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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"
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
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?
[shameless]n ew-editor
Hey I created some sort of javascript drawing tool. You can edit images other people created. And draw new ones:
Here I blog about it: http://the-timing.nl/blog/2006/10/wiki-art-has-a-
This is the actual application: http://wiki-art.fokdat.nl/
And it works in Opera, Firefox, IE and Safari!
[/shameless]
ActiveX and Flash are far from the same thing. The main problems with ActiveX is its windows only and its insecure. You also forget to mention java.
As far as being windows only, Flash and Java have the problem of requiring closed source bytecode interpreters, but run on other platforms. They are both relatively secure as well. Both have interpreters available for linux so you will be able to run this on linux.
I really hope this gets implemented as a J2EE delivered webapp with a flash frontend. Flash has the potential to be a platform of choice for rich web apps, and I think whatever R&D comes out of delivering photoshop as a flash app will translate into newer flash developer tools. I see this as the Flash equivilant of putting a man on the moon in terms of positive side effects.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.
Preview for Mac OS X can view PSD files natively.
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.
Quicktime which runs on both Mac OS X and Windows will view .PSD files.
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.
I've never known Flash to be a platform for intense serious work
... but then you reminded me
... I don't think that it's going to be a self contained app of that sort.
I was going to say you're bang on and that Java might be a good vector
(Adobe) own the thing
and I suddenly saw a whoooooooole marketing vector for Adobe to leverage. I wouldn't at ALL be surprised to see a Flash front end for this. If they can put out a showcase app like PS in Flash, it makes one hell of a bragging right and would literally move flash into the "serious" class of programming languages. On that note
Personally, I think this will be thin front end with all the real work happening on the server side. PS is a heavy app, I can't imaging sitting through a 20M download to get a "web" version launched.
Good people do not need laws to tell them to act responsibly, while bad people will find a way around the laws-Plato
I'm guessing that while performance might suck for large images, anyone doing real graphic design and photography will have a real version of Photoshop. This is probably intended for people who want to be able to quickly design some small graphics for use on their website.
To illustrate that you are most likely correct consider that the lead artist that works on professional photo restoration at YellowCatDesign typically works with files many gigabytes in size. A simple 8x11 inch at 600dpi and 8bit per color clocks in at 100MB. Most images are scanned at higher resolutions at higher bitdepth (and I think in CMYK rather then RGB). Also I've seen our professionals use tons of layers (10-100) which can add significantly to the filesize. I just don't see that amount of data beeing transferred between a web-based client and a remote server in real time.
Still, for smaller images having photoshop available online would be great.
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?)