Rick,

In fairness to Photoshop, the reason it is so "difficult" to work with layers, doing basic things like moving, etc. is because Photoshop allows you to do a lot more directly over the image surface than UF does. UF doesn't have things like text, selection areas, and so on to worry about; every click inside the image can be treated directly as location control. PS has to have an interface with different "modes" where your clicks in the image are treated differently depending on what tool you have selected.

In fact this is why Frederik has resisted adding too much Photoshop-like stuff to UF (although I may be stuffing words into his mouth here). There's a point at which adding new capability means diluting what is already there. Sort of like how you can now buy a cell phone that has a built-in camera, MP3 player, movie player, video games, etc. and yet digital cameras, iPods, portable DVD players, Nintendo DS, etc. still sell amazingly well. They excel at their one thing; they focus. Strictly speaking, that cell phone/PDA may do all of those things "better", but in so doing they have to clutter their interface and that makes them harder to use.

Photoshop is incredibly powerful but that very power is part of what handicaps its interface. But it didn't start out that way; its interface and capabilities have grown over the years, and its users have grown with it. Back in the day, most of the funky effects you can now do so easily had to be done step-by-step using chops (channel operations). You had to be pretty smart to figure out how to get all that stuff done, and sometimes reproducing it was very difficult. (I did the coolest thing in a graphics program once, and then could never do it again. I'm so glad for near-infinite undo.)

I think it should be possible to duplicate the effect in FP's "Flood" using a UF formula, it's just that nobody has yet. But this illustrates another problem, that is shared by both PS and UF: some effects are so "heavy" that they dominate whatever image you put them into, and it's really distracting to see them. They also tend to become trite very quickly. (How many KPT Page Curls do you see nowadays? Thought so.) I like the occasional bit of water, but I wouldn't want to look at a gallery full of them.

--Damien