Consistency in filters (live and not) and masks

[wfolta]

I got Photo a couple of days ago and it's pretty much exactly what I've been trying to find for years. Kudos!

 

Two things that have frustrated me:

 

1. Live filters versus destructive filters. This looks like the typical seam that arises when a program starts with one way of doing things (destructive filters, in this case), then adds a new way of doing things. Seems to me that Photo is too young for this kind of legacy interaction. Especially since it appears that the way of the future is live filters.

 

The ultimate way to fix this is to only have live filters, with a separate option to freeze a filter's results. (Or to rasterize a layer.) I don't think Photos is so old and has so much of a legacy tail to drag that a change can't be made.

 

A much-less satisfying solution would be to have only one way to select a filter, but the filter dialog could have two tabs: Live and Static. That way, it would be possible to have different options available for each -- Static might have more options since they don't have to be performant in real time -- but at least there's only one "Gaussian Blur" in the menus.

 

2. Applying filters to areas of a layer. Some of this inconsistency is due to item #1: destructive filters don't show up like live filters, so the selection is hidden/baked into the layer. My main concern is when I might decide that I want to restrict a filter to portions of a layer after I've applied the filter. The "Yeah, that makes the whole thing look better and... oh, it does mess up the video screen in the background, so I really want to apply it to the entire layer except that rectangle" issue. I've struggled mightily with this and the Mask to Below helps a bit, but it's a pain.

 

Try using Quick Mask after the fact. Nope. Try turning a pen-tool rectangle into a mask and then invert it to select everything except what's in the rectangle. I couldn't get it to work. Seems that some masking (or selection) works with black/white and other works with the alpha instead. Maybe masking/selection is more consistent than I understand, but it's been the thing that I've spent a lot of time struggling with a program that's otherwise very intuitive.

 

Thanks!