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

I admire Mr.Cox restraint in the face of statements like this.

well i said nothing bad or unpolite? it`s the truth.

No issue with politeness, I just seem to perceive Smart Filters and/or their benefits differently.
Please forgive me being snide.

And, Mx.Cox, I hope you forgive for referring to you unnecessarily in a thread that you are involved in anyway.

No problem Christoph. Yes, it is frustrating when someone confuses opinions based on a lack of information with truth.

as i said, i`m not a programmer. i just don`t think smart-filters are the perfect solution ;-) if you read my messages, try to imagine me being a nice guy :) without accentuation its often hard to understand written text the right way.

Yeah, like apply a filter the EXACT same way that you can apply a filter In After Effects. Adobe does make that app too, assuming that all Adobe apps share a common core and UI, I would think this should be "easy" but I'm willing to bet that they are a mess of legacy code.

"No professional I know uses layers, because they're not user friendly in our workflow" - several users in 1998 (who all use layers now)

Many users, around the world, do use smart objects regularly because they are so powerful, friendly, and flexible. There are books written about the workflows that smart objects enable. They do a lot more than non-destructive transforms.

Smart Filters take a while to calculate, because that's how long the filter takes to run on the size document you are using - they don't add anything to the time it would take to run them manually. It would actually be slower if you tried to use those same filters as "filter layers", and if you tried to work under the filter layer, it would be painfully slow (or just offer a bad UI by disabling and re-enabling the filters all the time).

We've looked at the possibilities, we've tried a variety of approaches (including what you propose - which users hated once they tried it). What you've got in Smart Filters is probably the fastest and most flexible approach.

i believe you when you say its faster than filter layers would be. I'm not a programmer just a user.

»no professional digital artist or retoucher in germany i met - and i know lots - uses smart-objects regularly.«
I work in a small neighboring country and I have observed among many professional Photoshop users an obstinate ignorance of the benefits of Smart Objects.
But that does not mean that the benefits are not there, just that those users don’t comprehend them or maybe have not bothered to read the »What’s new«-section in the Help for Photoshop CS2 (and possibly subsequent releases) ...
If you do not use Smart Objects in your workflow I recommend giving the matter some thought.
http://forums.adobe.com/message/34828...

hey christoph, i use smart-objects myself for the reasons mentioned in your link. it`s great while composing because it`s maintaining color space, vector data, and so on... all i`m saying is, smart-filters don`t kick it.

i`m not saying smart-objects should be kicked. smart-FILTERS should be :)

"Smart Filters take a while to calculate, because that's how long the filter takes to run on the size document you are using - they don't add anything to the time it would take to run them manually. It would actually be slower if you tried to use those same filters as "filter layers", and if you tried to work under the filter layer, it would be painfully slow (or just offer a bad UI by disabling and re-enabling the filters all the time). "

Smart filters could run hundreds to thousands of times faster if Photoshop updated its ancient filters to alternatives being evaluated by the GPU. There are other applications which do utilise the GPU to provide multiple stacked filters with which you interact with no perceptible lag, whereas Photoshop has to disable upper filters while you adjust one within the stack and then takes up to several seconds to refresh the image.

Even working with a single filter (except the recent introductions which are GPU-based) in standard non-Smart mode, Photoshop is a cross between a dinosaur and a sloth. There are alternative apps costing under $50 which make Photoshop look pitiful (in both performance and provided controls) when it comes to filters other than those which Ps does implement via the GPU - Liquify and Shift-Tilt Blur, for example, which are excellent.

No, use of the GPU has nothing to do with this.
And "filter layers" as a concept only work for trivial filters on small images before the computation costs explode. That math doesn't change with the GPU, it just makes the explosion a small percentage less painful.

And because we allow third party filters, not all filters will be using the GPU. Also, many of the existing Photoshop filters would run slower on current and forseeable GPUs because of the operations being used.

Sorry, but GPUs are not a panacea. They have their own problems, and they don't solve the basic math involved here.

I never tried to suggest that GPUs are a panacea. My post was truthful in what it actually does say.

A Smart Object is no slower than using a flat layer of the same size, and much faster than having all the component layers in your document. Somehow, I think you misunderstand Smart Objects and how they work.

and nearly all of the books by your so called professionals with photoshop secrets and great professional stuff are lame. for most of the stuff they hype, there are better, faster easier ways that are used in professional businesses. nobody thinks smart-objects are user-friendly. graphic designers use them a lot i heard. but not retouchers. i know nearly every single professional retoucher in germany by name - i talked to nearly all of them because i started writing a book about how people use photoshop in such different ways creating their own techniques - and i wanted to pick the best workarounds for this book. i have no chapter about smart-objects.

Retouchers use them quite frequently. Just because some of your acquaintances have no knowledge, or misinformation, about Smart Objects - that doesn't make them bad, just poorly understood.

no don`t get me wrong we use smart-objects for the reasons i mentioned before - i mean smart-filters! we all know them, we`ve all tried them they just don`t fit in our workflow. maybe american retouchers have a different approach :-) ha

adobe doesn`t even mention retouchers on their website as their target/user group :-)))

Nor do we mention all the other 300 known market segments....

As Mr.Cox has explained (might have been in another thread) Adjustment Layers can work fast because the calculate their effect for each pixel based on that pixel’s values alone, Filters on the other hand can derive the resulting values for a pixel from a huge number of (other) pixels, so the task is much more complex and does not lend itself to a Filter Layer implementation easily.

Thank you for merging this Chris.

I think this would be very powerful and helpful even if there's a "slow" responses, and even if there needs to be a "render" button or sorts.

Just like when you try to resize a smart object with smart filters and it warns you that the smart filters won't display until the transformation is done, the same could apply when you move a layer under the adjustment layer.

We actually tried the idea at one time.. and prerelease users used a lot of expletives and creative invective to describe how slow and unwieldy it was.
It's not just slow, it's too EXPLITIVE slow to use.

It is basically the same request.
No, PixelBender is still a filtering operation and cannot be used like an adjustment layer - the performance would be horrid.

An adjustment layer API might be possible, but not easy. We've shown some third party developers the limitations we have to live with to keep high performance and stability - and they had a lot of trouble trying to understand and deal with those limitations.

You would definitely know more about pixel bender's performance limitations than I would but my understanding of it was it was basically a fragment shader language whose very purpose is generally for high performance real-time redraw via the GPU which I'm quite familiar with (hello from the Zynga building from across the street). As with any tool though, you of course can abuse it past the point of usefulness if you're careless.  This even includes the existing tools in photoshop of course.  But discussion about pixel bender is moot I suppose because, as you've mentioned, it's dead.

In any case, I would absolutely LOVE to see a dedicated API for this.  I can think of many applications - even with the limitations.  Every year or so I check to see if one exists and am disappointed.

Pixel Bender was a GPU library.  Real-time was not really part of it's design, and it was a very general filter system.

If you're in San Jose, we could meet and go over more of the "it's more complex than you think" details.

Yup, PhotoLine has also been applying live filters to layers without the need for smart objects for years and years now.

However, Chris Cox is correct in stating that at a certain point of complexity live filters do slow down things. At that point smart objects can alleviate performance bottlenecks in your layer stack. Affinity Photo does not yet support smart objects. PhotoLine does, which gives it the best of both worlds.