I found some of the concepts a little hard to grasp, but because this was the first computer painting app that I had ever used, I assumed that all painting software was a little removed from the reality of painting with traditional media, and that Satori was no different.

(I'm leaving out my six months working with Quantel Paintbox some ten years earlier)

Eventually I got my head around Satori's way, and started to enjoy some of the more mind-boggling aspects of the program. The toolset seems so natural to me now, that I find that it's other programs that are weird to use.

So my question is this: What are the features of Satori that you personally have found the oddest, the most un-intuitive, the hardest to implement, etc.?

Please try to offer specific aspects rather than generalisations in your replies, and perhaps recall your solutions and work-arounds to the problems you met.

Bugs should really be regarded as off-topic here, and posted in a different thread.

Let rip!

Michael Hirsh

the first weird thing a new user would experience is the pixellated zoom and the need to press the hi-rez button. actually, i have never found a zoom useful, until i hi-rezzed it.

i use satori only for painting.

satori is great at this, no major difficulties here.

but the actions pallette can be a bit obscure to new users. in particular the geometry section contains many settings behind many tabs that a user may not be aware of.

the colour mixing and selection is also really not my favourite part. i can never select the right colour in one click somehow. especially muted colours are a pain, you always have to mix. i'd really love a HSB system.

workflow-wise i really wished the brush size panel were separate. in painting i switch like crazy between the brush tab and the size tab.

compositing in satori has always been hell to me, due to the weird way of scaling, rotating and distorting. while doing these actions there is no useful graphical feedback. in composition i judge form and proportion by the eye, and having some grid feedback or numeric input is just useless that way.

so i find myself compositing satori-made images in photoshop. that should not be necessary, right?

ok, that was my rant ;)

william

note: remove the z from my e-mail address.

In hindsight I think I should have entitled my post; "What makes Satori difficult to learn?", but as you probably know, there is a limit to the number of characters permitted in the titles on this forum, which meant that the "to learn" bit had to be cropped, or dropped, or something.

What has happened as a result is is that the topic has wandered off into a sort of collective rant about the pros and cons of Satori, which is quite valid, but as I originally suggested, the subject for another post.... Anybody remember the famous "Wish List" thread on the old I/US forum, that just ran and ran?

Peter, I agree that the brush size presets are irritating. I never, ever use them. I always use the sliders, even though I lose sight of which brush is currently selected. I suggest a flag just above the brush tabs that indicates the currently selected brush, whichever tab is active.

The 'absolute save' state woud be a boon. I ,too, hate the red / green colur palette > mix tab preset, especially after a (rare) crash.

Your idea of an unzoom window is great. I find myself propelling my chair backwards in order to get a long view of my work. Thank heavens the chair has castors....

As to "catching" the edge of the frame, I always work on a centred window, for the very reason you give.

Don, your first point really gets to the nub of my original (abbreviated) question: "Satori's interface is awkward" Can I ask : In what way? Perhaps I am too used to it; It all seems so logical to me. That might be because three years of day-to-day familiarity has blinded me to the shortcomings of the GUI.

Is it the split between some of the functions? I.E. some are only available from the menus and some only from the Actions palette?

Your idea for a links list / database is an excellent one, by the way. Fingers crossed for that one to make it past Mark Lister.

My underlying reason for starting this thread was that I was hoping that users who had real difficulties getting to grips with Satori might reply, and give me some ideas for future tutorials on my website. At the moment, I just launch into whatever takes my fancy, or use some recent experience of Satori's versatility as the basis for a tutorial. I have no idea whether anybody wants to read this stuff! I was really trawling to find out which aspects of Satori might need fuller visual explanation for beginners, particularly, and whether there might be a need for a specific tutorial based upon people's needs rather than my personal whims.

Meanwhile, anybody want to start a wish list thread?

Or what about a thread called "What do you use Satori FOR?" Judging by the array of problems that users have with Satori, and their wishes for its improvement, it seems that we use the program to tackle a very wide range of graphic projects.

Here's hoping that all our problems find their own solutions.

Michael

Your main question of 'what makes Satori difficult to learn?' is important as there does seem to be some element about the app which ultimately puts a fair few off, even after giving it a test drive. For example, searching the Sijun forum came up with a couple of previous threads discussing Satori (with a similar thumbs up conclusion to the recent postings), but no further responses, i.e. no evidence of anyone really taking it on and running with it.

I'm always astounded how anyone can start using Satori - particularly for print-res illustration - and then cheerfully return back to PS/Painter and re-enter the bitmap nightmare. Somehow, I think that the vast majority just miss the point entirely, perhaps because for them resolution really isn't an issue. Secondly, at first glance Satori's toolset perhaps seems quite limited; functions like flipping a layer or whatever are hidden away in the land of numeric input, slightly off-putting to those used to the lead-by-the-hand GUIs of PS and similar.

Satori puts two largish hurdles in the path of the user - a new approach to generating content *and* an unorthodox GUI. Personally, perhaps because I had previously played around with 3D, the idea of incorporating rendering into my workflow seemed absolutely normal and logical. The interface was another matter entirely, but because I loved the technology I took the time to adapt.

