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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"
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?
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...
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.
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.
"Sacrifice for the good of The State" - The State
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
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.
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
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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.
You can already do online video editing in java.
...depending on your life expectancy.
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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.
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.
Gimp handles a lot of the less common advanced tasks that photoshop handles really well- and does some things much better than photoshop. The problem is those 7 or 8 things that the gimp doesn't do that photoshop does are 7 or 8 of the most common things that you might want to do when doing some graphic design. Layer styles, decent drop-shadow effects, layer grouping, color channels as layers, shape dynamics, all of these are really common things that Gimp either doesn't do at all, or does so poorly that it is functionally unusable for those tasks when compared to Photoshop.
Don't get me wrong, I love gimp for certain tasks, but there are some areas where it simply doesn't compete with photoshop- and I don't think it nessesarily attempts to.
Famous Last Words: "hmm...wikipedia says it's edible"