TECH NEWS – Still heavily beta, “Photoshop for the Web” is only available in one country for now, but hopefully it will expand soon. We also tested whether the free photo editing app works with a VPN in this country…

Photoshop may finally become as accessible as many of its alternatives. Adobe has made the existing web version of Photoshop free – or, well, freemium – in Canada, and will hopefully expand availability in the near future. In an interview with The Verge, Maria Yap, Adobe’s vice president of digital imaging, didn’t say when that would be, but she wants to “meet users where they are now”.

Access requires a free Adobe account, and you can use the link on this page (currently only visible if you’re in Canada or using a VPN – see below for instructions on the latter) to open it.

The web version of Photoshop isn’t as robust as the software that costs at least $10 a month through Adobe Creative Cloud, but it has the features you need to do most simple tasks. You can use keyboard shortcuts, crop images, switch between layers, create masks, add correction layers and use the healing brush. Crucially, images cannot be converted into smart objects, which means that if you resize them several times, they will not retain the correct resolution.

Photoshop for the Web, which is still in beta, can’t really compete with some other popular free image editing tools, such as Photopea, GIMP and Paint.NET. Photopea, for example, has image filters, layer merging and layer styles – most of the big features of Photoshop and a near identical user interface. Surprisingly, Photoshop for the Web is not as close to the desktop version either, perhaps to make it more accessible to new users. The point is to eventually get you to pay for a Creative Cloud subscription or some other unannounced monetization to unlock more features. It’s a bit of a squeeze if you don’t want to use it just for basic editing tasks like making memes or quickly enhancing images.

This free to try format for Adobe apps is nothing new. The company already has several free apps on mobile, including Adobe Premiere Rush, Adobe Fresco and Adobe Express. However, Photoshop on the web is the first time one of the most popular pieces of software has been made available in this way, and it can be very useful if you don’t have a powerful laptop or tablet.

As for using a VPN: the usual ‘teleporting’ trickery only works if you don’t just set the VPN to Canada, but launch the browser in incognito mode and start a brand new account – otherwise Adobe will know you’re trying to log in from your own registered country. Whether this trickery is worth the effort is for everyone to decide…

Source: Slashgear