Smart guides appear infrequently on my machine; sometimes they are there, usually they are not. And when they *do* appear, they’re usually visible for much too brief a time to be useful.
I think the Smart Guide "Target Zone" should be expanded. They should appear in one color as you approach the target, and turn another color when you’re on target. They also should work with the nudge keys.
I haven’t even used them, and I know the implementation is half-baked.
Why the hell CAN’T guidelines in Photoshop have more functionality like they do in Illustrator? Cripes, if they’re going to revamp and update them, why stop at "Smart Guides"? It’d make a lot more sense to have "Guide Layers" with togglable visibility, color shoice and the ability to be rotated.
I love and respect what you do Chris, but that’s a lame response.
Illustrator has had great features with guidelines for years, and some of us have been asking for a little parity (or even greater functionality) in Photoshop for several versions now.
Is there anything that would make it difficult or overly bloatfulicious?
I’ve detailed in "Feature Requests" a handful of functions that would make guidelines much more useful, and given your team’s History, I could imagine you guys might even come up with additional functionalities even nicer than those I’ve thought of.
"Yes, there are things that make it…potentially slow."
I’m not buying it…
More potentially deceleratory than, say, gigantic blurs or small-cell Filter—»Extrude, among other horsepower-straining functions? People seem to live with the speed of those.
Difficult? I’ll have to take your word for it, for the most part. But that’s not to say I wouldn’t enjoy hearing a little more detailed explanation about why, nor that I might understand the explanation. Aren’t the math and display routines already there. Aren’t guidelines based pretty much on vector routines?
My inclination is to believe that enhanced guideline functions just aren’t a selling point with the big drama of stuff like Perspective cloning, and therefor keep getting sidelined when new features are discussed.
I could live with the guides as they were meant to work in their present incarnation if they would work reliably. As it is, they seem to be overly sensitive. They flicker on and off so quickly that it usually takes me 3 or 4 attempts to get it right. And that’s IF they appear at all. Often they don’t show up on the first pass, or the second, or the third. Then I find myself moving one object back and forth over another, waiting for the guides to show. Moving, waving, waiting…
SO, it takes me longer, usually MUCH longer, to position objects using Smart Guides than it does using Layer Align, so no time savings here. Quite the contrary. And it doesn’t seem to matter what the zoom level is (I thought 100% was the ticket, but I was wrong), or whether I’m using my mouse or my Wacom.
OK, this is pretty wild. I installed a couple of Optional Plugins, Disable Scratch Compression Registry Key and Optimize Redraw Drawing Registry Key. I also disabled Write Combining for my video card.
Suddenly, I have Smart Guides everywhere, on everything. Even the edge of the document shows up, which it never did before. I guess I should try to figure out what fixed it, but I really don’t care.
Chris…could you elaborate a little about the difficulty and potential slowness aspects? Perhaps if I understand a little more, I might not continue to be such a pesterhead.
<pesterhead mode ?level="only slightly annoying"> OK, I’ll give you that. But how about a layman’s explanation tailored to someone who isn’t a complete bonehead (most of the time, anyway). At the very least, a quick comparison with why the guideline functions of Illustrator 8 work quite well, even if I have loaded a document with 20 MB of raster image layers, and why this is so much different than it would be for Photoshop. </pesterhead mode>
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