I’ve been getting a lot of email from excited photographers about our next set of actions, set to debut in mid-June, and I thought I’d take a little time to answer some of the questions people had. So from my hotel room in Chicago, here are some things that you might want to know (or might not give a rat’s ass about):

Q: Will TRA2 be an update to the Totally Rad Action Mix, or a separate product?

A: TRA2 is a completely separate set of actions, and will be sold as such. Any updates / bugfixes will be made available for free to customers who already own the product, but TRA2 is a completely different product, with its own pricetag. Think of it more as a sequel than an updated version.

Q: How many actions will be in the new set?

A: Currently we have about 50 new actions in the set, but the final number will probably change a bit. I have at least three more additions that I want to write, and we might yank one or two from the final version. If it’s lame, it doesn’t make it into the set, and I’ve killed at least a dozen actions that I wrote for the next set, only to decide later that they’re just not good enough.

Q: How much will TRA2 cost?

A: The price will likely be $149.00 or similar. We’ll probably also make a combined package with both sets of action available, as a discount vs the combined retail total of both sets.

Q: Are you developing something for Lightroom?  Now that I have LR, I hate using Photoshop, and want cool presets.

A: We are, but don’t expect miracles.  Lightroom is an impressive program, but most of the things that you love about TRA, and will love about TRA2, just simply can’t be translated into a preset for Lightroom.  The capability for tweaking photos afforded by LR is actually a lot more limited than people would think, but we’re going to be looking into exactly how far we can push the program very soon, so maybe we’ll discover some things we didn’t know… stay tuned.  But don’t expect LR presets to be able to replace or replicate the functionality available in Photoshop.  It ain’t gonna happen.  Adobe isn’t going to take a 60% pay cut by replacing Photoshop with something that costs half as much.  Beyond basic color and exposure corrections, Photoshop is still king.

Q: I read some earlier blog posts about scripts and plugins – what exactly IS TRA2?

A: TRA2 will be another set of straight Photoshop actions. What follows is a slightly geeky rant, so beware… When I sat down to start working on another set of Photoshop tools, I looked at all the different ways that Photoshop is programmable and extendable, and every option was on the table. Photoshop’s scripting system allows you to automate the program in three ways – with actions, scripts, or automation plugins. Actions are great because they offer single-click operation via button mode on the layers palette, and because people who want to learn more about Photoshop can pick them apart to learn what’s going on. So they simultaneously offer a way to accomplish complicated tasks, as well as a learning tool. One big downside is that they don’t offer any ability to modify their own behavior based on the context of the image, which means that they operate in a very “dumb” way. For instance, there’s no way to change the radius of a gaussian blur step based on the pixel dimensions of an image. This means that many actions will behave very differently on web sized images than they do on full-res images. The other downside is that they are stateless (geek terminology for the fact that they can’t remember information between executions). And finally, they don’t offer any kind of user interface, aside from the ability to pop a simple, alert-style dialog via the “stop” command.

Photoshop scripts circumvent all those major issues, but unfortunately, Adobe decided that scripts would be called via the scripts menu, which, unfortunately, is very cumbersome. It’s too many mouse clicks to get to things, when you’d be calling 4 or 5 scripts per image, and the scripts menu itself doesn’t offer you any way to organize things. So if you had 50 scripts, it’d be a pain to use. We looked at having scripts run most of the logic, and just calling the scripts through actions, but, again, Adobe unfortunately chose a very cumbersome way of referencing scripts from an action. Actions in Photoshop reference scripts through OS-specific, hard-coded paths. So basically, installation would be a nightmare for most people. Since the .atn file format is proprietary, and unpublished, and basically a nightmare to try to parse, generating custom, installation-specific atn files is out, too. So scripts were a non-starter, ultimately, because I just didn’t like the user-experience compromises that they entailed…

Which brings us to automation plugins.  Those don’t have the drawbacks of scripts, from an integration perspective, but they also are compiled machine code – which means different versions for mac and windows plus decreased compatibility overall.  Since plugins are actually compiled, and not interpreted code, they have the potential to crash Photoshop, and otherwise cause more system instability than interpreted programs that run inside Photoshop.  Plus, they’re much more of a headache to develop, and relying heavily on automation plugins would have doubled development time, or more, meaning less actions for you guys, or a higher price tag, or both.

So the long and short of it is that just writing things as actions gets us most of what I wanted for this next product, and the other options, after much exploration, all had fatal flaws, based on my priorities for what the end user experience would be like.