Photoshop – IMG.LY Blog

Why our SDK is not Photoshop or Lego.

Magnus — Sun, 23 Feb 2020 23:00:00 GMT

PhotoEditor SDK (Software Development Kit) or more general white-label editor solution might sound like big words. And of course, we’d love to tell you that we are a jack of all trades. However, while our standard is to provide you with the most sophisticated editor solution possible, there are challenges to be faced on that path. Now, while I’d be more than happy to talk about all the reasons in favor of using our SDKs, I’m convinced you’ll get the clearest image of whether PhotoEditor SDK is the right solution for you when I tell you what we can’t do. So, let’s jump right in.

We are no Photoshop

First of all, it has to be said that image editing is a quite flexible concept. It relates to everything that alters the appearance or content of an image. From applying a black & white filter and adding text to make your Instagram-stories more epic, over cutting out undesired aspects of an image like an ex-boyfriend or altering ratios up to the point where the image does not display what was originally captured, for sure, some Tinder profile pictures.

Now, tools like Photoshop are built for professionals to edit images and polish them in hours of detail work. In other words: it’s an extremely powerful solution you can do ANYTHING with. And while this is its main appeal, its complexity is also why non-designers who don’t want to spend a lot of time learning how to use it — simply don’t.

However, that isn’t to say that these users don’t have a need to edit images for different purposes. This is where we come into play, making image editing and design accessible for everyone at the tap of a finger. While our PhotoEditor SDK doesn’t do everything, it delivers the set of tools your users really need and want to see in your app — no matter if it’s a social network, a printing service or a marketing tool — at a very high quality.

We are no Lego either

I guess many of us remember the joy of playing with Lego when we were little toddlers. No matter how crazy the idea, we put it together brick by brick eventually ending up with a quite colorful but yet solid plane, car or spaceship — thanks to Lego’s incredible modularity.

Can you approach using PhotoEditor SDK in the same way? No.
Is that a bad thing? No, again — actually quite the opposite. While freedom of design is often viewed as one of the greatest goods to strive for, it adds tons of complexity when building applications. However, right at the top of the must-have list is a smooth and intuitive UX. Hence, not every part of the editor can just be re-attached to any other place within it. Our designers created a well thought out UI that makes operating the editor simple and enjoyable.

You can think of it as a Lego building instruction. Sure, you could try to assemble that recently bought Lego product without it, by trial and error. However, as you didn’t purchase just a handful of randomly selected bricks, I’m convinced you’d love to successfully complete that flashy Millennium Falcon to proudly place it somewhere in your living room. Therefore, following the steps of the enclosed booklet is similar to editing your way through our well thought out UI.

Also, back then Lego seemed compatible with almost every other toy we owned, or at least, we didn’t mind mixing them up. However, when it comes to coding, not every brick attaches to any other brick per default. For instance, there used to be only rudimentary demos for the integration of our SDKs with a handful of frameworks available. Thus, making the standard integration as explained in our docs the best way for the implementation. That is, until now.

With our React Native wrapper, we have released the first in a row of framework integrations for PhotoEditor SDK. Feel free to check it out here. In addition, you should read the corresponding blog article my colleague, Alex, published a few days ago. The good news — our development team doesn’t stop there and will add more wrappers during the coming months. So, stay tuned.

If you’re interested in implementing the editor into your app or website using a framework, you should let us know which framework you’re interested in.

So, what exactly can you expect from us?

In essence: an editor solution that provides you with…

**·** a well-balanced feature selection serving a wide variety of use cases,

**·** a degree of customizability ensuring that no one will ever notice that your editor is a third-party library, and

**·** ongoing maintenance and support at an easy to calculate price over time.

To sum things up, ideally, you already know what you expect from a third-party editor solution. So, instead of telling you that we are the best choice for your use-case, I’d like you to be the judge of that.

We are happy to discuss any and every question you might have. Also, as qualitative feedback is always appreciated, we’d love to talk to you. Don’t hesitate to reach out.

Until then, cheers and keep it up
Magnus

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On the Democratization of Design

Daniel — Mon, 24 Jun 2019 00:00:00 GMT

Over the last century we have experienced the democratization of various domains of our lives:

Key drivers have been technological advancements and lower barriers to leveraging those technologies. In turn, technology became more accessible to more people resulting in products, services, and tools that improve our lives every day.

