
Not everyone will likely be happy with these changes but most digital photographers should appreciate the more streamlined and organized product line-up. There have also been a number of other Adobe products that came and went over the years such as TypeAlign, PressReady, and LiveMotion, all of which I personally owned. A number of changes took place when Adobe acquired Macromedia in 2005 and GoLive passed the baton to Dreamweaver. The most well known previous shift came in 2003 when what would have been Photoshop 8 was rebranded as Photoshop CS but there have been others. Adobe has made similar tweaks in their lineup and product names before but none quite as abrupt as what is apparently being planned this time around. After years of confusion, this reshuffling of Creative Suite features seems likely to simplify things at least for them. Photographers have long had a difficult time learning Photoshop since it included so many features only used by graphic artists.

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In addition to the migrated Photoshop features, early word is that the new ImageReady will once again be able to work with the multiple rollover and image slice code generated by the old ImageReady. In much the same way that the old ImageReady was used to finish off images edited in Photoshop the new ImageReady will fill that same role for today's digital photographers. What remains though will now be known as the new Adobe ImageReady. Some features aimed mainly at graphic artists will apparently move from Photoshop to Adobe Illustrator, and some features will get merged with Lightroom in the new Photoshop. Now just a few releases later of their Creative Suite, Adobe seems poised to bring the name back in order to rebrand what has been called Photoshop. Although they still have the name trademarked, the last release of the original ImageReady shipped with Photoshop CS2 in 2005. Introduced as a stand-alone product in 1998, Adobe began bundling it with Photoshop the next year. In the past, Adobe produced a different application known as ImageReady aimed mainly at the manipulation of web graphics. Lightroom, which has for the past couple releases been officially known as Adobe Photoshop Lightroom will be rebranded simply as Adobe Photoshop with Photoshop itself will be renamed as Adobe ImageReady.Īt first, this sounded like an unusual decision to me but the more I thought about it there did seem to be a certain logic to it. While no official word is likely until we get closer to the actual release date, leaked word is that the company is making some significant changes in their product lineup aimed at more directly targeting the exploding digital photography market. Initial beta testing is claimed to be starting the beginning of April for the next generation of Adobe's Creative Suite software, and it sounds like the company is set to shake things up a bit. As I say, confusing.Īpparently based on feedback from focus groups and other market research, Adobe has gotten the message that their product names no longer convey the concepts they want them to. But it has become Lightroom that is most associated with photography, not Photoshop in spite of the name. Adobe has added some targeted adjustment features to Lightroom recently, but there are still things that it can't do, and if you need to do them you need Photoshop. Increasingly, many photographers have found that Lightroom satisfies the lion's share of their needs with Photoshop being used now mainly to finish off images after they've been processed in Lightroom. But then Adobe released Lightroom and things got even more confusing for digital photographers. Because it was the market leader for computer graphics, Photoshop became the leading tool used by photographers as they struggled to move to digital.



These days, film and chemical developing have given way to digital cameras, raw file converts and image editing on computers. With the limited capabilities of computers at the time, I doubt Thomas Knoll or anyone else involved realized where things would be now. The product name may have had nice connotations to it, but there wasn't much photography to Photoshop back then. Photoshop started out as a general purpose graphics program in the late 1980's. In addition to the usual crop of new features, Adobe plans to rename both products to better target digital photographers. We're starting to hear rumors of Adobe's plans for the next release of Photoshop and Lightroom. It seems this time of year always brings big news. Adobe Plans to Rebrand, Repackage Photoshop and Lightroom
