Adobe Photoshop has been on the leading edge of digital image editing since, well, the beginning of digital images. They’ve been the foremost application for digital images on the internet, in print and in practically any visual media you can think of. Literally millions of graphic artists, photographers, designers and people who communicate visually have used the program, and also millions of people who just love to do cool stuff with their digital pictures.
Many of the images that you see every day, from book covers to movie posters, magazine art, brochures of all types and much more have been either wholly created or edited using this powerful program. It’s stable, intuitive and lets’ you be creative in many ways that only a few short years ago would have been nearly impossible to do on a small scale and would have been enormously costly. So yeah, it’s a darn good program.
But, despite being an awesome program, it does have flaws. While the main software has been updated every year or two, for example, there are parts that haven’t been touched in nearly a decade. One of these outdated areas is the ‘presets’ collection that Adobe ships with the software — the brushes, patterns, actions, shapes, and styles. The original presets are simply not suitable for professional design. If you’ve used Photoshop lately you likely know this first-hand.
Enter PsDefaults
Developed (and still under construction, frankly) by a small group of creative types who take their design quite seriously; PsDefaults is the updated, modern collection of presets that Adobe should have included in Photoshop but still hasn’t.
What’s cool about this new resource (being funded on Kickstarter as we speak) is that it is designed to be a complete replacement for your existing Photoshop presets without the need for hours of searching and downloading. For 20 bucks, PsDefaults gives you access to a metric ton of new design elements (they also offer a free mini-kit) — useful new brushes, updated and modern shapes, and newer, better artsy-fartsy stuff. I downloaded it and it took about 6 minutes to install. After using it for a day now, I have to say that this set is a huge improvement and definitely a worthwhile upgrade to Photoshop.
The design group promises that, once they’re done getting the funds they need on Kickstarter, their new baby will have over 1000 new, hand-crafted design elements that will make Photoshop rock. I for one am hoping that this happens because, as upgrades go, this one has got some real potential.
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