As a compositor I’m used to the transparent workflow of a node-based creative environment where everything just flows. Makes changes back in the chain of thought possible, unlike Photoshop’s convoluted workflow where you often need to freeze states into a layer and keep going from there, locking you down to a fixed resolution.

Naked Light takes the more artist-friendly approach of a node-based editor and aims to put and end to Photoshop’s fundamentally broken “Smart Objects” metaphor.The public beta launches in a few hours, it’s Leopard only and requires a modern NVidia graphics card. They say it’s ATI too, but yeah, since ATI is so damn painful to support it’s probably like Apple’s Motion app under ATI not much more than a “nice science experiment”.

From the screenshots on the site it looks a little half-baked with the non arrangeable interface. In a real-world environmen you’ll want to have your node tree on a second screen apart from your main image as this contrains your entire image history.

Naked Light comes with some nice innovations like the noise brush which lets you brush on some dust and probably other garb too.

Why would I prefer this to Photoshop? Price for once, they don’t look like they overcharge and underdeliver like Adobe does on an annual basis. Another point is the easy workflow. Imagine building a complex composition that heavily relies on source images, but then you need to keep the locked down look but need other images: With a node-based workflow that’s a matter of seconds, with Photoshop it’s a day’s work.

I’m really excited on what the guys at Naked Light did with this.

technorati tags:photoshop, node-based, workflow

Blogged with Flock