If you deselect the rotate view by selecting another tool the rotating will be disabled. When you deselect the enable Open GL option in the preferences under performance and restart PS Rotate view wont be able to work at all.
The new firmware does not effect the fact that accidentally putting two fingers on the touch pad will rotate and/or zoom your canvas without any settings depressed associated with the rotate/zoom tools.
The multi-touch gesture with the new trackpad does present problems for PS. There currently is no option short of disabling all OpenGL drawing features in CS4. Sorry that we didn’t have or know about the new hardware during development. We used the MacBook Air as a test platform.
We have a bug logged into Apple to investigate. Note that Safari also inadvertently zooms. For many users the sensitivity of the track pad in the area that used to be a "dead" physical button is triggering an unintended 2 finger gesture.
I, as well as at least 2 other people here who just upgraded to CS4 for the new macbooks are on the verge of returning CS4 and sticking with CS3. The rotation and zoom happen CONSTANTLY, no matter what tool is selected. Its killing our productivity.
I hear you, Joe. Unfortunately, I paid for a cross-platform upgrade to CS4 Extended… there is no going back for me. I’m training myself to keep my thumb down when using the trackpad and it has become more tolerable. It is still, definitely, an issue.
I’d just like to throw my voice in the mix as a user that is getting more and more frustrated by this. I’m just *trying* my best to keep my thumb off the trackpad so it won’t trigger. But old habits die hard.
And yes, the same issue exists in Safari. Although, I think it’s a bit *more* sensitive in Photoshop.
I’m relieved that Steve recognizes that it’s a problem. I just hope there’s a fix for it soon!
Here’s the thing: when it happens in Safari, it can be easily corrected with either the opposite trackpad gesture or hitting command+0 to reset the font size. In Photoshop it’s a matter of switching to the hand tool, switching that to the rotate tool, and manually typing 0 into the rotational degree input.
I’d love to see this fixed soon, too. The track record for niggling annoyances being fixed in Photoshop is not so good, so I’m a little skeptical about this being treated differently.
While I don’t have a new MacBook Pro to check this I believe that if you go to System Preferences, Keyboard & Mouse and select Trackpad you will have all kinds of options for disabling and controlling gestures.
Also why doesn’t Adobe simply add a way to turn this off as post #5 suggests?
Also why doesn’t Adobe simply add a way to turn this off ?
Typical of Apple, they think that they know best what users should use. That’s why I had to go through third party solutions to disable Spotblight and the Dashboard.
Just hang in there, some third party will write a little itty bit of code to disable this annoyance for you soon enough if Apple doesn’t do it.
its not apple, its adobe, they could of done research on what new features are coming out, knowing that most designers and photographers use photoshop and will love the new slim macbooks so they could have waited to release instead of just taking the macbook air test as golden. Thanks Adoblowme!
Are you running a new Macbook / Pro with the glass trackpad? It activates itself if it detects more than one finger on the pad. If you’re used to using your thumb on the bottom of the pad to click-and-drag then it happens a few times a minute until you pay better attention to it.
I would still like a fix from Adobe or Apple and I’ve logged proper trouble calls in to each.
I agree with the post above, while I was not aware of the "ESC" trick, and it’s completely useful, I still trigger the openGL rotate far too easily, and it screws me up oftenmore than that it just irritates me. I use photoshop for web graphics and have basically ZERO use for this feature.
Pllllleeeaaassssse let us turn it off.
You let us turn off the terrible tab interface (mostly), why not this too?
Turning off the OpenGL pref is not an adequate was of disabling the automatic rotate/zoom feature of the new MacBooks, as it disabled other features that I upgraded to CS4 for. That’s is similar to saying "if you want to turn your refrigurator off, you might as well kill the power to the entire house." It’s illogical, and not a fix.
Shouldn’t it be simple enough for Apple OR Adobe to add a simple "Turn off mouse gestures" options?
That makes sense but the part where it doesn’t make sense is that when you mouse gesture, Adobe activates the rotate canvas feature even if the tool is not selected.
(Obviously I know the answer now, the Adobe test team did not have a new Macbook while developing CS4, but c’mon, please patch it! It isn’t a stretch of the imagination that people want to run Photoshop on a new Mac laptop.)
Ideally Apple will change the System preferences to enable/disable any of the trackpad options. And even better they will allow them to be application specific, like MultiClutch (states it only works for Cocoa apps, hence no help here). I have no idea what they are planning, but I’m not holding my breath.
Separately, we are looking at a fix for this issue specific to Ps. I’ll post here when more information is available.
