Gotcha

Also of concern is Behance and Cloud Storage. Behance is the online community for displaying professional work that was recently purchased by Adobe. The shared storage space in the cloud for Adobe products gives the new Adobe package its name: Creative Cloud. Not only is the software downloaded and updated from there, but the new idea gives the impression the work files are there too. Does one lose access to them when their subscription lapses? Many are concerned.

With Dreamweaver web designers have learned how to have multiple people working on a project. There are file checkouts and version control stuff to keep people from stepping on each other’s work. This idea is being extended to other parts of the Adobe suite of products. You can share a PS file and several people can be working on it, or versions of it. And everyone can get to the latest versions. This is great as some of our work files are in the 100 megabyte range. Try making a decal to fit a city bus. There are possibilities for big time savings.

Tech Crunch says, “Morris [Adobe’s head of the Creative Cloud Team] also acknowledged that there will be customers who just can’t switch to Creative Cloud and for the most part, that’s because of the online components like the Behance community and cloud storage features. Government agencies, for example, will not want to use this (or aren’t allowed to), schools won’t want their students to publish their work publicly to Behance and some enterprise customers, too, will not want to deal with these features. For them, Adobe has created special licenses and a version of the Creative Cloud package that still use the online distribution mechanism, but that won’t include that features that these customers will object to.”

So… are these online features a MUST DO or an optional thing? There is a myth that they are a MUST. But read on.

Digging through the web site I find that you must connect to the Adobe site once every month to keep the software working. Other than that you can be offline. Pretty much the same as it is now. The max time the software will run without connecting is 99 days. …ummm, well that’s what they say even if it would seem to indicate you only have to connect once every 99 days.

The Adobe software downloads and installs just as it does now. It lives in your computer. It is NOT a web based product. There are versions of the software for iPads and other devices. But, I haven’t researched those.

Once Adobe software is installed, it connects and verifies the key and subscription.

Online storage is 20gb in the cloud. Adobe apps will be able to sync using this storage space and you can send a link to a client so they can see the file. Terry White did a video of how files can be shared. 6 min.

The online storage feature packages up a process that web designers have used for a long time. The Creative Cloud process is much cleaner and easier. It requires far less effort and time.

I’ll have to see how this works. The cloud storage that Microsoft created, Skydrive, conflicts with Second Life viewers. My hope is that Adobe is using something else.

Reading more at Adobe I get the impression that are moving toward web and content hosting.

My basic analysis is that for many professional artists, web and game designers, and publishing peeps this is a great deal. It is likely to be popular with them. But for hobbyist, this change will likely lock them out. Second Life users will tend to be pushed to Adobe’s competition.

Competition

There are alternatives to Adobe Photoshop. GIMP (Free) is the well known open source alternative. It mimics the PS user interface. But it does not develop at the speed PS is developing. Nor does it have the features the PS has, but neither do other programs. Other alternatives are:

• Aperture – (Mac Only) – £60 – $80
• Acorn – (Mac Only) – £20 – $30
• Media Composer – £1,799 – $2,300
•  Pixelmator – (Mac Only) – £12 – $15
• Paint.net – (Windows Only) – Free – This is a handy program. I download and use it when I am at remote sites and need simple image editing. Surprisingly good.
• PaintShop Pro – (Windows Only) – £60 – $80 – By Corel. This is a long time competitor of PS.
• QuarkXPress – £935 – US$1,200 – This is another program once very popular with professionals going to print. For a time it was the king of print shops doing pre-press trapping. It still a top program for magazine publishers.
• Sketch – (Mac Only) – £35 – $50
• SumoPaint – (Web Based) – free and £15 – $20 Pro.

To read more about these see: The top 8 alternatives to Photoshop.

For use with Second Life only any of the free programs will suffice. The 3D painting tools in PS Extended can be somewhat replaced using Blender. Whether using PS or Blender 3D painting is for advanced users. So, the lack of 3D in these other programs is probably not that big an issue.

Let me know which image editor you are using.