There's great articles on how layered uis are a lot easier to use than node based uis. Really excited to see a layered approach to SD. Its definitely time to break out of gradio.
Maybe if they're talking about layered UIs with layer groups, which turn a flat stack into something resembling a tree. But even these UIs don't give you proper non-destructive editing - anything more complex requires you to duplicate parts of layer stack to feed as inputs, which is a destructive operation with respect to structure (those pasted layers won't update if you make changes to copied source). Doing this properly requires a DAG, at which point you're at node-based UIs (or some idiosyncratic mess of an UI that pretends it's not modelling a DAG).
It's all moot though, because as far as I know, there is no proper 2D graphics editing software that uses DAGs and nodes. Everyone just copies Photoshop. Especially Affinity, which is grating, given their recent focus on non-destructive editing. For some reason, node-based UIs ended up being a mainstay of VFX, 3D graphics, and VFX & gamedev support tooling. But general 2D graphics - photo editing, raster and vector creation? Nodes are surprisingly absent.
For some reason, node-based UIs ended up being a mainstay of VFX, 3D graphics, and VFX & gamedev support tooling. But general 2D graphics - photo editing, raster and vector creation? Nodes are surprisingly absent.
That's because non-destructive editing is mostly useful for animation, image series/sequences, and asset reuse, which are the most common in these fields. 2D artists have a different mental model, which is additionally set in stone by Photoshop and other software imitating it. Photographers use non-destructive editing, but mostly in simple cases because advanced things (retouching, creative compositing) can't and don't need to be done procedurally anyway.
What about ancient 'Illusion', old 'Shake' or current 'Nuke' VFX compositing softwares that totally have been supporting node-based (ie DAG-based) comp-workflows since the early 2000s? Guess this is just a very different (much smaller) realm than your usual Photoshop's and so on?
It's all moot though, because as far as I know, there is no proper 2D graphics editing software that uses DAGs and nodes. Everyone just copies Photoshop. Especially Affinity, which is grating, given their recent focus on non-destructive editing. For some reason, node-based UIs ended up being a mainstay of VFX, 3D graphics, and VFX & gamedev support tooling. But general 2D graphics - photo editing, raster and vector creation? Nodes are surprisingly absent.