The company is now testing the free version in Canada, where users are able to access Photoshop on the web through a free Adobe account. Adobe describes the service as “freemium” and eventually plans to gate off some features that will be exclusive to paying subscribers. Enough tools will be freely available to perform what Adobe considers to be Photoshop’s core functions.
The question of course will be how useful the core features will be. We do have open source cross-platform GIMP, which is really powerful (and very likely more so than Photoshop’s web product), but GIMP is still a difficult UI can casual users (once you use it very often I imagine you’d know exactly what is where).
So yes, Photoshop follows Microsoft Office then in exposing young children to getting used to a product they’ll probably have to pay for later on if they want to progress a bit further with it. I’d really prefer that schools teach the principles of the various products on completely free and open source software, and apart from the freedoms of use, so that they are familiar with there being alternatives, and so that schools themselves don’t get locked into a specific proprietary product.
See https://www.theverge.com/2022/6/14/23162580/photoshop-web-free-freemium-version-adobe
#technology #photoshop #schools #graphics #freemium