Ideally, Adobe would offer a simple checkbox in preferences like:
<X> "Use/Enable Apple Trackpad Gestures"
I don’t want to disable them systemwide, just as I don’t want to disable OpenGL. I want to disable the PROBLEM, which in this case is the implementation of the gestures in my Adobe apps (Photoshop and Illustrator). Even better would be an option to adjust sensitivity, but I’m sure that will come with CS5.
I appreciate that the QC team has responded to this but now as more and more people are buying MacBooks, I do hope the programming team can address this. You’ll only get more complaints are more MacBooks are sold and more people find this ‘feature’ absolutely annoying.
While you folks may suggest that this is "Apple’s problem", the fact is, Adobe elected to interpret a rotation gesture from Apple’s trackpad as a "Rotate canvas" in Photoshop. They do the same thing with the pinch gesture. If you’re not VERY careful on a newer generation Mac laptop, you end up rotating the canvas and zooming in and out wildly.
I’ve been using Photoshop professionally since about 1994, including literally thousands of hours on Powerbooks and MacBooks. Adobe’s implementation of Apple’s multitouch trackpad interface in CS4 makes this version of Photoshop nearly impossible to use.
I think, in practice, a user rarely, if ever, free-rotates the canvas in Photoshop. For the new Photoshop interface to assume that a slight re-adjustment of my fingers on the trackpad means that I want to spin the canvas around is just plain dumb. If Adobe doesn’t add a way to turn this off, I’m going to have to revert to CS3.
While you folks may suggest that this is "Apple’s problem", the fact is, Adobe elected to interpret a rotation gesture from Apple’s trackpad as a "Rotate canvas" in Photoshop. They do the same thing with the pinch gesture. If you’re not VERY careful on a newer generation Mac laptop, you end up rotating the canvas and zooming in and out wildly.
Actually, Photoshop followed Apple’s lead very closely. If you look at the gesture demo movies built into Leopard’s Trackpad system preference, they specifically show images being rotated and scaled in Apple Preview as if that was Official Apple Best Practice. No "interpretation" by Adobe is necessary. When Apple introduced multi-touch trackpads, image rotation and scaling were demoed incessantly to show off gesture support. After all the complaints Adobe gets from Mac users about alleged anti-Mac bias, they probably looked at that and said well, that’s how Apple does it, it’s easy to do, let’s do it Apple’s way. (That’s my own interpretation, not anything Adobe actually said.)
The difference with Preview is that it can only rotate in 90 degree increments, so unless you gesture past 45 degrees, the images snaps back to zero. With scaling, Photoshop also follows Preview’s model: The slightest zoom gesture changes the zoom level of the image. The reason it’s a problem in Photoshop is simply because nobody spends all day working in Apple Preview.
We all realize now that these gestures could use a bit more refinement, maybe a threshold of some kind that you have to overshoot before the gesture takes effect. Hopefully Apple will properly guide the way so that each developer can avoid having to fix these problems individually.
Having to press a key to activate rotation can be useful. I had to use Ps with the trackpad, and one get very often unwanted rotations. A lock to the rotate canvas tool’s option bar would do.
Just wanted to add my name to list of annoyed users who is always zooming in, zooming out, rotating the canvas…and always zooming in and out in Safari, too.
There is no way to make the canvas rotate on my desktop machine unless one deliberately activates the rotate tool. …It only happens on Apple laptops, so that puts the ball in Apple’s court, I would think
It is not the trackpad/rotate function made available on Apple laptops that is overall problematic. It is the application implementation of that function that is overall problematic.
In Photoshop IMO that makes it an Adobe issue, working in concert with host Apple. What I would hope to see would be an Adobe patch that provides a multi-parameter adjustment drop-down for trackpad operation under PS similar to the drop-downs provided for brushes, filters, etc.
in Safari, too …again points to an Apple issue.
Agreed it points fully to an Apple issue in Safari, because Safari is an Apple application.
I kinda feel at home here to see some many people have the same problem as I have in regard to the over sensitive multi-touch gesture control in Ps Mac version. I have to use a mouse whenever it’s possible. This is a perfect example of how a seemingly good feature can go terribly wrong. On a iPod touch I love the zoom/rotation 2 finger control, but frequently triggered canvas rotation in Ps can be really annoying. On iPod touch it’s not very sensitive and it snaps to 90 degree position, but in Ps it’s arbitrary and very sensitive and there’s no way to adjust the sensitivity. As to Apple’s Preview, the rotation/scaling with 2 fingers feels so much smoother and robust than Ps, try it side by side yourself you can definitely tell the difference. Honestly I would live with it if Ps behaves similar to Preview. What’s going on Adobe engineers? If it’s not implemented correctly the first time, please give us a fix ASAP.
