Photoshop: Adding Features You Don’t Need Since 1990
My Adventures as an Illustrator
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Photoshop: Adding Features You Don’t Need Since 1990<br>Here’s what Photoshop still gets wrong
David Mattingly<br>Aug 18, 2026
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I’ve been using Photoshop since version 1.
When I told my students that the original version had only one undo and one layer, they looked at me in horror. Layers didn’t arrive until version 3 in 1994.
Before that, everything happened on a single layer, so any mistake could cost hours of work. Today artists, including me, routinely use hundreds of layers and rely on seemingly unlimited undos.<br>Early on, I was part of the Photoshop beta team. Every year, I submitted the same four suggestions. Each time, the team responded, “Those are great ideas.” Then the new version would ship, and none of them would be included.<br>Here are those four ideas:<br>I work with a Wacom tablet, and I’ve always wished for a “reverse” checkbox on all brush controls. For example, I’d like to tie scatter to pen tilt so that when the pen is upright there’s no scatter, and when it’s tilted, the scatter increases. Currently, it works the opposite way. The same would apply to opacity: with “reverse” checked, a light touch could produce full opacity, and heavier pressure would reduce it. That may sound counterintuitive, but it would open up a lot of expressive control.
Painting with a sampled image is awkward. I wish you could simply Option-drag to select an area of an image and load it into the brush as a complete sample. Then, when you resize the brush, the entire sample would scale proportionally. As it works now, changing brush size crops into the sample or adds empty space around it, which doesn’t make intuitive sense. Artists think in terms of scaling an image, not slicing it apart.
I’ve often wanted something like an “image hose” brush. You could load multiple image samples, say ten, and the brush would randomly cycle through them as you paint. I ran into this while doing a matte painting that required thousands of tiny houses. Being able to paint a variety of houses randomly would have saved days of work.
In the Brush Tip Shape settings, I wish you could squash the brush from all four sides, not just top and bottom. Right now, you can make a brush fatter, but not thinner in the perpendicular direction without rotating it. The workaround, rotating the brush 90 degrees, adjusting it, then rotating it back, is clumsy. Direct control on both axes would be much more intuitive.
I always thought these were solid, practical ideas, so I was baffled that they were never implemented. My friend Brian Maffitt offered an explanation, when Photoshop releases a new version, they want to promote new features. They don’t want to say, “We finally fixed an old problem.” All of my suggestions involved improving or correcting existing tools, not adding flashy new ones.<br>That may explain why Photoshop continues to accumulate features no one asked for, while issues that artists deal with every day remain unresolved.
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