Naysayers about Chromebooks‘ usefulness for more “professional” work beyond cloud-based document editing now have one less argument to use. Google has just announced that the Chrome OS-toting laptops can now be used for photo editing and digital painting thanks to Adobe‘s Creative Cloud and Photoshop.
For those unfamiliar with Adobe’s lineup, the Creative Cloud is its newest and somewhat highly controversial offering that will eventually displace the popular Creative Suite or CS. It is controversial because it is a cloud-based, subscription-based system where users who wish to be able to continue using software like Photoshop or Illustrator will be basically renting the software instead of owning them as in the previous CS system.
Photoshop Creative Cloud edition takes a different form when it comes to this new Chromebook incarnation. Whereas Creative Cloud desktop apps like it get installed directly on PCs, the Chromebook version will actually be streaming the app from a virtualized environment hosted on Adobe’s servers. In short, Project Photoshop Streaming, as it is called by Adobe, will basically be a web app, which is a perfect fit for Google’s Chromebook environment.
This kind of system has several advantages, at least from a Chrome OS and Chromebook standpoint. Given how underpowered most Chromebooks are, streaming Photoshop instead of running directly on the metal lowers the hardware requirement considerably, a minimum of an Intel Pentium 4 and 512 MB RAM to be exact. The partnership with Google also means that users won’t have to worry about Photoshop PSD files taking up huge amounts of space on their hard drive as they can work on files stored on Google Drive directly.
While that may be a Chromebook user’s dream come true, the offer comes with a price, figuratively and literally. First is that you need to have a Creative Cloud account, which starts at $13 per month at the lowest. But for this particular product, it will be initially available to US-based Adobe education customers only. Adobe’s FAQ reveals that the project will run for six months only, something Google has not mentioned in its announcement. No other Adobe products will be available for streaming.
