Reaper... no pencil tools for automation?

[stardustmedia]

I used GIMP for some years, and switched to Photoshop Elements at some point, and, it's MUCH easier to use. I know, it's not the same as Photoshop, but, frankly, if it was hard to use, noone would use it, unless it had a gazillion features other programs don't have. All the industry standard software is quite easy, and comfortable to use, otherwise it wouldn't be the industry standard. And, if you really think GIMP is easier to use than Photoshop, then, sorry, i really question your ability to judge ease of use.

Compare it to Affinity Photo instead of GIMP. GIMP was made by software engineers for other software engineers so it's a terrible example. I've been using Adobe products for a long time, even before they were Adobe products. Before they swallowed up Aldus and Macromedia. Macromedia Freehand had a much better workflow than Illustrator has today, and the case is the same for Aldus Pagemaker and Adobe InDesign. It's hard to gauge ease-of-use because there's hardly any viable competition.

Ease of use is always subjective. To certain degree. But a lot of things can be done better UX-wise in GIMP. I'm no graphisist/designer (don't know the correct english term) by all means, but had some hard times when switching from Photoshop.

Maybe if you start with Gimp, it's another story. When you switch from a software, you're familiar with and accustomed, you're very biased. It's hard to let go and start from scratch.

What ever tool you use, you must feel comfortable with it. It must not slow down your creative flow. And this is very personal, very subjective.

I don't know UX, how you work it out, what to consider, etc etc etc. I have to assume you cannot measure UX directly and there are always different solutions to achieve a highly user friendly UI.

Finally, everyone has to demo the apps himself to get a personal feeling.

[chk071]

I used GIMP for some years, and switched to Photoshop Elements at some point, and, it's MUCH easier to use. I know, it's not the same as Photoshop, but, frankly, if it was hard to use, noone would use it, unless it had a gazillion features other programs don't have. All the industry standard software is quite easy, and comfortable to use, otherwise it wouldn't be the industry standard. And, if you really think GIMP is easier to use than Photoshop, then, sorry, i really question your ability to judge ease of use.

Compare it to Affinity Photo instead of GIMP. GIMP was made by software engineers for other software engineers so it's a terrible example. I've been using Adobe products for a long time, even before they were Adobe products. Before they swallowed up Aldus and Macromedia. Macromedia Freehand had a much better workflow than Illustrator has today, and the case is the same for Aldus Pagemaker and Adobe InDesign. It's hard to gauge ease-of-use because there's hardly any viable competition.

True. I only used Gimp as an example, because it was brought up a couple of posts ago. I heard some good things abotu Affinity Photo. I used Serif PagePlus, which is from the same company, but, that one was quite overloaded in terms of feature, and GUI. Affinity Photo looks much more like it, because it looks much easier, and isn't overloaded with gazillions of tools on the GUI, like PagePlus is. Frankly, i can't even tell if Photoshop IS easy to use, because i only ever tried some older versions. I have a hard time believing though that it is NOT reasonably easy to use. I mean, come on, if it wasn't, then many wouldn't use it. And i can tell that PS Elements is VERY user friendly. Sorry for the comparison again, but i used Gimp for quite a while, it didn't nearly have so many automated tools to make quick adjustments, the content was crapped compared to PS Elements, and the GUI was worse too. The only thing i could say was better in Gimp was the way you could drag selection frames, anything else is much better in PS Elements. Gimp is a typical Open Source project. Quite ok, yet much too complicated for the common user, develops in snail pace, and perfoms quite badly, e.g. it takes much too long to load initially.

[nineofkings]

"Industry standard = easy to use" is not necessarily true as a general rule. Pro Tools is the industry standard DAW in many fields both musical and non-musical (radio, cinema foley etc) and is one of the least user-friendly DAWs I've ever used. I mean, in HD all rendering is real-time, and by default you can't have more than one plugin window at a time, and if you want to change audio devices you have to restart the program.

Don't have any experience with Photoshop but just wanted to point out the fallacy underlying a lot of these posts about it.

[Liero]

Just use ReaControlMIDI. Seriously.

How is ReaControlMIDI supposed to make the piano roll more user-friendly?

Because you don't need to use the piano roll at all for CCs. If you use ReaControlMIDI you can simply automate its sliders and use all the power of normal automation lanes. No finicky bars required, just automate your expression/mod wheel/whatever as easily as you'd automate track volume.

Have you, then, devised a way to edit automation lanes from within the MIDI editor, or some other trick to avoid having to close&open the ME every time you want to do a CC edit? In my line of work I constantly have to tweak notes, then tweak CC's, then go back to tweaking notes, so I'd need both functionalities pretty close.

[EvilDragon]

There's inline MIDI editor you can use instead of the full-blown MIDI editor, if you need to tweak notes here and there. Things end up like so:



That's one way. Another way would be to dock the big MIDI editor below the arrange or something.

[Liero]

There's inline MIDI editor you can use instead of the full-blown MIDI editor, if you need to tweak notes here and there. Things end up like so:



That's one way. Another way would be to dock the big MIDI editor below the arrange or something.

Interesting - any way to have all midi items by default open in inline editor mode?

(( EDIT= I mean that instead of showing up in arrange as midi items, have them show up as open inline editors. MIDI items in arrange dont show very much information and by themselves are pretty unusable as is))

[EvilDragon]

Only if you create a custom action to drop in a MIDI item and activate inline editing mode, but to have all MIDI items auto-show in inline editor mode, I'm not aware of that possibility.
I just have it bound to 'E', it's fast either way, but I rarely use the inline editor, really. CC editing in Reaper is fine for me so I use the big MIDI editor on secondary monitor 99.9% of the time.