The Photoshop family — including Album, Elements, Lightroom, and so on — is everywhere, from a scrapbooker’s living room to a photographer’s studio and a scientist’s lab. While I haven’t seen Adobe’s accounts, I’m betting it’s a major financial linchpin of the company. That’s why I was surprised to learn that Adobe plans to make a free version of Photoshop available online within the next six months. Does that mean you can pocket that chunk of cash you set aside for Photoshop CS3?
Hardly, says Christopher Smith, president of Aquent Graphics Institute. “There are far too many advantages to working on the desktop version,” he adds. “For example, a hosted version won’t provide batch processing. I really can’t see a creative pro using a hosted version exclusively.”
creativepro.com senior editor Ben Long agrees. “I find it hard to believe that much of Photoshop’s interactive functionality, such as the retouching tools, would be very workable online. If it’s a question of cost, a lot of sophisticated functionality is in Photoshop Elements. Even with the fastest Internet connection, why would I go through a Web browser interface when I could spend $89 on Elements?”
Of course, pundits said that no one would want to watch a movie on a 2.5-inch screen, yet I hear that video iPods sell pretty well. And Adobe is no stranger to offering complex operations via the Web. Waaaay back in 2000, you could go to www.adobe.com and find InProduction Preflight Online. Once you uploaded a PDF, InProduction Preflight Online analyzed it for printing issues and returned a report. Technology has improved exponentially since then, as shown by Adobe’s most recent foray into Web-based tools, its Flash-based Remix service available through Photobucket.
I predict that we creative pros will be using the desktop version of Photoshop for years to come, but we should keep an eye on its online development. Adobe hints at that evolution in this blog post from its public relations team: “Bringing Photoshop technology online would simply be an extension of our strategy to deliver the right Photoshop for Adobe’s diverse user base. And by Photoshop ‘branded’ we don’t mean the professional version of Photoshop — at least not initially. A Photoshop technology online offering would at first, most likely, be targeted at the consumer market.”
In other words, the future is coming.
This article was last modified on January 4, 2023
This article was first published on March 6, 2007
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