As you know, Adobe made the move to a subscription model, meaning you are now “renting” your applications rather than purchasing them. In the latest move, Adobe Photoshop has a web version, and you can, maybe, test it out by yourself right now.

If you go to https://creativecloud.adobe.com/cc/photoshop, and have an Adobe account (it doesn’t matter if you have a subscription or not), you are greeted with a dashboard. There you will see Photoshop (Beta), which is a web-version of Adobe Photoshop. If you launch the application, you may get an error message depending on the browser you are using. For example, I use Brave, and the website told me to use either Edge or Chrome.

After copying the URL onto Edge, I clicked the “Take the tour” button, where I saw a brief tour that explains some of the functionality. This version has the selection tools, masking tools, transformation tools, layer functionality, and other features found in the software version of Photoshop. However, there are some limitations and not all features are included (for example, not all the filters). Since I don’t use Photoshop CC (I still use Photoshop CS6) I don’t know how collaboration works in that version. This version of Photoshop Web allows you to collaborate with other people on your team, where all can add or comment on the work. You can either share a link, or invite specific people.

If you have an Adobe account, but don’t have an Adobe CC subscription, you can’t really try out this app. When you try to create a new document, you are shown a message that says you need to get a subscription. From what I understand, Adobe plans to make Photoshop Web free for everyone, as a way to introduce people to the application. Right now, they are testing the “Free Photoshop Web” program in Canada only, and I don’t know when they will expand to other countries.

While I couldn’t test this web app myself, I saw some videos of the app in action and I can say that I have tested other web-based alternatives with way more functionality. While this one might be good for existing Adobe users that need to do edits of their applications on the go, on a computer that doesn’t have Photoshop installed (Photoshop Web does not run on a tablet), in its current form it’s going to have a difficult time winning users that are already using other web alternatives.

Photoshop Web (Beta): https://creativecloud.adobe.com/cc/photoshop