[TeMPOraL]

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.

[orbital-decay]

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.

[danwills]

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?