Eyes-on With Streaming Photoshop: Adobe’s Plan to Bring PS to the Cloud
We have seen Photoshop work in a browser, and it looked pretty good. “Streaming Photoshop” is Adobe and Google’s plan to bring the incomparable photo editor to Chrome OS and the Chrome Browser. We covered the original announcement, but we were recently given the chance to talk to Adobe about the project and see it actually working in a Chrome browser.
“Streaming Photoshop” is a Chrome App that you download from the Chrome store (provided you are whitelisted). The app opens in a window that looks just like a local version of Photoshop—there’s no browser UI of any kind. Photoshop lives on a computer in the cloud, and a video feed of it is streamed to the Chrome app. The app captures clicks and sends them to the server. It sounds like using it would be a clunky mess, but the whole process looked indistinguishable from a local install of Photoshop.
The primary purpose of Photoshop-in-a-browser is to get the app running on Chrome OS, which pretty much can only run a browser. Chrome OS has taken off as a competitor to Windows—the NPD’s last estimate put it at 35% of commercial notebook sales—but it lacks a few killer apps like Photoshop. The other benefit is that you can now run Photoshop on just about any computer without having to worry about RAM and CPU usage, since all the computer has to display is a video stream. Adobe says even the $200 Chromebooks on the market today should be fast enough to handle Streaming Photoshop.
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