Fem korta frågor till John Nack

När jag når John Nack är det mitt under Adobe Max, den årliga officiella Adobe-mässan. Attans, jag borde åka dit, det är i Vegas och allt.

John Nack är Senior Product Manager för Photoshop. Dvs, ytterst är det han som bestämmer vad du kommer att få i CS3. Spännande jobb.

0. Hi John! It’s the Swedish Photoshoppers that needs your attention!

Hi Mattias, Greetings from the Adobe MAX show. Nice blog!  I’m envious that you get to use all those cool characters like ”å” that don’t appear in English. ;-)

1. Do you remember using Photoshop for the first time?

Absolutely.  I was in my first year in university (1993), and I’d just discovered email.  A friend wrote to me to say, ”You’ve got to check out this Photoshop thing!”  Once I did, I was absolutely hooked. Previously I’d used MacPaint, so I knew I was looking at a whole new beast. :-)

The minute I saw Photoshop, I knew it was a whole new class of application. I’ve only experienced that a few other times–with MacPaint in 1984, Photoshop in ’93, Netscape in ’94, and Flash in ’97.  Each time I thought, ”Wow, this changes everything.”

2. What made you feel that ”This is the thing, I’m gonna waste an enormous amount of time with this?

Well, I was a university student, so playing–er, working–in Photoshop was more fun than studying!  The thing that hooked me was a ”self expression” piece I did for one of my classes later that year.  The professor was kind of an old hippie, so we had a lot of freedom in defining the assignment.  I spent weeks camped out in the basement of the computer building, working with Photoshop and Director.

3. Favorite tool that can never ever be removed from Photoshop?

I really love the brush tool.  I know the interface has become rather complicated, but there’s an enormous amount of power in there.

4. Smart objects, smart sharpen and smart blur. Can Photoshop get any more intelligent or have we reached the peak?

Heh–we certainly think so, although we don’t plan to put the word ”Smart” in front of everything (just 50% of things ;-)).  Yes, I think that Photoshop can and will become a great deal smarter and more flexible.  Part of that has to do with advances in image science, letting computers ”see” objects and therefore select and adjust them more intelligently.  Another part has to do with leveraging the Smart Objects foundation and revamping the Photoshop user interface.  We have some rather ambitious ideas for the future, and the key measure of success will be how usable each feature is. (It’s no good to shove things into the app if only a small percentage of the audience can use them.)

5. What to you do with your own vacation photos? Do you retouch them?

It really depends.  Often I simply do global tonal corrections using Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom.  If images are particularly problematic (for example, if I’ve caught some lens flare that’s interfering with a composition), I may retouch those.  I also took quite a bit of time to retouch the shots from my wedding.

• John Nacks intressanta blogg
• Intervju med John på Photoshop News
• Inside Macs intervju