With the launch of a brand new version of Photoshop for smartphones, Adobe has also launched what is now its cheapest premium Photoshop plan. We’re not sure if it’s a good replacement for that 20GB Photography Plan that Adobe killed off a couple of months ago, though.
Adobe has just launched a new “Photoshop Mobile and Web” plan, which now fills the spot of the cheapest Adobe subscription plan that was left by the removal of the 20GB Photography plan. Both the web version and the mobile version of Photoshop, the latter of which was just announced today, are free to use for the most part with a limited set of features. The point of this plan is to bring both versions of Photoshop a tad closer to the capabilities of the desktop version. The plan itself doesn’t include desktop access, so you can’t use the desktop version of Photoshop on your computer if you’re using this one. But if you’re using Photoshop via either a browser or your iPhone, you do get a slightly wider set of features.
What features do you get, exactly? This subscription gives you access to the Remove Tool for the ability to remove entire objects by selecting them. You also get Content Aware Fill which, just like the desktop version, lets you fill in parts of an image by sampling other parts—this is how we used to patch/fill in images before the AI era came along, and it’s still the preferred method in certain specific scenarios.
You also get Object Select for quickly selecting objects or people, more fine-tuned tweaking of layers with Advanced Blend Modes, and the good old reliable Magic Wand tool. You can also export images in file formats such as PSD, JPG, PNG, and TIFF, and you also get 100 generative credits that you can use for your images. This doesn’t get both of these versions of Photoshop to feature parity with the desktop version, and that one is still preferred for more complex/intensive editing needs. But if all you need is a basic set of image editing tools, this might just fit the bill if you need to do things on the go.
This comes as a sort of replacement for those who were looking for a cheaper Photoshop subscription. As a reminder, Adobe killed off the 20GB Photography plan last December, which gave you access to the desktop version of Photoshop for $9.99 a month. That was pretty good since it allowed you full access to Photoshop if you didn’t really need a lot of cloud storage, or you didn’t need any at all—currently, Adobe’s best deal is the 1TB Photography plan, which is otherwise identical but gives you 1TB of cloud storage rather than 20GB. Also, it’s $19.99 a month, although it’s occasionally discounted—as we write this, you can grab it for $14.98 a month.
This plan, on the other hand, costs $7.99 a month. It’s cheaper than what the 20GB Photography plan costed, but it’s also a lot more limited and might not be worth it for some graphic designers. If you only need to do light editing on the go, a la apps such as Canva, it could be worth it. It’s a cool tool to have. The standard Photoshop plans, including the Photography plans as well as the full Creative Cloud plans, seem to give you the perks of this mobile/web plan. So if you need to pay extra for desktop Photoshop, you can still take advantage of the expanded mobile apps.
The new subscription can only be had right now by downloading the iPhone app and signing up for it there. Presumably, it will become a platform-independent subscription once the mobile app rolls out to Android users later this year.
Source: Adobe (App Store)
