Slashdot Mirror
Photoshop Online Within Six Months
scobrown writes "Adobe is going to create a software-as-a-service version of photoshop that it will initially be offering for free. It should be available within 6 months. It is supposed to be ad supported... but we'll see how long that lasts"
So long as it's not written in ActiveX or anything dumb like that, this could be good news for Linux on the desktop. Can't install the latest version of Photoshop? Who cares, just use it online!
This is nothing new. There was an online version of GIMP available 7 years ago. It wasn't a commercial success, but with today's hardware and bandwidth prices, and with a modern AJAX interface, would it stand a chance now? Adobe obviously seem to think so.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Once it is offered, someone from the Third World would offer services to touch up the photos, clearing the background and adjust the color balance etc on the web using the free adobe photoshop. Already I have seen ads from people willing solve CAPTCHAs for less than a dollar an hour. Homework service for school children is also popping up. If only someone would invent a lawnmower that could be driven remotely via the net ...
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
This means that Microsoft will follow by putting their much loved 'MS Paint' online.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
Didn't take reading the article to figure out that any version of Photoshop that was both online and ad-supported was more likely to be a very cut-down service and greatly different/simplified from the boxed versions.
I used to use an app from Adobe called "Photo Deluxe". It was based on the Photoshop engine, but with the interface totally changed and cut down (more so than Elements). I wouldn't have considered that Photoshop, and I suspect that this online service will be even more simplified. Calling it Photoshop is likely just a branding exercise.
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
Whenever people Photoshop comes up at Slashdot, people mention Gimp. But Gimp is not a substitute for Photoshop as far as professional users are concerned. Gimp is like so many OSS projects, a rat's nest of messed up code, no real road map, and half-assed implementations "features".
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Seems like it will be an interesting experiment in software as a service, but media editing seems to be a bad fit for the "software as an online service" model due to the high bandwidth & processing demands. The math has to be done either on the user's end (which would be bad for folks with low spec systems, who i see as the primary target for this business model) or on Adobe's systems (which will cost them money, decreasing their bottom line). Anyone with experience in the field have any compelling reasons why one would chose to use adobe's online photoshop rather than just using picasa or gimp?
You can already do online video editing in java.
http://www.forscene.net/
Probably not going to be a huge deal, but those real-time previews of CPU intensive filters are nice on the machine local installation; only hope those make it to the online as well.
Never hit your grandmother with a shovel, for it leaves a bad impression on her mind...
I'd buy it. I use OS X, and Photoshop would make a nice addition.
For OS X is good, for Linux even better. But either way, just reduce the price and I'm sure they'd get more users.
Besides, Photoshop is already "online" for most people (P2P). Anyhow. I don't mind paying 150$ for the upgrade (that's how much CS2 cost me) for something I use so much (I'm very much into photography). GIMP may be free, but it's not quite Photoshop (I would rather take any old version of Photoshop or even Paint Shop Pro over it). Worst GUI *EVER* of any open source app I've ever used or seen -- all of it (don't know if it's because of GTK or something, but it's fugly, feels clunky, and just sucks badly). And it's lacking a lot of the basic features which we're taking for granted like Camera RAW.
I'm sick of people saying "GIMP!" as their answer to Photoshop all the time. That's like saying a wheelbarrow is a perfectly good replacement for a truck. It might work for some people, but not for the vast majority of its users.
Is this going to be a standalone application or is it going to compete with the hundreds of other online image editing applications?
I say hundreds and I do not lie. There are hundreds of online java and javascript image editors. Some of them are quite fancy. I have usde one or two of them in the past when visiting family locations where they have no suitable software available.
We do not need another online editor. I would be interested in downloading a small 50mb file to do basic functions though. Adverts or no adverts, I wouldn't care.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
I somehow don't doubt that Adobe may try something sneaky along the lines of claiming ownership of any works created using Photoshop online.
There's the casual use I suppose but if you're not doing something uber-serious then you don't need photoshop - the gimp or similar will do just fine.
Am I missing something?
