Is Photoshop Training moving to the Cloud

Photoshop has traditionally been installed directly on your computer, either from a disc such as a DVD, or after downloading it from Adobe’s website. Whether you are working in your studio or office, or taking a Photoshop training classes as American Graphics Institute, the application is installed directly on the computer being used for classes. But this may be changing. Web services such as FaceBook or SalesForce, are accessed online through a web browser, and require an Internet connection to be used, and some versions of Photoshop may soon be accessible this way. Currently Photoshop works whether you were connected to the Internet or not, because the program is installed directly on your computer. For more than a decade Photoshop has been available for users of Mac OS and Windows computers, but many of the newer, low-cost, and low-powered ChromeBook computers have no access to Photoshop. This is because Photoshop likely would not run well on them, and Adobe hasn’t made a version available for these devices. Now that low-cost ChromeBooks account for one-third of all notebook sales, Adobe is looking at ways to make Photoshop available to users of these devices.

To bring Photoshop to the fast-growing group of ChromeBook users, Adobe has devised a solution where the work will not be done on the computers locally. Adobe will handle all the processing on its computers, and stream the images being edited through the browser onto the user’s screen. In a test version of Photoshop that can run on Chromebooks, you’ll find that no image editing application is actually installed. Instead, Adobe creates a connection to a server where you are able to open Photoshop on a remove computer server. Images are uploaded to the server, edited on the server, and you see a remote picture of what is being edited. All the work is done remotely. The brand Adobe has applied to this release of the application is Photoshop Streaming.

Although Photoshop Streaming is a full version of the Windows application, we don’t expect to be using it for Photoshop training courses anytime soon. This is because the streaming version of Photoshop requires approximately 4 MB per second of bandwidth to perform optimally. In a full Photoshop class, this could involve up to 10 students learning Photoshop, and needing to stream the app. This type of bandwidth intensive requirement makes the streaming version less attractive for uses such as having many people in an agency accessing the app online, or trying to deliver a Photoshop class using the streaming version of the app.

While this might not be the best solution for use in a Photoshop class, it may be suitable for casual users who only have access to a ChromeBook. The streaming version is currently available to education users of the Creative Cloud and you can apply for access to it here.