okay, I give them some credit in that Autodesk modified the format a couple of times – a 3DS file exported from a current version of MAX is not the same as one saved from the original 3D Studio for DOS, but still, not having a handle on this makes the Photoshop 3D engineers look like a bunch of morons, when even freeware apps coded by one man alone can probably handle those files without a hitch…

… or it isn’t. What apparently doesn’t change is that some bugs never get fixed and Adobe prefers to just ignore them to maintain the illusion of perfection. Following my initial attempts at giving Repoussé a spin led me to some deeper investigation of various matters surrounding the crookedness of what they call 3D and I came up with the following results on my machine:

• I have this weird issue, where the tile pattern overlay of the CS5 renderer will not disappear when it’s finished. This only happens in the 32bit version of Photoshop, but the 64bit one works without flaw. Go figure! (usually it’s the other way around).

• Unlit Texture rendering mode is still busted and cannot be used in combination with edge rendering – edges simply will not use any color other than white. This issue has already been in Photoshop CS4! There goes my comic!

• Importing 3D PSDs and rendering them in After Effects results in a different render Gamma being used.

• Textures look a whole lot worse in After Effects than they do in Photoshop.

• 3D PSDs created in Photoshop CS4 do not open correctly in After Effects CS5. they use the wrong view or produce no camera at all.

• In reverse, 3D PSDs created in Photoshop CS5 seem to shift the camera by 2 or 3 pixels in After Effects CS4. I haven’t found a clear reason yet, but this may be a problem. And they also use a completely crooked Gamma, making things almost unbearably dark.

• Based on what another user encountered, there may be an issue where 3D content is not displayed correctly in After Effects CS5, if the graphics card in the system is not equally suitable for Photoshop and After Effects.

Mind you, the above findings are the result of only 1 or 2 hours spent, so I’m wondering why nobody ever noticed them nor cares to fix them. If I dug any deeper, I’m sure i could add 10 more entries to the list… When you market Repoussé as one of the CS5 key features for Photoshop and encourage people, this should at least work, should it not?

After that exhausting session yesterday, I thought to myself "I really need to check whether the programs actually work!". The CS4 installer once again refused to install Soundbooth (don’t ask me why, I fixed it once in the past, but can’t remember the exact solution) and the CS5 installer had given me a warning that some components were not installed correctly. The latter referered to Fireworks, which still seems to work (go, figure?!) and Soundbooth CS5 also works, so the absence of its CS4 cousin doesn’t concern me too much at the moment.

Anyway, in all my testing I couldn’t help but have one more look at Photoshop‘s 3D features, and believe it or not, it really seems to have gotten worse. While the idea behind Repoussé is sound, the whole way it has been implemented couldn’t be more awkward. You know, when you need a panel to adjust something like bend and twist in 3D, that really should be something you do interactively with widgets, then that makes for very difficult finetuning. It even has this fundamental design flaw, where values seem to be stored as absolute pixel values, which is ridiculous, given that 4 pixels in a 300dpi print document is something wholly different than in a video or web document. And then the renderer. Geez! Even a simple extruded shape keeps jumping back and forth with their new progressive refinement renderer and after 5 minutes, it still looks dithered, noisy and with washed out textures and utterly not like something I would sell my clients. You know, this was really just a test – the lightning bolt from the custom shape tool in a 1050×576 PAL widescreen document with default lights and shading. A proper 3D program rips through this in under 30 seconds at excessively excellent quality settings, but Photoshop just fails miserably. *yikes* So in conclusion, I’ll just keep extruding my AI and EPS files in my trusted 3D applications, render them nicely in a predictable timeframe and just try to forget that Photoshop even has 3D. It simply doesn’t cut it and is a waste of time and effort!

…with Bodypaint and Photoshop. Yes, it seems after all these years someone has taken up the challenge of coming up with a "proper" 3D texture painting tool that gives the two old stinkers the boot. Especially Photoshop‘s sucky 3D painting abilities will now be even less attractive to 3D artists. Sorry guys, you have lost that battle and so has Maxon. Okay, Bodypaint will be with us as Cinema 4D‘s painting and UV texturing toolset, but has long lost its luster as a standalone painting tool. At the time it first appeared it was brilliant, but Maxon it has been stuck in limbo for several years now, with only minor additions and enhancements here and there. It’s easy to see how a tool, that runs in OpenGL, can handle floating point textures and seems quite beastly on other ends, too, might take the crown. Now add to that the ability to get animated textures with all those same features, this might even make After Effects users take a look… For the full blurb, just keep an eye on FX Guide. I’m sure over the course of NAB and until SIGGRAPH more wonderful details will be revealed. Oh, and they also announced some new stuff, including their 3D tracking features from Nuke X as a plug-in for After Effects, but unfortunately that’s the part where I don’t trust them an inch: They will probably make it so overpriced, it will be less than attractive for average users and people will gladly spend their money on SynthEyes for a few years longer…