TWENTY years or so ago, Adobe Photoshop was, as its name suggests, primarily a tool for professional commercial photographers. Strange though it may seem for a company that now sells its software via a “Cloud” subscription service, the web was not at all on Adobe’s radar in those days. “Save For Web” was not even a widely held concept, let alone a Photoshop menu option.
This vacuum created an opportunity for independent developers and designers. Which is how the very talented Craig Hockenberry of Iconfactory and I came to release Furbo Filters, an indie shareware product that let designers prepare images for the web. It did a few other things as well, such as offering garish, psychedelic treatments you could apply to any image—not unlike the far more expensive (and also far, far more developed) Kai’s Power Tools. (And you know what they say: if you’re old enough to remember Kai’s Power Tools, there’s a Drop Shadow in your closet. But I digress.) Some of you may have used DeBabelizer to manage your web color palettes in those days when Adobe and Photoshop ignored the web. Some may even have used Furbo Filters.
Then Adobe created a “Save For Web” option (in Photoshop 5.5), and Furbo Filters’s beautiful market was gone in a moment. All that remains as a memento of that time and that product is the domain name furbo.org, which is where Craig keeps his blog.
I was reminded of this during a workplace discussion about the seeming disappearance of “Save For Web” from modern Photoshop.
To be clear, “Save For Web” still exists in Photoshop CC 2015. But it has been rather awkwardly deprecated, as revealed through both UX (“Save For Web” no longer appears in the part of the interface where we’ve been trained to look for it for the past twenty years) and language: when we stumble onto “Save For Web” hiding under Export, after not finding it where we expect it, we’re presented with the words “Save For Web (Legacy),” clearly indicating that the feature is no longer a recommended part of today’s workflow.
Adobe explains: “Because Save for Web is built on the former ImageReady product (now discontinued), the code is too antiquated to maintain and develop new features.” (If Furbo Filters and DeBabelizer didn’t resurrect dead brain cells for some of you, I bet “ImageReady” did. Remember that one? Also, how scary is it for me that half the tools I’ve used in my career only exist today as Wikipedia entries?)
Instead of Save For Web, we’re to use Export: Export As…, which Adobe has built on its Generator platform. Stephen Nielson, writing on Jeff Tranberry’s blog for Adobe, explains:
Adobe Generator is a new, modern, and more efficient platform for exporting image assets from Photoshop. We have been building new capabilities on top of this platform for the past two years, including the new Export As and Device Preview features. The Generator platform allows us to build new, streamlined workflows and incorporate more efficient compression algorithms like PNGQuant into Photoshop.
The new Export As workflows are a complete redesign of how you export assets out of Photoshop. Export As has new capabilities like adding padding to an image and exporting shapes and paths to SVG. We also introduced the Quick Export option, which allows you to export an entire document or selected layers very quickly with no dialog.
Going forward, we will no longer develop new features in Save for Web, which is why it now is labeled as “Legacy”. Don’t worry; no features have been removed from it and we know there are critical workflows that still require Save for Web. However, Save for Web does not support, for example, new Artboard documents.
—Jeff Tranberry’s Digital Imaging Crawlspace, “Save for Web in Photoshop CC 2015”
While I believe the Export As function is built on newer code, and I get that Adobe is committed to it, after months of use, I still spend a tremendous amount of time searching for Save For Web whenever I use Photoshop. And when I make myself use Export As, I still don’t feel that I’m getting the speed, power, and options I loved and came to depend on in Save For Web. This is a subjective reaction, of course, and “users hate change” is not a truth to which designers are immune—but I’ve yet to meet a designer who prefers the new tool and doesn’t feel confused, frustrated, and bummed out about the switch.
What I’m saying is, Craig, let’s talk.