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
Agreed,
The GIMP is just that, a gimp, a crippled, stinking, half assed, stupid dwarf, better left gagged and bound in the back of Zed's boutique.
I take it you use a fully paid, licensed version of Photoshop then. Or are you one of these people who likes to steal software, and then claim that the truly Free competition is not up to scratch ?
.. and from the comments looks like most of the gimp-bashers haven't tried the recent versions of it.
Whenever GIMP comes up on slashdot some up-their-own-arse "professional" (who
likes to italicise "professional") comes on and bangs on about how bad it is.
Admit it -- you just want an excuse to buy a high end Mac, the colour goes with
your stash of cocaine.
Granted, you will probably still need Photoshop to do glossy full color magazines, but the vast majority of professional printing is pamphlets, newspapers, and junk mail and other low quality bulk print jobs, for which the GIMP is just fine. In the future, Photoshop will have to target an ever-decreasing niche.
Take care
-mat
weirdest thing I ever saw: scientology advertising on slashdot.
Now Firefox will use up even MORE memory.
The embedded ad images will provide the perfect raw material to deface when trying to come up with clever parody images to post on b3ta, Fark, Something Awful, and the like.
Slashdot Burying Stories About Slashdot Media Owned
I somehow doubt they will be able to pack the full goodness of photoshop into an online site. One of the best ones I have seen so far is lunapic.com. It's got all the basic edits, lots of effects, and it's pretty fast too.
-- these are only opinions and they might not be mine.
read the posting... He wrote he pays 150$ for the upgrade version...
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
And it would also have the advantage of being able to be sold!
1) Web 2.0 Web 2.0 Web 2.0 Java Java Java Ajax Ajax Ajax
2) ????
3) Profit!
Yea, right.
Um, there isn't a snowballs chance in hell of anyone who uses Photoshop in professional capacity switching to an online version anyway. People on Slashdot are all using pirated versions of Photoshop and aren't using any of its professional features, they could just as easily use The Gimp.
Sounds great for casual edits and what not, but serious users of Photoshop usually work with huge files, like 10, 20, 50, hell 100's of megabytes. Bandwidth, lag, connection reliability, etc. will be a serious issue for anyone doing serious Photoshop work.
I really hope, they will fail for whatever reason. I see the same danger here as with DRM. Photoshop might have a GIMP ersatz that might be sufficient for many ocassional users, but there are many software packages that are either commercial only or their free counterparts are not that good. The online distribution is just a first step to make it pay-per-use in the end. JAM
Even if you make the assumption that seems to continually sink the FOSS crowd, that the proprietary app you are chasing will stand still while you catch up, I still think you are wrong.
I looked at GIMP, again, somewhere around the unstable 2.3 release. It still does not have enough color management to be taken seriously by graphic artists. Layers aren't as well implemented as any Adobe product, they remain difficult to line up and as far as I could tell don't support non destructive effects. It is also limited to 8 bits. That alone will keep it out of any serious studio.
Someone is a little out-of-touch with what photoshop is typically used for.
you just want an excuse to buy a high end Mac, the colour goes with
2 0060807.png
your stash of cocaine.
Since when does cocaine come in aluminium?
http://images.apple.com/macpro/images/index_tower
Blank until
Photoshop is great photo-editing software - the best.
For Web graphics, Fireworks is much better - more functional, more flexible, and with a much lighter footprint.
Fireworks is like a mix between Illustrator and Photoshop. You can use vector drawing tools and you can use bitmap drawing tools. You can do so without having to load behemoth programs that hog resources greedily.
If you're at all interested in efficiency, if you want to get the job done quickly, if flexibility sounds good to you...Fireworks ends up being a great option for web graphics.
Once again, for a print job, or for high resolution photo-editing, Illustrator and Photoshop are the best. They are capable of web graphics, however clumsily, but why not use the right tool?
A stripped-down, ad-strewn Photoshop? Why? For what reason? For the tasks that I'd want Photoshop, I want it to be fully powered. If there are lesser tasks, there are far and away more efficient tools.