I don’t think this is an Apple problem. I don’t want to change my multi touch settings globally across all apps, I only want to change it in Ps specifically.
Another checkbox each in the general tab of the settings panel to enable "Rotate View Tool", "Birdseye Zooming", and "Pixel Grid" would be perfect. The "Pixel Grid" might not be as crucial as the rotate and zooming preferences but could come in handy sometimes. Assuming the UI interaction and support is already there if the user is already able to disable OpenGL. If not, a simple graying out of the rotate canvas button would suffice in the UI end. I would guess most experienced users utilize the command + =/- buttons to zoom anyway.
In the future, working toward implementing a sensitivity settings for the rotate and birdseye would also come in handy but wouldn’t be as urgent if the option to disable them were made available.
I find myself using both a mouse and the trackpad and have the birdseye and rotate features activate far too frequently. It would help tremendously to be able to deactivate these.
I’m not saying new features are bad, just that training your userbase is very hard. Old habits die hard. Something I have learned in the web industry. People will fight any sort of change. We’re a tough crowd. 😉
Should Apple be held responsible to create a multi touch settings panel for every program I install? No. It’s hardware interaction with specific software, it should be handled by the program being used. Should the brush pressure sensitivity and other dynamics for Ps be handled in the Wacom settings panel?
Yes, I think Apple should still have the option of turning multi touch off in the system preferences but I also feel this is an application specific problem.
You are of course entitled to express your opinion. On the other hand, I’m equally entitled to express my own opinion, which relies on giving the statements by an Adobe Photoshop programmer more weight than I give yours.
I must have missed what they said about it then. I’m not seeing any posts in this thread from Ps programmers that say it is Apple’s problem. Maybe there was another thread regarding this issue that I haven’t seen. I haven’t spent much time here so that is entirely possible. If there is any info you might be able to help me with, I would appreciate it. I guess Buko also knows something I don’t (or you have to be a Ps programmer to give an opinion).
I do see a post saying "ideally Apple will fix the problem" which, to me, means they are hoping they don’t have to deal with it. I also see another post mentioning they are working on a Ps specific fix. (Thanks for the heads up Steve Guilhamet. Much appreciated. Acknowledging the problem and letting us know a solution is in the works is great for PR.)
I guess the point of my post wasn’t to try to convince you it is Adobe’s problem but to publicly give another point of view to the situation. You have been very vocal in this thread about placing the blame on Apple but I haven’t heard any real supporting facts either way. This thread needed some Josh B love and logic in it. 😉 I was also a little bugged by the lack of possible solutions posted here so I posted mine. There were a lot of vague complaints posted early on that caused the thread to meander off topic at first and not much else. It took nearly 30 posts just to find out the multi-touch gesture support for the new Apple notebook trackpads is the culprit.
I thought we might actually discuss the topic logically and perhaps get Adobe involved in a solution or possible solution that we would all be happy about. All I got was a snide remark about how long I have been programming Ps and that I am entitled to my opinion. _____________________________
Steve Guilhamet,
If the Adobe developers had to develop Ps specifically for multi-touch support, doesn’t that also leave the ability to disable those features (in-program) up to Adobe?
What was the response from Apple regarding the issue?
And, I’m sorry, but "Note that Safari also inadvertently zooms."? The gesture has to be pretty deliberate in order for Safari to "zoom" (ie: increase the font size). This is no where NEAR as sensitive as the rotate and zoom in Ps. Personally, I have never accidentally changed the font size in Safari through multi-touch. I never noticed the multi-touch features until they became problematic in Ps. I don’t think this issue and Safari’s text resize gesture are comparable. There sensitivity difference is too substantial.
Again, thanks for keeping us updated and somewhat in the loop about solutions.
Yes, Photoshop added code and we did already tune the rotation gesture to be less sensitive than it can be. The issue cropped up because we didn’t know about the button-less trackpad, which has no dead zone. We relied on an assumption that to enable a 2 finger gesture would need discrete user intention. The new trackpad design disrupts this assumption. Also, there are some gestures that happen at the system level which we don’t control (ie. 2 finger scroll).
Apple’s applications implementation for rotation only makes discrete 90 degree changes and thus the sensitivity for triggering the gesture can be really blunt. The Rotate View tool would be less than useful for 90 degree only rotates, though. I still have problems with pinch zoom in Safari, but that’s just my opinion (it’s actually not fine grained enough for me and I end up triggering when I don’t want, and zooming past where I want to stop in either direction).
