Photoshop Online Within Six Months 179
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"
GIMP online 7 years ago (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:GIMP online 7 years ago (who cares?) (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't get it... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Platform-independent, I hope (Score:3, Interesting)
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/ [fokdat.nl]
And it works in Opera, Firefox, IE and Safari!
[/shameless]
Re:Platform-independent, I hope (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Platform-independent, I hope (Score:2, Interesting)
What do you use Photoshop for? (Score:2, Interesting)
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.
Re:Platform-independent, I hope (Score:2, Interesting)
Comment removed (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Platform-independent, I hope (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
Re:What do you use Photoshop for? (Score:3, Interesting)
Photoshop is lousy photo-editing software. It's great for doing graphic-arts-type stuff, but is really lousy at editing photos. Photoshop is a pixel-painting application on steroids. It's 20-year-old (!) software and was made at a time when people just wanted to manipulate digital images. Notice I said "images" and not "photos." Photoshop, despite "Photo" being in the name, wasn't written with photographers in mind.
By "editing photos," I strictly mean making your photos look better. If you want to modify the hell out of a photo (like changing the background, erasing your ex, etc.), Photoshop is definitely the application to use. But if you want to make tonal, contrast, color, etc., adjustments, using things like "Levels" or "Curves" is an exercise in frustration.
For example, you're looking at your photo and the Curves dialog box that contains an X-Y graph and a diagonal line. Somehow, you're supposed to figure out how to manipulate the curve to make your photo look better. You're supposed to know how to correlate, say, a face that's in shadow, to a particular segment of the curve, and then adjust the curve to make it brighter. Good luck. It might be the ideal UI for maniplating images, but it's horrible for editing photos.
Doing selections is also pretty bad. You select and area and want to feather it so as to seemlessly blend your change between the selected and non-selected areas. OK, so you select the Feathering menu item and enter an integer, click OK, and see how it looks. Nope, too little. Undo. Selecting Feathing again, enter another integer, click OK. Nope, too much. Undo. You get the idea. Why now have a vector-based curve with an inner curve that you can simply drag to adjust the feathering and see the result in real time?
And let's not forget that doing any photo editing in gamma-corrected color-space (which Photoshop does) is just wrong. You want to use a linear color-space so as not to introduce weird color-shifts during editing operations.
I could go on. But make no mistake: Photoshop is not the best photo-editing application.
Re:Platform-independent, I hope (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:GIMP online 7 years ago (who cares?) (Score:1, Interesting)
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?)