For the first time ever, an Adobe program is available through the Mac App Store. Yesterday, Adobe began selling Photoshop Elements 9 there for $80, a generous 20% off the regular $100 price for the boxed version. It’s a pretty big deal, because Adobe — along with Microsoft — is a company that would love to keep its software out of Apple’s App Store. It generates significant profits by selling its popular programs in the traditional boxed format, while businesses that sell through the Mac App Store must fork over 30% to Apple (which may soon become the most valuable company in the world). This news shows that Adobe is at least testing the waters, and may eventually expand its offers in the Mac Store to reach Apple’s rapidly expanding customer base.
Earlier this week Adobe launched a new subscription-based model for their Creative Suite line of software products. The program ordinarily costs $699, but a yearly subscription costs $420 and gives you access to the latest version. You can also subscribe for a monthly fee of $49 if you need the program on a short term basis. While this won’t be very enticing for heavy users of the programs who can just save money by buying and upgrading, renting is a good option for anyone who needs the latest Photoshop on a as-needed basis.
Adobe announced new tools today that lets developers create tablet apps — called Photoshop Touch Apps — that interact directly with Photoshop CS5. They also created a few apps to showcase some of the possibilities of using a tablet while working in Photoshop, including one called Adobe Nav. Basically it turns your iPad into a separate interface for controlling Photoshop, allowing you to select tools, customize the toolbar, or manage your open files by conveniently showing them as thumbnails. It’ll be available for $2 starting in early May, but we can’t wait to see what other apps developers will unveil before then!
Amazon’s Gold Box deal of the day today is Adobe Lightroom 3 for $189. This normally costs $299 direct from Adobe or $240-250 elsewhere, so if you’ve been waiting to jump into Lightroom, now’s a good time to do so.
Here are a couple mockups by MacRumors showing what Photoshop might look like on mobile computing devices like the iPad or iPhone. Adobe recently published a presentation they did on various things they’re exploring with such devices. An example was using Content Aware Fill to modify a scene by painting over objects to be removed using your finger. Read more…
There was a rumor circulating today that Sony was potentially an acquisition target of Apple, which has $51 billion in cash lying around waiting to be used. Shares of Sony were up nearly 3 percent at one point before the rumors were quashed by analysts. If Apple did somehow acquire Sony in the future, it would bring the company back into the digital camera market that the company explored and then abandoned back in the 90s. However, it doesn’t seem likely that we’ll see an Apple Alpha DSLR anytime soon.
Another photo-related company that’s being mentioned as an acquisition target: Adobe.
The Internet was abuzz yesterday due to a secret meeting at Adobe’s offices between the head honchos of Microsoft (Steve Ballmer) and Adobe (Shantanu Narayen). The New York Times reports:
The meeting, which lasted more than an hour, covered a number of topics, but one of the main thrusts of the discussion was Apple and its control of the mobile phone market and how the two companies could team up in the battle against Apple. A possible acquisition of Adobe by Microsoft were among the options.
Whoa. Acquisition. That’s a pretty deal. So big, in fact, that the rumor drove Adobe’s stock price up 11.5% yesterday, adding about $1.5 billion to their market cap. Read more…
In the future, focusing on the wrong subject when taking a picture might be a thing of the past. At Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference this year Adobe gave a demonstration of how plenoptic lenses can be used to allow focus to be arbitrarily chosen after the image is captured during post-processing. These are microlens arrays containing hundreds, thousands, or even tens of thousands (Stanford researchers used a camera with 90,000 lenses) of tiny lenses that record much more information about a scene than traditional single lenses. Read more…
Adobe is running a unique contest right now in search of the “next Photoshop evangelist”. Sadly, the winner isn’t given a special “evangelist” position in Adobe’s marketing department, but rather the prize package is pretty typical: a copy of CS5 Design Standard and a trip to Photoshop World in 2011 (which includes airfare, lodging, meals, and a chance to demo the winning tutorial). Read more…
We reported yesterday that Adobe had launched a “Freedom of Choice” ad campaign against Apple, the latest shot in their ongoing battle over Flash. The above nerd joke is supposed to show what it might look like if Apple responded to Adobe with their own advertisement.
