It’s the baby steps that take us where we want to go. But they don’t always take us down the path we want to get us there.
Adobe’s Creative Cloud has been a divisive product since Adobe moved its Creative Suite products to an exclusive subscription model. Some creatives laud the accessibility and Adobe’s frequent updates. However, other users are appalled by the prospect of subscribing to a software product.
The technology that Adobe delivers continues to amaze me with what we are doing on all of our devices now.
I have Lightroom on my iPad now.
I don’t even want to remember what I did before Lightroom.
Editing digital images sucked eight years ago. Now, I can edit RAW photos in Lightroom on my iPad and the edits sync with my desktop catalog. Just. Wow.
In 2012, Adobe launched “Adobe Anywhere” as a meta-data synching tool for video editors. It got us one step closer to the glorious render farm in the cloud. And while I’m still waiting for that render farm to come so I don’t have to watch After Effects chug along at a snail’s pace on a new 6-core Mac Pro, Photoshop is close to becoming a streaming reality.
Imagine that you are on an underpowered MacBook Air or Windows Surface and you need to churn through some edits in Photoshop. That’s going to suck.
But if you could connect to a virtual machine that is spec’d out to kick Photoshop’s butt, then you are good to go as long as you have a decent Internet connection.
With 2015 just around the corner, these are very real ideas that are going to happening in the very near future.
Adobe is currently testing a streaming version of Photoshop and is about 90% of the way to making this type of use a viable alternative to buying your computer with Photoshop specs in mind.
The streaming version of Photoshop is being tested with files hosted on Google Drive, but I suspect that would be something Adobe would move (or at least provide the option) to Creative Cloud hosting when Photoshop Streaming gets the full commercial green light.
Project Photoshop Streaming is currently only available to certain individuals and institutions in the education field. You can read more about it here on Adobe’s website.
There are plenty of hurdles and limitations that I’m sure we’ll see in the first Photoshop Streaming version (just like we’re seeing in Lightroom for iPad); however, it’s only a matter of time before the creative software giant brings hardware agnostic Photoshop access to a browser near you.
Now Adobe, about my Creative Cloud render farm…
[via The Verge]
forkboy1965 says
This is the sort of thing that causes me no small amount of excitement as well as incredible trepidation.
Imagine…. your catalogue in the cloud, editing online, no longer buying high-powered computers to satisfy PSs or Lrs needs…. It does feel very wow.
But then I think about security issues, Adobe being hit with a DDoS, hackers, etc. And suddenly I feel less wow.
But either way it does seem like it’s the future of Adobe products in general.
Buzz says
I’ll pass. There are some definite benifits to the cloud farming but realize its only as good as the server system and connection lines in between you and Adobe. You also need to realize that when an image is on someone elses server is it still truly yours? Gates has been trying to do this with Microsoft products for years. Every time you turn on your computer you get charged for it. I’ll pass on that too.
I have to also point out that legislation has not caught up with reality. One guy uploads child porn and every server is confiscated and wipped, unless you can get court order stopping it of course.