If they follow this by pulling the plug on Fireworks, which I wouldn't put past them, then they will be doing themselves and us a great disservice.
Cluephone ringing!
Of course online isn't the appropriate place to edit "professional" material, ie giant files, projects requiring esoteric plug-ins, local fonts, a multitude of resources embedded in the image, etc. The "professionals" will do what they always do: Purchase the right tools and get on with it.
However for non-"professionals" this is an interesting development. There are already other online photo-editing sites out there, using Java applications or clever Web 2.0 AJAX-ey stuff (and probably some older technology upload-and-refresh ones) but Adobe does have the brand name everyone knows and they do have a good concentration of code, coders, UI folks, etc. to pull it off with.
As others have pointed out it'll probably be in Adobe's Flash product, which already has a lot of basic image manipulation built into it. If it will be entirely client-based or if there will be backend processing will be interesting to find out.
From a business perspective how much Adobe will tie this to other services like photo storing & sharing, buy-a-tea-towel-with-the-picture-on-it, etc. is the big question. Will Adobe just have 3rd party banner advertising or will they build in hooks for 3rd party services, the tea-towel sellers & such? Will those services require licensing deals with Adobe or will Photoshop Online be a 'web service' open to other websites to integrate as part of their own offerings a la Google Maps.
I'm looking forward to Photoshop Online, if only as another tool in the progress towards increasingly sophisticated online client applications. They don't seem ready to entirely supplant desktop applications yet, but for occasional-use situations they're already viable, and this is just one more category soon to have multiple 'real' options.
I don't read ACs: If a post isn't worth so much as a nom de plume to its author then I wont bother either.
Sure, for a large segment of professional users, Gimp isn't there yet. On the other hand, there exists a decent size subset of professionals for which Gimp works perfectly well. Claiming Gimp is not used by and unuseable by professionals is completely false. In fact, many professional users of Photoshop pass on Gimp simply because documentation and quality of tutorials on Gimp suck so badly; not because Gimp is incapable. In other words, Gimp is perfectly useable by many professionals and is frequently used by professionals. In my opinion, the only reason it is not used by more is because the lack of quality documentation, tutorials, and workshops which are geared toward the professional. Photoshop has all three; documentation, tutorials, and workshops.
I'm assuming professional photographers still qualify as "professionals"?
I wonder if headlines like this are contrived to (continue to) mask competitive products such as Pixel and GIMPshop?
for estimating the market for alternative platforms like Linux. They look how many people use their online app from under Linux, and then decide if this is going to justify the investment associated with porting.
There's a lot more than a "CMYK implementation" needed to replace Photoshop. You need suppport for ICC color correction, a lossless "base" color space (e.g. L*a*b), high-bit-depth support, monitor/scanner/device calibration support, 6+ color separation support, PANTONE color library support, and a hundred other professional-level features.
GIMP is good for making JPEGs that target the web, where color fidelity is (lamentably) disregarded. And of course personal photo editing. GIMP's true competition at this point is Photoshop Elements, Paint.NET, Paint Shop Pro, and other "prosumer" tools.
Does this mean Adobe can see the stuff I'm editing ??
No, really !
They have this already http://www.fauxto.com/ Its under development, but it has potential
I must be snorting bumps off my rectum again, but who in the ad/marketing industry (Photoshop's core consumers) uses GIMP? No one. I imagine people may use it (professionally) for non-professional grade work (publishing their own works, DIY graphic applications, instances where budgets are too tight to hire a designer). Been in an agency for 15 years and never heard of GIMP. My assumption is that most in my position haven't heard of it either. But based on everyone's love of it, I'm sure its not that bad.
How Photoshop Online functions will determine its success. (duh) If it functions just like the current local version (but with an online subscription key) then it will do well. If its designed to run off Adobe's server and the user needs a constant on internet connection, then it will take a relatively long time for adoption. It would create a major sea change in web access if Adobe moves all their products to an online server scenario.
