Over the past couple of days I've really started to play with some various photoshop plugins. I've always had a weird aversion to using plugins. In some ways I felt like by using them I would limit my understanding of the software and that is probably true to some respect. On the other hand, the end result of what I'd like to accomplish is mostly the same but in about a third of the time. Even still, I'm cautious about using plugins too much and usually try to use as much restraint as possible. It's very easy to overdo things and usually that will show in your photos in a very noticeable way.
All this talk about plugins comes from my use of Nik Software's Silver Efex Pro with this photo. I was lucky enough to be in the private beta test of this plugin and it has gone from a very limited black and white conversion tool to a pretty full-featured plugin complete with Nik Software's control point technology. The control points are one of my favorite features of all of the Nik plugins. They basically allow you to put a point on your photo and control certain parameters and the size at which those parameters effect the photo. Beyond that, these control points are smart enough to know not to mess with each other. It's not 100% perfect but it is pretty damn good at determining what your intent is and then allow one of the control points to override the other control point just for the area it thinks you want. It's a very neat way of making quick edits that can be very powerful and it is great to see plugin software of this quality.
On a completely different note, I wanted to just throw something out that was mentioned to me by a friend at the Orlando Python User Group that I attended last night regarding the UX of this very site. Josh mentioned that he found it odd that when you click on the current picture that it just takes you to a page with the same picture but more details and to get to the previous picture, you have to then click the photo again. I had thought about this before and really didn't like the design inconsistency that this causes. Shouldn't the user know that when the click on a picture that it will always take them to the previous picture? Of course the reasoning for this UI decision was strictly an attempt to keep the homepage clean and simple. Should the homepage just be the full detail page of the latest picture? I'm not sure. It just made me think about it a little bit more and about the fundamental design and just about every photoblog out there.
Since starting F/1.8, I've always run into design issues with navigation. With any photoblog the focus should of course be the photos and I've always been under the conclusion that having unnecessary text or arrows just distract from the focus and often result in an overall lesser user experience. I've thought about implementing a LightBox type of navigation where if you click the left half of the photo it takes you to the previous photos and if you click to the right half it takes you to the next photo. Adding something along these lines is just about on the 'must-have' list for a future update but it really doesn't solve inconsistent experience of getting from a homepage to the detail page about the most current photo. I do have one idea that I think might work but I'm not quite ready to talk about but if it can work the way I am hoping then it will be pretty slick and 'different' from most.
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