Photoshop: Non-destructive filter layers instead of smart-filters

Some apps get away with the concept on screen size images, but at higher resolutions - the computational complexity kills usability. If you do the math, you quickly figure out that live "filter layers" just can't work well on anything but tiny screen rez documents (and even then only if you use a few filters, stack more than 2 or 3 up and it gets painful to use).

Smart Filters give you the re-editability, an explicit update step (since realtime updates would kill performance and usability), and have the benefit of work on real world image sizes.

well... please find a way because smart-filters are really killing the workflow!

no professional digital artist or retoucher in germany i met - and i know lots - uses smart-objects regularly. because it`s not even close to user-friendly enough to fit in our workflow. it just plain stinks. the only reason to use it, is when you need to downscale images within a composing and want it to be non-destructive.

by the way - smart-filters also take ages to calculate if you use 2 or 3 of them.

i`m sure there are way better possibilities.

okay - i believe you've tried. but if i add smart-objects to my files the get slow as hell. and this is a common problem all retouchers i know have. everyone is like: oh there are smart-objects in there, thats why.

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled
Effect Filters / Adjustment Layers for effects.

In the same way you can create filters to change level, brightness, color, etc, it would be great to be able to create filters that apply effects such as blur, sharpen, etc. With masking it would be a great way to losslessly retouch photos and apply depth/soft focus to illustrations.

This reply was created from a merged topic originally titled PHOTOSHOP - Pixel Bender adjustment layer.

Adjustment layers are one of the most powerful tools in Photoshop.  I love them, but they have a pretty limited selection.  As a game developer I have often come across the need for the ability to write my own to accomplish my goals more efficiently - specifically with the ability to see the results of the filter in real-time like adjustment layers.  Use cases include visualizing/authoring texture channel data for shaders, or a real-time indexed palette filter (as described in my blog http://danfessler.com/blog/hd-index-painting-in-photoshop)

My suggestion is to create an API to create custom adjustment layers.  It turns out Adobe has already done quite a bit of the legwork with pixel-bender.  If there were a new adjustment layer type that accepted pixel bender files, then this would be a perfect solution (and is GPU accelerated to boot)

would this be a reasonable feature?

Hey Chris, thanks for the response in the other thread.

"1) No, you can't have filters as adjustment layers, the math just doesn't work in the user's favor (i.e.: too slow to be useful)"

I understand that filters would be too slow, which is why I didn't request filters (also why it doesn't make sense to merge my topic with this one, I read up on previous posts regarding smart filter requests).  This feature would need to be it's own API independent of filters that operate purely on individual pixels within a single pass given provided inputs.  This would have the same performance footprint as any other adjustment layer.

"2) PixelBender is gone and will not be coming back."

The former is why I suggested PixelBender specifically - it meets the performance criteria and can be limited to single-passes.  I'm not sure of the reasons why pixel bender died, it sounds unfortunate, but the premise of my suggestion still stands.  If not Pixel Bender, then simply a dedicated API that has limitations which favor performance would suffice.

Would this approach to the problem resolve any technical resistance to adding such a feature?

thanks!
-Dan

Solution: applying filters to folders or as in adjustment layers
Smart objects is slow. You need to be grouping into smart objects to apply the same effect.
Adobe we need more productivity. This solution would be great.

This program uses smart objects directly without having to convert each image. Also uses non-destructive layer filters that affect more than one layer. He also has a layer mask for each filter.

I like photoshop, but AP is incredible in its first version. I also like its Price.