I use Photoshop Elements, the cheapo version of Photoshop you get when you buy some scanners or cameras (a scanner in my case). The first couple of times I tried to use it I would get the splash screen, and then it would go out to the Adobe site to look for "updates," suffer bandwidth latency issues, and crap out. A little Googling found a site that tells you how to disable that "feature," which I did immediately.
The only good thing I can think of with regard to an online Photoshop site is that the software will always be up to date, unless Adobe's products can't access their own update site from in house. The fact that Adobe products need their own update manager, which always seems to run poorly and slowly in my experience, worries me with regard to their software.
If this were Usenet, I'd killfile the lot of you.
Not sure what the percentages are, but I'd say there's a very large percentage of people out there (especially with cable ISPs) who have very throttled upstream bandwidth. I know, because I'm one of them. The average digital camera today puts out an image that is like 5MB, and that's jpg compressed!
Or are the actual controls just being downloaded to my computer, and running locally? That would seem to make more sense.
THE MAGIC WORDS ARE SQUEAMISH OSSIFRAGE
Which seems to be the reply when anyone says anything negative about any open source application...ever...
Every time gimp is mentioned, some graphics guy stops by to remind us that it can't do "real" work. Okay, probably they're right and I'm not a real graphics guy, but I wonder: seriously, how many people *need the 7 or 8 things that photoshop does well that are not (yet) possible or very good in the Gimp. 2%?
Sometimes the GIMP bashing reminds me of when billgates was ragging on the OLPC for not having a hard drive and a big heavy expensive battery.
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
But Gimp is not a substitute for Photoshop as far as professional users are concerned.
I'm struggling to reconcile your implication that you are a professional with your username.
I would wager that you are as much a professional photographer as I am a professional ballet dancer.
Professional whiney Internet bitch with nothing original to troll about, I'll give you.
"as far as professional users are concerned. "
You mean as far as Adobe-paid asstroturfers are concerned. True professionals are able to conduct themselves without jumping at every opportunity to make flaming attacks.
That's an upgrade. Did he pay for the full product in order to qualify for an upgrade? DOUBTFULL!
This makes a lot of sense.. No, it's not going to replace a real copy of Photoshop on a graphic designer's workstation, but it may be enough for Adobe to squeeze some ad revenue out of people who would normally just download it off BitTorrent. These are the casual users of Photoshop who use it maybe once every few weeks and for whom buying a $600 program doesn't make sense.
Basically, Adobe is getting no money from those people right now, so any additional revenue they can pull from them is free money. Of course, your graphics professionals will still have the legit, expensive copy of Photoshop because $600 really isn't that much if you're using it to make money.
Adobe Graphics Server has been around and hasn't done much. Other sites have had basic online image editing available for a while. I'm glad Adobe is finally getting in gear. I'm a serious Photoshop user, but this has some exciting implications in a lot of non-serious-user areas.
SAAS is yet another way of fleecing the people, let's do the rent vs buy economic analysis on say Photoshop.
Buy:
Cost: Say about 780.00 - 800.00
Bandwidth Cost: 0.00
Lifetime : 3-4 Years
Residual Value: 300.00-500.00 min, around 250.00
Rent:
Cost: 0.00 to say 25.00
Bandwidth Cost: 40.00-50.00/mo
Residual Value: 0.00
Now, lets see, over 3 years, with buying the software, I can use part of the sale proceeds to buy a newer version, even at full price, or get a significant discount on an upgrade version.
What does 'renting' get me? Nothing. Generally, a contract that I can't cancel, at least without significant penalties, and foreced to use whatever version they chose to make available.
Sound familliar, people already do it with cellphones, and are getting fleeced left, right, and center.
I think I'll start up a SAAS depot, providing some 'service' like a web OS or some other bullshit. I'll provide computers for free, but tie people into 5 year contracts. Provider wins every way one looks at it.
1) Create online photo-editing service.
2) Present a forty-page Terms and Conditions agreement in a 300-by-75 pixel window, with an all-your-images-are-belong-to-us clause three-fourths of the way down.
3) Wait for people to upload and edit you-know-what-kinds of images.
4) Profit!
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Flex 2 applications look great although for now I slightly prefer the approach of OpenLazlo because OpenLazlo supports both Flash and DHTML on the back end.
