As a preface: I am hugely grateful to your posts and discussions you initiate. Firstly because regardless of how and what, I think it’s really productive and helpful to focus on expressing arguments. Knowing your intentions and facts their based on, and acting on them is one thing, explaining them such that others can comprehend quite another. Secondly because I personally benefit a lot from bringing the topic closer to a “physical methodology”, simply because I am trained there and not that much in photography/color theory/… (I know I can’t neglect that either if I really want to get “it”). Don’t take my criticism as opposition, I am much more prone to express criticism towards people and subjects I find highly interesting and helpful.
Your statements are too black and white and using absolutes for my taste. I do have a hunch that’s mostly a rhetorical decision, nevertheless I can’t leave it unchallenged (probably in a not very rhetorically brilliant way):
How do you define “image processing”?
If you just take it literally, i.e. putting an image through a process, I am doing “image processing” when I take my mountaineering snapshot straight out of camera and rotating it to get a straight horizon. Is this an “expert process”?
In my view thinking in terms of “expert” is a fallacy in itself. There’s no such thing as a defining line between experts and non-experts. If you ever believe you are over it, and you know all you need to, you most definitely aren’t.
These statements contradict each other: Why should simple algorithms be able to apply to complex concepts, but a simple UI not?
There is no User Interface without thinking of the user. You are obviously free to design a UI for users that have a minimum level of knowledge on the concepts, but that doesn’t make a UI targeting users below that a scam. I do totally agree with
That just doesn’t make it a scam. Depending on your target audience defaults and abstractions are useful or detrimental. It entirely depends on your user’s knowledge and intent. There’s nothing scammy about designing an UI for an image processing program targeted at users that do not want to learn about the concepts in depth. You may not like that, and that’s perfectly fine. Just as it is fine to create a simplified UI for a simpler needs, it is fine to create a UI that tries to expose all the underlying concepts. One doesn’t exclude the other.
Without defining the target audience, you can’t fully judge a UI (obviously there are aspects of an UI that are independent).
I believe lots of the defensiveness comes from a often expressed attitude of users along the lines “but Adobe&Co do it that way”. That doesn’t deserve much more of an answer than “Yes, what’s your point?”. Then the ignorant come with the second line “they are the professional solution, what they do must be good”, which doesn’t deserve an answer at all.
And in my opinion “professional” is inherent in the problem: Professional image processors need to do as many projects that meet clients needs, and I have never heard a graphic artist complain about to high standards in clients needs, only about too low and too often changing standards. So a professional solution doesn’t need to be technically excellent, it needs to be streamlined: Get most done in the least amount of time. That’s not the focus of DT/RT as far as I see (and luckily so).