Photoshop: Gradient editor needs a few improvements

"change the orientation of each point or handle in colour space." makes no sense.

do you really think it makes no sense, or do you mean to say you didn't understand it? RGB pixels are located in 3-dimensional RGB space. A gradient is a line or a curve that passes through that space, and you set the position of points on that curve. In photoshop, you have no control over the tangents of those points. If you were able to set the tangents, you might be able to get more creative control over how the gradient looks.

As written, it does not make sense - you left out significant context needed for it to make sense.

well do you understand it now?

Yes, between several of your posts you've provided some of the context to understand what you meant but didn't quite say.

I should add that it was faster to make the gradient using my tool than it was to use Photoshop's editor.

And I realize you can turn up the smoothness on Photoshop's gradient, but the artificial middle band remains highly visible.

That's the same gradient with the middle spread out slightly.

BTW - the halfway point between 255,128,0 and 0,0,255 should be 128, 64, 128 -- which is desaturated violet, not gray. You are trying to simulate something that is not the mathematical gradient between those 2 end colors.
You'd need complimentary colors (255,255,0 and 0,0,255) to get gray in the middle.

"That's the same gradient with the middle spread out slightly." the point is there is no good-looking way to spread out the middle point using photoshop!

And that is almost identical to your "desired" result above.

It's not the same at all.

I honestly don't get why you're being so hostile to this suggestion. I'm trying to help you make a fairly simply tweak that would greatly improve the usefulness of the application to me and many others like me. You haven't changed or improved this aspect of PS in at least a decade - it's very strange!

So far there isn't a useful suggestion here. I'm trying to understand the source of the problem, and so far it just seems that you prefer the UI that you wrote, and don't understand the existing UI in Photoshop.

Ok, here are three concrete UI suggestions that would help:

1 - allow the user to specify a non-RGB color space when designing gradients within an RGB document (for example, a gradient that traces a spline in LAB or HSL)

2 - allow the user to specify a custom gamma for the gradient when designing the gradient, without having to change the colour scheme for their whole document (which leads to huge problems as we see below where you post an image that looks completely wrong without realizing)

3 - best: allow the user to use bezier splines instead of cardinal splines for their control points. I'm honestly not sure what the best UI solution is for this, but it can't be that hard to solve.

1) The user can already specify the control points in a non-RGB space. I think you mean to allow a specification of which colorspace the control points will be interpolated in, before being converted to the document colorspace.

2) Again, I think you mean a gamma value for the interpolation before converting to the document colorspace. (and a gamma value for LAB makes no sense)

The example image difference was due to browser color management (wide gamut display matched, sRGB didn't) - not gamma. I should have opened the file instead of sampling values from the screen.

3) I've never seen a good UI for color gradients using bezier controls -- there are too many degrees of freedom involved (it becomes a 3D curve). One might exist, but I haven't seen it yet (and I keep track of all the curves and gradient UIs out there)

This is much closer to what you should have suggested in the first place.

No, just that you seem to be after an effect that doesn't normally occur in a gamma 2.2 space with just 2 colors, but is closer to what happens in a gamma 1.0 space.

The gradient tool doesn't have a window.
Are you referring to the gradient editor dialog, which does use the current document colorspace for it's preview?

Yes, the dialog. If you change the document to LAB color, it still previews gradients in RGB. If you change the document gamma, yes it affects the gradient dialog. But this is still an incredible inefficient way to work! And it means if you're using layers in a gamma 2.2 document, you have to make your gradients in a separate document and paste them across.

Add all this to the fact that changing the colour space still doesn't let you make a gradient that traces an arbitrary curve, rather than a straight line, through colour space.

How do you figure that the preview is different from the LAB document? The only time it is in RGB is when it draws to the screen, just like the document.

And why would you have to make your gradients in a separate document?

YOU make an arbitrary curve by setting the control points on the gradient - that's been there since Photoshop 4.0.

You really aren't making sense here.

> And why would you have to make your gradients in a separate document?

Because I don't want to work in 1.0 gamma space most of the time! All my compositions are in standard colour spaces, and I don't want to change them over just so I can make a good-looking gradient.

> How do you figure that the preview is different from the LAB document?

This is really a side topic, but: here's the gradient editor and the output of htat gradient with an image set to LAB. Note: they are not remotely the same:

http://i.imgur.com/k9EUPyI.png

> YOU make an arbitrary curve by setting the control points on the gradient - that's been there since Photoshop 4.0.

It's *not* an arbitrary curve, because you can't set the tangents of the control points.

> You really aren't making sense here.

Thanks for repeatedly telling me I'm not making any sense, by the way. That's really helping things. Are you actually in charge of this functionality or are you just standing in the way of the relevant person finding out about this suggestion?

It is an arbitrary curve, because you are setting the control points (there are no tangents to set). We're talking about a cardinal spline, not a bezier.

And I'm still trying to figure out what you're talking about.

Chris, seriously. That doesn't look even remotely the same. Are you kidding me?

I didn't embed a profile, so it may look different depending on your display and browser.

Chris, you could at least try to make the endpoints match.

So upload one with an embedded profile! The one you've posted here is nothing but an admission of defeat.

Again, you may be seeing something different depending on your display and browser. When I created it, they were a close match.

Ugh, that does not look remotely the same, and you have an ugly hard band between red and purple and between purple and blue.

Not the same, but close, because I didn't spend a lot of time trying to match it exactly.

You will never get it sufficiently close for design work, and you will never manage to get rid of those ugly banding problems, because it's a mathematical limitation of cardinal splines.

Bennett dude. You are on the money here. I have noticed this limitation too with gradients(not to mention it takes 3 UI windows to edit a gradient.) This forum is super frustrating and is pretty much filled with defensive engineers trying to tell us that things work, when they clearly do not have the experience using the tools in practice. They also are not visual. They really aren't interested in listening and understanding what we are asking for.

Many of our engineers (Dev and QE) are photographers, painters, and/or designers. In practice, we have far more experience, and are very visually oriented.

We are listening or we wouldn't be having the conversation and trying to understand what you are asking for (when the original requests are lacking).

Chris, your tone is still defensive and (worse!) condescending. You've got a dozen people on this thread who all clearly understand the problem that you continue to argue doesn't exist. You do realize you're operating in a customer service capacity, right? You're not helping.

Yep. Bennett is in the right, the devs are in the wrong. In no way are the default Photoshop gradient tool results good enough (not after seeing how much better the alternatives can be, at least), and in no way is all that fiddling and tweaking intuitive or acceptable, not for a +thousand-dollar piece of software (be it on the older CS suite, or the new CC subscription). And I've been working in the field (with Adobe CS, no less) for more than 10 years, so that's just my not-so-humble opinion.

Plotted this way, you can clearly see the "ugly hard bands" Bennett describes as corners in the plotted gradient path. The only way to get closer to Bennett's result in Photoshop would be to add more color stops, effectively just closer approximating but never quite hitting the smooth curve achieved by Bennett's gradient.

EDIT: Why closed for further discussion? David's posts are showing the existing gradient tools shortcomings in crystal clarity. Throughout this thread you've kept claiming either user ignorance or user miscommunication. Now that time has been taken here to show you EXACTLY what we're talking about, you're going to close the thread? You could at least acknowledge David's graphs with a "Oh, now I get it".