Check out gliffy.com for just how good OpenLazlo (with Flash backend) applications can look, with good functionality.
Adobe's upcoming Apollo will probably build on Flex 2 (not sure off hand) and promises the ability to have one code base for both web and desktop applications.
Nice ad homenims, don't address the content of what he says but rather attack his credibility.
What does him pirating it have jack shit to do with anything?
If he's not paying for it, then perhaps he has even less vested interest in trying to justify the value in it.
You fail at your attempt.
You lose 1 internet.
I'd use it immediately. I'd beta test it if it were offered to me for that. If it turns out worse than other approaches I'd soon quit using it, but I'd sure give it a good try first. And I presently own PS CS2.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
You don't have to: it'll upgrade from just about anything - any old version off eBay (or just about), or like I did, I upgraded from Photoshop 5 LE which was bundled with an old coolpix I bought about 4 or 5 years ago. It doesn't have to cost an arm and a leg. Besides, for most people Photoshop Elements is a better pick (and quite a bit cheaper than the full thing at retail price)
And as for the other "you must not have tried a recent version" - I only wish I didn't! It's still horrible. And the feature gap (and number of quality/pro tools) between PS and GIMP keeps growing. GIMP is like a bad joke. Or a textbook example of how NOT to design a GUI. Just because one doesn't know anything past the most basic PS features doesn't mean GIMP is even close.
farm out all these tasks to people playing The Sims online, who will pay money in order to do them!
Gentlemen, I think we have found the notorious Step 2 that comes before profit.
Yes, as a matter of fact. I originally bought the full version of Photoshop 3, upgraded to PS 4, then finally to PS 7 when OS X came out. I actually bought Creative Suite so I have the full version of PS CS and I could get an upgrade from the PS 7 if I wanted to.
Some of us are professionals and don't pirate software. In fact, some of us are creative professionals (in my case, a photographer) and rely on copyright law to protect our work.
Oh, yeah, and I'll be buying the Family Pack of OS X Leopard for my three 10.5-capable Macs when it comes out.
Hang out on a few professional or even semi-pro message boards. Sure, people mention the GIMP, but it just as quickly gets shot down. Elements or PSP for those who absolutely can't afford the full Photoshop, but GIMP doesn't cut it.
And BTW, I have lenses which cost more than a full Photoshop license. Pretty much any professional photo gear makes buying Photoshop look like a minor expense (have you priced medium-format digital backs lately? Or Elinchrome lights? Or studio rentals? Or assistant time?)
re:"On the other hand, there exists a decent size subset of professionals for which Gimp works perfectly well."
I've given GIMP a shot for 10 years (I first recall seeing it while working for Quark in the mid to late 90s) and even as recent as a year ago - I "tried" to use it in a professional setting and it's still not ready for prime time. After 10 years, I doubt it ever will be. The interface is about the worst thing I've ever seen, and I had to create a significant number of "workarounds" to achieve even basic results. But do-able isn't a replacement when it burns up significant time.
Of course I'm paid by the hour so I should be glad - but those darn feelings kick in. Something about ethics.
When you've got a body like this.
You seem to be editing porn, would you like to purchase some Kleenex?
Yet they still choose to pirate over free.
Speaks volumes about how "good" GIMP is.
Don't give me any crap about what they are "used to either" as if this was some Window's familiarity argument
Photoshop doesn't come on nearly every new computer so it doesn't have the saturation of Windows.
GIMP has one of the worst UI designs I've ever seen... and it has nothing to do with it being a WINDOWS App. I'm talking about UI design from a task oriented aspect. Photoshop clearly has this as part of the design philosophy.. GIMP? it's cobbled together components make me laugh.
The GIMPShop hack makes it a little better but it's still not great.
.. and from the comments looks like most of the gimp-bashers haven't tried the recent versions of it. Tried, still lacks the same old basic things that everyone is eexpecting today: 16bit, RAW support and adjustement layers. Developers seems to be focused on things cool for programmers. Bye, bye GIMP.It's okay so long as you don't mind having your images watermarked with a Head ON ad.