“Computers are a bicycle for the mind” — Steve Jobs

Tools, such as computers, allow us to finish more tasks in a shorter amount of time and with fewer resources. Even more importantly, said tools also rid us from boring and repetitive work, thus enabling us to shift our attention to exciting and more creative tasks, paving the way for us to experiment and create rather than repeat.

Evolve Design with better Tools

Proper visual design attracts, engages, and persuades; it helps convey stories and facilitates communication.

Nowadays, design in all its facets like advertising, social stories, product presentations, or merchandise is omnipresent in our daily lives. As there is no arguing that appealing and beautiful design has an impact on us and our surrounding, consequently there is also a growing demand for good design and easy-to-use tools.

“Use a picture. It’s worth a thousand words!” — Arthur Brisbamne

Although the importance of design is unquestioned, creating appealing designs remains hard for most of us, and there are many reasons for that.

First of all, design tools are still challenging to master, and while they empower professional designers to create stunning assets, they remain a closed book for most people.

Secondly, even if we leave most of the creational part to professionals, the average user is still unable to use existing designs as a basis to create new assets or refine and update small details. Even for the slightest changes, one has to get familiar with the inner workings of sophisticated design tools.

Also, when it comes to collaboration, the process with most tools is far from frictionless, to put it mildly. Still, most designs get shared as Photoshop, Sketch, or PowerPoint files, and there is no tool or platform that grants unhindered access for multiple stakeholders with varying degrees of experience with design solutions.

As today’s design processes regularly involve multiple stakeholders like designers, marketers, copywriters, or product engineers, one has to acknowledge that prevalent design solutions simply lack features and workflows that reflect daily routines.

Make Design Accessible through Technology

As we pointed out, the overall access to good visual design is still very limited, but with the growing need for compelling creatives in virtually every aspect of the digital and non-digital realm this shouldn’t be and it doesn’t have to. We believe in the democratization of design.

Better tools enable the democratization of design!

We believe that:

We need to overhaul design processes and methods to cope with the ever growing design needs and the ever-rising number of stakeholders.
Achieving elegant design must be made simple.
Design can be made accessible through technology.

The question remains: How do we achieve that?

We came to the conclusion that there are four key elements design tools should have that will make design more accessible:

Collaboration,
building blocks of intelligent design components,
automation of tedious design tasks, and
bringing together Editing, Compositing, and Layouting.

Collaboration

We hold as an opinion that design tools have to facilitate the collaboration between professionals and non-professionals, thus allowing an effective and frictionless design creation and adaption process. This includes direct collaboration on a design as well as the exchange of whole design templates, design components, and presets.

While some solutions already offer templates for content creation, we think that design components as a more modular approach are going to be a necessity to simplify the creation of new complex assets for everyone.

Building Blocks of Intelligent Design Components

If Lego™ taught us anything, then it is that creativity can flow when you base your work on a solid foundation.

That said, one has to admit that while the basic elements of design such as text, shapes, or images can be creatively combined in millions of ways to create stunning designs, they also can be used in a trillion ways to create underwhelming output.

Similar to modern UI design, complex building blocks will play a central role in the visual design process, allowing creators to be more efficient by removing repetitive tasks from the workflow and also allowing average users to create and adopt complex designs quickly. Intelligent design components will shift the focus to the composition by guiding the user in carefully chosen constraints.

Automation of Tedious Design Tasks

Speaking of intelligent building blocks, we believe that said blocks must not be static but adaptive to fit into an effective and frictionless design process. That may include the automation of certain design tasks like text layout or even abstracting away the complexity of image editing.

We envision that with the help of technology and specifically artificial intelligence, recurring and taunting tasks like for example, the separation of a picture into fore- and background can become totally interaction- and hassle-free. Even automatically choosing the right adjustments based on the image content will be possible.

Altogether, intelligent design components are a necessity and will be the next step in design automation, fostering a flexible and fail-safe adaption and creation process and thus ensuring that even without professional knowledge designs will be created faster and look better.

Bringing together Editing, Composition, and Layouting

Photo editing and layouting are both central to the design process. That is why, in a holistic approach, combining both will yield exciting new possibilities, improved visual consistency, and a reduced amount of friction while going back and forth between layout and photo editing.

Closing words

To sum it up: To democratize design, we need intelligent design tools and ecosystems that allow for the cooperation between all stakeholders, as well as a community that is open to share and learn from one another by building and sharing reusable and intelligent design components.