All that said, Photoshop should be able to make it so the 3 gestures that are controlled at the application level can be disabled without having to sacrifice all the other OpenGL drawing features. Keep posted for ETA on a drop.
You have been a great help. I was beginning to lose hope in this forum as being a place to actually get help.
Just for the record, the 2 finger scrolling in Ps works very well and I use it frequentlyin case you guys were thinking about disabling it as well…
That’s interesting to hear your experience on the Safari zooming. Is yours actually zooming closer or increasing/decreasing the font size? (Mine does the latter.) Maybe the implementation of Multi-touch in the MacBook Air is different than the single button trackpads?
I’ll keep my eye out for the update. I am very happy with the customer service you have provided. The information shared has definitely left me feeling supported by Adobe and comfortable knowing we are being listened to and will be taken care of.
I was beginning to lose hope in this forum as being a place to actually get help.
this is a user to user forum. So other than give you advice from a users standpoint the majority of us can do nothing about reprogramming Photoshop neither can we do anything about Apple or the way they design their computers. You are lucky to get a response from Steve as Adobe employees have been quite scarce over the last few years.
I think Josh deserves credit for persistence and standing his ground.
I didn’t appreciate the problem either as I did not have a new MacBook Pro but am thinking of getting one. Anyone else that is should thank those who have persisted in focussing on the problem as they are helping to improve they way Photoshop will work on a MacBook or MacBook Pro and consider that the Mac Book Pro can now support 8 GB of RANM and probably 16 in the near future with two powerful graphics cards and two internal drive. Then it is now a much more important tool then it was before especially for a photographer working in remote locations and for those who must travel.
And of course Steve is doing a great job with the Open GL which has made my life so much easier and with better results.
And I point out Buko by your on words if you are just users then you really do not know who is responsible if anyone for the these types of problems.
I think Josh and the others deserve a thank you. And Steve as well!
The response from Steve was great but I was more or less referring to the lack of user help I received.
I guess I expected some constructive feedback instead of sarcastic remarks or telling me how difficult it is to discuss an often discussed "point" with somebody new to the forums. What this "often discussed point" is exactly, I’m not even sure. It wasn’t clear. I thought we were discussing possible causes/solutions to the problem so that we could potentially contact either Apple or Adobe requesting support. (Or hopefully get direct feedback from Adobe in this thread.) If we (the users) want this issue resolved in a way that we will be happy, it would be smart to diagnose the problem and come up with some possible solutions. Then, rather than have Adobe/Apple choose a solution for us, we can approach them with our ideas. We’re the ones using these tools day in and day out. Let’s make them work for us. At least that’s how I approach it but I am involved in a lot of usability testing and UX design.
According to Ramón, Adobe programmers have already said something about this issue but there weren’t any users willing to help me with that. I hope there are others with similar thoughts or questions. Maybe I was just the only person vocal enough to ask. (Me and my big mouth).
If you have any clue about programming at all, you would know that the gestures are included in something called an API or Application Programming Interface. In order to take advantage of any new feature in the OS ( Operating System for those of you not familiar) you need to use those Gesture API’s in your program to take advantage of them. Now these API’s, when implemented, will usually return some value for a given action, and it is up to the programmer to say how this value is interpreted. THIS MEANS THAT THE PROBLEM IS COMPLETELY ADOBE’S, the only problem that is apples is that when using the new trackpad, both fingers tend to be on on the track pad which magnifies the ridiculous sensitivity. The feature works great in other applications
As to the introduction of multitouch trackpads being after CS4 was introduced.. Multi touch was included in the Early 2008 revision of the MacBook Pros.. Long before CS4 was introduced.
Of course the track pad gestures were published before CS4 release, otherwise how does Ps support it. That’s not the thrust of this whole thread. The OP has always been talking about the new Late ’08 button-less trackpad.
Did you post to carry this discussion forward or was that just a vent?
The OP has always been concerned with turning off the gestures particularly because the new button-less trackpad (released after CS4) makes then unworkable. Ps provided a solution, and we continue to look at ways to make it workable with the new hardware.
Constructive opinion is appreciated. Shouting and name calling (from all sides) is noise.
Please include an option to disable the productivity killing (not to mention time wasting and annoying) multi touch rotate feature in Adobe Photoshop CS4.
Huh? There already is a way to disable that in 11.0.1 (because Apple didn’t include a way to disable it, or even understand the problem they introduced).
Explaining the origins of the problem; and telling you that Adobe has already provided you with a fix for something that was NOT of their making; is hardly "unprofessional finger-pointing"!