Although I don't use the GIMP either, because it lacks a lot of features that I need and use (adjustment layers and layer styles are important, as well as a few other things) there is a plugin for RAW support based on dcRaw called "UFRaw". http://ufraw.sourceforge.net/ I've only used the standalone version, but it reads my files just fine, I assume that the GIMP plugin would be just as useful.
There's also a very cheap, multiplatform image editor out there that may someday be a competitor to photoshop for people with alternative OS choices. It's called Pixel Image Editor and you can get a trial here: http://www.kanzelsberger.com/pixel/?page_id=12 I haven't personally paid for it, because when I used it under linux a few things were very buggy and crashed the app, but if the author keeps plugging away at it, it may be exactly what linux needs to be taken seriously. Unfortunately it isn't open source, but the author has expressed the possibility of it being open sourced in the future...
But Gimp is not a substitute for Photoshop as far as professional users are concerned.
Define "professional". I'm a web designer, and I've used GIMP for years. Photoshop is like Word. Most people (even most professionals) ignore 90% of the features. Sure, there are probably still plenty of professionals that use enough of the features to make switching to the GIMP infeasible, but they are not representative of all professional users.
These days there are plenty of automated lawn mowers; many are based on the system used by the robo-vacuum cleaners (using sensors or only moving within specific barriers).
You can find automated mowers such as the robomower [robomower.us] and plenty more at stores like this [probotics.com]
I am not a professional photographer. On the other hand, most of those who have chosen to make comments that addressmy basic point and are not personal attacks, agree with my basic point.
Have a nice day.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
So, anyone who is of the opinion that Gimp is not "professional" quality is astroturfing for Adobe? You, sir, are what's known as a "fanboi". Enjoy your title.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Oekaki Shi-Painter Pro, Not really PhotoShop but you get layers etc http://hp.vector.co.jp/authors/VA016309/spainter/i ndex_en.html/
I agree. I use GIMP daily for graphic design and it works great. I can't stand the layout of Photoshop even though I was using Photoshop before GIMP even existed. Some things GIMP can't do but most things it can and it does them well. I avoid Photoshop whenever possible because of it's bulk and rigidness which gets in the way more often than not.
Now - if only there were a real Illustrator alternative.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
FWIW, that's pretty much how I feel about Photoshop. No, I'm not trolling, it's just genuinely how I feel. I struggle to make myself productive when using Photoshop, because it just doesn't seem to match the way I think. I find myself fighting the interface, rather than just getting on and making the changes to the image that I want. In contrast, GIMP just lets me get at the functionality I need in a simple and intuitive way. I appreciate I'm in the minority here.
"The invisible and the non-existent look very much alike." -- Delos B. McKown
Once 2.4 is out of the door they'll start to integrate GEGL. The first GEGL Gimp will just be using it for adjustment layers, but a version or two after that will be fully gegl'd and should do 16 bits. Of course they've been promising 16 bits for years :-( but the momentum does seem to be back again.
Your view of professional is very narrow in that it seems to be focusing (oh pun?) on the largest possible group; which I already said was excluded. Believe it or not, there exists a number of professionals that never see the inside of a studio. Nor do they use an assistant. These guys photograph things like buildings, building sites, sky lines, construction materials, various types of inspections, nature, etc... The closest thing they have to an assistant, is a pilot; if they are not flying themselves. Perhaps GIMP is used (again, by a subset) because this lot is certainly much more technical than your average photographer. With a bill rate ranging from hundreds to many thousands per hour (paying for fuel burn can be very expensive), these guys easily qualify as professionals.
Your mentality seems to be one of "me too" rather than "good enough".
Download the free trial of CS3. I think you'll agree that it is not even close to version 6.
They don't grade fathers, but if your daughter's a stripper, you fucked up. --Chris Rock
Watch prime time BBC2 tonight at 7:00pm. My Life as a Child was made using FORscene in Java on existing BBC PCs. Java is pretty fast these days, as is the Internet.