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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"
Photoshop has a solid identity in the market, even among casual photographers. Walk into a camera shop and mention GIMP to some random person looking at the point and shoots and you'll probably get punched in the eye. That same person almost certainly recognizes what Photoshop is and does.
I'm a professional photographer but I am far less Photoshop oriented than most of my peers. But it is an indespensible tool. I've tried dozens of other apps, online and off, and even for my relatively simple needs Photoshop has no replacement. Not even other less expensive Adobe products like Elements or Lightroom. From the way the article reads this online version won't actually have the same features as a local version of Photoshop. My guess would be that it would be better named after Elements or Lightroom but neither of those have the kind of ubiquitous name recognition that Photoshop does.
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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.
Photo editing services on the web already exist for several years. Years ago I played with a photo filter tool on the Nikon website. You could apply all sorts of funny filters on your foto's, like cartoon filters and so on.
Now there are several (free) services available, like myImager, Phixr and Pixenate. Image processing is done at the webserver. A preview of the image processing result is shown on the web page and the final image can be downloaded at full resolution. So no rocket science at all. Just some clever web programming. I think there is space for a big player (Adobe, did I hear the G-word?) to create a more advanced web based image processing service. I think it could be very popular and a real concurrent for light weight photo editing tools.
A short review of some of these tools can be found at the "Ditigal Inspiration" weblog.