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"

Re:GIMP online 7 years ago (who cares?)

[an.echte.trilingue]

Gonna have to call bullshit on this one. The one thing that GIMP is missing is a CMYK implementation (which will be in 2.3, they say). Then, it will be ready for professional printing.

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

Re:Surely a bad idea?

[Hijacked Public]

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.

MS Paint online

[Dogtanian]

This means that Microsoft will follow by putting their much loved 'MS Paint' online.

"Funny", huh? It's already been done [canvaspaint.org], albeit not by MS themselves.

Re:GIMP online 7 years ago (who cares?)

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Platform-independent, I hope

[Constantine XVI]

Im pretty sure GIMP on *nix, Preview on OSx as the sister post mentioned, and the freeware Photoshop Album on Windows can handle PSD

Re:GIMP online 7 years ago (who cares?)

[Thundersnatch]

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.

Re:Platform-independent, I hope

[Arleo]

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 [myimager.com], Phixr [phixr.com] and Pixenate [pixenate.com]. 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 [blogspot.com].

Re:Platform-independent, I hope

[mrbcs]

http://www.tucows.com/preview/194967.html [tucows.com] This views almost anything and is free.

Re:Platform-independent, I hope

[Constantine XVI]

Keep in mind Adobe develops Flash. I've heard they're working on a .NET like stack with Flash, JavaScript, and a few other things. Another post mentioned it somewhere in this topic. They could have the Death Star* of web application stacks, and this is just Alderaan(sp?).

*Let's hope they better protect the exhaust port

Re:Question about Gimp bashing...

[miyako]

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.