I installed Adobe CS5 a couple of days ago, and of course immediately fired up Photoshop to see what’s changed. As usual there’s a dedicated What’s New link in the help index which leads to some interesting new features. As far as I can see though there’s no mention of my favourite new feature. Maybe that’s because it’s not exactly new…
Remember ImageReady? It was the .gif editor which shipped with Photoshop up until version CS2, after which it was removed. From CS3 onwards it was only possible to open animated .gifs in Photoshop by using (in fact mis-using) a script designed to import movie clips. Unfortunately this method also gave each frame a fixed delay (exactly as if it was dealing with a movie clip) and disregarded the orginal frame delays, making it impossible to edit animated .gifs properly in Photoshop.
Adobe support was very vague on specifics about the whole thing. What they did seem clear about was that I should use Fireworks for editing animated .gifs. My feeling was; it probably wasn’t not too much of a coincidence that this happened just after Adobe purchased Macromedia — and inherited their web graphics editor, Fireworks.
Up until that time I don’t think I’d ever been unhappy with a PS upgrade. But when Photoshop CS3 shipped with animated .gif support removed it felt more like a downgrade to me, and I’ve been whining and bitching about it to anyone who will listen ever since.
Thankfully (and I do mean that) I can shut the hell up now. Photoshop CS5 has quietly reinstated full animated .gif support. No import script, no silly work-arounds, just double-click the file to open it with the frame delays intact. Exactly the way it should have been from the first day ImageReady was abandoned.
Actually it’s a huge improvement over ImageReady, because it’s seamlessly integrated into the main Photoshop application, making the entire process of creating and editing animated .gifs much smoother. Sure it’s a bit late arriving, but it’s here now and it’s good. And to be fair, in the meantime Photoshop has continued to improve in lots of other ways.
I still can’t find any mention of any of this in the What’s New links. And in the help files, as far as I can see, Adobe seem to be behaving as if it’s been this way all along.
I was going to try to set up some kind of joke here about airbrushing mistakes out of history, but in the end I didn’t.