Michael, your tutorials are always interesting because you're always exploring new avenues in using Satori. By contrast, I have evolved a particular workflow over the past year which I rarely alter, other than sporadically designing new brushes and altering technique accordingly. Bearing your own spirit of adventure in mind, I have used Satori to generate the graphical elements for my (almost ready!) website, something I would have probably done previously via Painter or PS. In doing it this way, I've had more fun and thus probably achieved a better result.

To me, it's more important that your tutorials cover Satori's scope in the manner you've already established, i.e. from a project-by-project perspective. For beginners, it gives a terrific overview of Satori's capabilities, and for the more experienced throws light on other angles of approach.

kindest regards,

Peter

Re: "no evidence of anyone really taking it on and running with it"

True enough. There are several reasons for this. Let's forget the UI and the different way in which Satori works.

What Satori needs is visibility and hype. There needs to be some excitement surrounding Satori. I wish I knew how I could help accomplish that.

People need to be "shown" what Satori can do that other apps can't or what it can do better than other apps. Feature lists on developers websites are nice. But until people understand, by seeing with their own eyes, what Satori can do, it's just another little known application that many will figure can't be any good since they have heard little to nothing about it.

If anyone has any interesting ideas as to how we can help generate some buz around Satori, let'er rip.

Adam.

Don, your first point really gets to the nub of my original (abbreviated) question: "Satori's interface is awkward" Can I ask : In what way?

Are you asking me to clarify the point about zooms and hi-rez? If so here goes:

The area zooming is quite fast but seeing the zoom in hi-rez takes a long time so when moving around the canvas you keep losing the temporary hi-rez render everytime you move the zoom or increase the zoom. I guess I'm just annoyed that it can't be as fast as in Photoshop.

The only remedy that I can think of would be for Satori to incorporate a feature that allowed you to choose a working 'output resolution' and create a hi-rez temp image of the full canvas, that matched that resolution. This could be stored in Ram or the Pagefile. This might allow for faster hi-rez zoom and pan to any area of the canvas area. However, I can see how this may slow other screen updates.

When using the Layer-Colour adjustment window: there is no BYPASS or PREVIEW-Off option. This means using my work around of initially copying the layer you wish to work on and applying the adjustments to the layer. You can then toggle back and forth between Before and After colour correction by turning off the layer and viewing the original layer below. Also allows for transparency blending (which is a good thing).

It would be much easier if there was a Bypass switch in the adjustment window. This goes for other window that also lack this convenience.

For the record, all of these requests and suggestions are being recorded and evaluated. That they can all be included in the next release is unlikely but I'm definitely going to be pushing for this one.

More like it please.

Mark Graham

Satori Support

However, over the months it became less and less of an issue, until these days I don’t think I think about it at all. Indeed I’ve built the exponential size thing into my method of working (i.e. rough out at 40, move in at 20, begin detailing at 10 and so on) which has probably indirectly improved the way I do things.

I suppose now I have only four pet peeves – first up has to be the GUI, which I’ve rattled on at length at before; I’m more disposed toward the actions palette now than I was, but this doesn’t mean that there isn’t still massive room for improvement. To be honest, I think it would be quite logical for all the palettes to be combined on to one ‘master’ palette, thus releasing more screen estate and giving us a bigger colour picker.

As I’ve requested in the past, I furtively dream that 4.0 will include some kind of PS-style indicator in the colour/mix pickers to show from which spot the last hue was sampled. This is genuinely the only thing I still miss from Painter.

Second peeve – no absolute save state. For some reason it really gets to me that on boot up my default colour value is red, that my mix is red/green, that my brush is set at 30 pixels… yet my grads remain, my temporary brush styles have been stored – why not saves across the board?

Third – and this is quite obscure – is that because I right-click a good deal on my Wacom pen, I somehow manage to pointlessly select ‘Replace Brush Style’ just /so/ many times as it’s first up on the drop down. Of course, this can sometimes lead to really lengthy delays as Satori then goes into replacing the brush with itself (aarrrgghhh!), and I quietly bang my head against the table. If only the first on that list was a more innocuous function.

Lastly - and this is probably the most serious issue – I really wish there was an easy way of zooming right out of an image so it was 25% or whatever of it’s original size. The current workaround (in/out of zoom palette, then resizing the actual new window) just doesn’t cut it at all as it’s so approximate, and doesn’t generate a ‘safety’ border around each edge of the image. I’m always constantly catching the edge of a window while painting, which drives me nuts.

BTW, I love Don’s idea of a links managing window… now that I’m copying a lot of my stuff on to CD sometimes finding a particular reference file can be a fairly fraught process. It would be good if this links window could produce a hardcopy too.

That’s all I can think of for now… of course, with Satori the pros massively outweigh the cons, but it’d be nice if the above were addressed somehow.

as ever,

peter

Satori is a saviour for most of my projects that involve resizing and reworking designs to accomodate CD covers and huge promotional posters.

Photoshop bogs right down on large resolution work. But I guess you want critisizm not praise. OK, I'll try.

1. Satori's interface is awkward and slow on zooms and creating hi-rez screen views.

2. Undo commands are worded badly and I still get confused on what is about to be undid at times.

Deleating from the object list is the most reliable but scrolling through that list can be very slow unless you constantly rename all those items.

3. A proper links managing window could also be very helpful to keep track of the files needed for each canvas. When you open a canvas file that has been backed up or has been moved than you should have the option to locate the missing file.

Hows that for a start.

My list of praises would be much longer:^))