Adobe brings Creative Cloud to Chromebooks starting w/ ‘Project Photoshop Streaming’ beta

Google announced a new partnership with Adobe today that will see the companies bring Adobe’s suite of popular Creative Cloud apps to Chromebooks. Initially, Adobe will launch just the Photoshop app as a beta (pictured above) and make it available to only its education customers. 

The announcement notes that Adobe has a streaming version of Photoshop that’s “designed to run straight from the cloud” and fully integrated with Google Drive, but also appears to hint that the app will offer a full Photoshop experience that Creative Cloud users will be familiar with. In case you’re wondering how this streaming version of Photoshop will differ from the normal Creative Cloud experience, Adobe explains:

Project Photoshop Streaming is identical to the Photoshop you’d install locally with a few notable exceptions. This build can be accessed from any Chrome browser (Windows only) or Chromebook and does not require a full download and install. In other words, this is the same build of Photoshop you’d typically download and install from Creative Cloud, however, instead of being installed on your local machine, it is running in a virtualized environment so can be accessed from any Chrome browser or Chromebook. Because this version of Photoshop is running in a virtualized environment, you open, save, export and recover files from/to your Google Drive rather than your local file share. Also this Beta version of the virtualized environment does not have support for GPU consequently GPU dependent features are not yet available (coming soon). This build also does not yet support for print.

Adobe has a list of features that aren’t currently working on the streaming version of Photoshop here but says those features will return in the future. It also notes that “additionally other input devices such as scanners, audio, and printing is not currently supported.”

At first the app will only be available to users in the US and will require a paid Creative Cloud subscription. Adobe has a range of plans for Creative Cloud that range from $9 for access to Photoshop and Lightroom to $30/month for access to the entire CC suite ($20/month for education customers). You can check out all of Adobe’s current discounts and promotions for Creative Cloud here. 

Those interested in getting access to the new “Project Photoshop Streaming” beta can sign-up through Adobe.