A rather geeky/technical weblog, est. 2001, by Bramus
Next generation audio from Adobe is here. Record, transcribe, edit, share. Crisp and clear, every time.
This is pretty crazy: it automagically transcribes the recorded audio, and allows you to alter the segments by removing words from the transcribed text. That Enhance Speech Filter also blew my mind there.
At (the ongoing) Adobe MAX 2021, Adobe announced that Photoshop and Illustrator are coming to the web, with Photoshop already in beta.
Your collaborators can open and view your work in the browser and provide feedback. You’ll also be able to make basic edits without having to download or launch the apps.
It’s not the entire Photoshop functionality that you get there, but from what I can tell the “basic edits” as they call it will let you do more than enough.
Yep, you heard that right. @Photoshop is coming the to Web, so that you can access projects anywhere. 🙌 In public beta now. #AdobeMAX pic.twitter.com/d1idupdTzo
— Adobe (@Adobe) October 26, 2021
Does require a Photoshop subscription though.
Adobe Blog: Bringing teams together in Creative Cloud at Adobe MAX 2021 →
Photoshop on the Web Beta FAQ →
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Over at web.dev there’s a writeup on how Photoshop on the web came to be. The heavy lifting was done by Emscripten, to convert Photoshop’s C++ code to WASM:
WebAssembly and its C++ toolchain Emscripten have been the key to unlocking Photoshop’s ability to come to the web, as it meant that Adobe would not have to start from scratch, but could leverage their existing Photoshop codebase.
For the UI, Adobe went all-in on Web Components, powered by Lit:
The entire Photoshop app is built using Lit-based Web Components. Leaning on the browser’s built-in component model and Shadow DOM encapsulation, the team found it easy to cleanly integrate a few “islands” of React code provided by other Adobe teams.
The UI Elements themselves are based on Spectrum, Adobe’s design system. Here’s an example implementation of Spectrum’s Color Wheel:
See the Pen Spectrum Web Components: sp-color-wheel by Bramus (@bramus) on CodePen.
Photoshop’s journey to the web →
Spectrum Web Components →
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Photoshop on the web is only available in Chromium-based browsers right now (Chrome, Edge, …) and Firefox support is coming. No mention of Safari though.
Currently, Photoshop on the web beta works with Google Chrome and Microsoft Edge. We will soon bring Photoshop to other browsers as well (i.e. Firefox). We are leveraging the cutting-edge capabilities of modern browsers for the best experience.
The fact that it only works in Chromium right now is due to the use of very recent Fugu APIs.
Project Fugu 🐡 is an effort to close gaps in the web's capabilities enabling new classes of applications to run on the web. It's also known as The Web Capabilities Project.
Example Fugu APIs are the Shape Detection API (Face and Text), Native File System API, Contact Picker API, Web NFC API, Web Serial API, …
My guess is they make heavy use of the The Asynchronous Clipboard API, The File System Access API, and possibly many others.
I hope this release — which is a huge milestone for Fugu — gives the Safari Team(’s Tech Managers) a little push to also put these Fugu APIs on the roadmap, because one must admit: “Safari can’t run Photoshop on the web” doesn’t sound very good 😕
On the upside: The Safari/WebKit team has been crushing it lately, and they are actively hiring … so I’m getting my hopes up here to be honest 😊
Update 2021.10.27: Adobe is working with the Safari Team on this:
Only for now. We're gated on a few WASM and File System Access APIs which are currently in progress in the other browsers.
Adobe is working hard with all the browser vendors to bring this sort of capability to them all. Chrome is just ahead of the curve.
— Ben Delarre (@BenDelarre) October 26, 2021
Update 2021.10.28: Safari Technology Preview 134 (which is preview release of the next version of Safari) contains some of the required WASM + Web API changes … 🤩
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🔥 Like what you see? Want to stay in the loop? Here's how:
Nice new feature coming to Adobe Premiere Pro:
Powered by Adobe Sensei machine learning technology, Auto Reframe seamlessly adjusts aspect ratios such as square, vertical or 16:9 video to help improve time-consuming manual video resizing.
Adobe’s Web Platform group teamed up with Food Network to experiment with bringing their popular Cupcakes! tablet application to the web. See how we turned beautiful content from Food Network, hardware from Leap Motion, speech recognition, responsive tooling, and new layout and graphics standards into a next-generation web experience.
Canvas Blend Modes, CSS Masks, CSS Clip Paths, Dynamic Masks, Regions, CSS Shapes, Web Speech API, …
With its latest update, Flash Professional CC empowers the open web ecosystem by providing native support for HTML5. You can now natively author and publish HTML5 Canvas content from within Flash Pro.
Powered by CreateJS. Also comes with a AS3 to JS converter.
Adobe Flash CC: What’s New →
Flash Professional Help: Creating and publishing an HTML5 Canvas document →
A crossword based on the Adobe password leak. The answers to the crossword are chosen from the 1000 most used passwords for Adobe user accounts from the recent password leak. The clues are up to 50 of the most commonly used hints for each of the passwords.
Hilarious stuff!
Inspired upon XKCD #1286: Encryptic
Generator allows you to create image assets in real time as you work, eliminating the tedious steps of copying, slicing and exporting each layer manually, and saving you hours of time. Simply add a file extension to the name of your layer or layer group, and Photoshop will automatically create a JPG, PNG or GIF from the contents of that layer.
Bad news for Layer Cake Slicy
This code is so literate, so easy to read, that comments might even have gotten in the way. This is the kind of code I aspire to write.
Collaboration between Adobe Research and The University of Michigan
Adobe’s now offering Creative Suite 2 (Acrobat Pro, Photoshop, Illustrator, …) for free. Sounds like a perfect deal for (my) students who are still learning the tools and are still learning (and most likely will only need) the basics.