Google Chromebooks and Adobe Photoshop: An Exploration

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Google Chomebooks have become popular with students and schools around the world — they’re small, portable, and affordable. And with Photoshop as one of the world’s most-learned tools, we’re giving students an opportunity for more access. Adobe and Google are working together to host a new streaming version of Photoshop that runs directly in Chrome. We think this is an interesting experiment and another example of the how Creative Cloud is giving us an opportunity to re-think how customers interact with our software in new environments.

As many of you know, Creative Cloud brings together our industry-defining desktop apps like Photoshop CC, InDesign CC and Illustrator CC; new mobile apps; and more connected ways of creating and sharing high-impact content. Desktop applications, available as part of Creative Cloud, are downloaded and installed locally.

We are always experimenting with new ways we can support our broad customer base. This streaming version of Photoshop is an exploration that offers unique additional value: it provides hardware independence with performance comparable to that of a locally installed application. Education IT departments will also benefit since updates become available as soon as they’re ready, and don’t have to be deployed across multiple machines. Users benefit from a fully cloud-based workflow, where changes can be made to documents directly in the cloud, removing the need to download large files locally, then upload once the changes are complete.

Most Creative Cloud members will continue to download and install our applications locally. But we want to hear from you about this additional way of using your favorite Adobe desktop applications. To qualify for now you need to be an Adobe education customer in North America, with a paid Creative Cloud membership. Sign-up is available from today at: http://edex.adobe.com/projectphotoshopstreaming. We’ll have forums available for your feedback and look forward to your input.