Adobe Pushes Deeper in SaaS Space With New Photoshop.com Service

San Jose (CA) - Adobe today launched Photoshop Elements 7 and Premiere Elements 7 for Windows as two new more affordable ways to edit pictures and videos with a touch of Photoshop and Premiere. But the real news is that Adobe is ready to get consumers used to the fact that buying a software is only half the story. What you really want is to buy a service and renew it every year. The question is: Will you bite?

We have to admit it, the news of Photoshop Elements 7 and Premiere Elements 7 passed us by as being insignificant this morning. Yes, there are new features here and there: Photoshop for example now includes a "Scene Cleaner" to brush away unwanted subjects in a vacation shot who may be impacting the main subject of the photo. There is a new Smart Brush and new tools that combine multiple editing steps into one. Premiere Elements now supports AVCHD (for those HD video camcorders), Smart Tags to identify the video quality, number of faces and sounds as well as a more advanced Videomerge option that can automatically place a person into any scene.

Both applications are available for $100 if you buy them separate, or $150 in a bundle. But what Adobe wants you really to buy is a Photoshop.com Plus membership that will be available for $50 per year, while a basic membership will be offered free of charge. The basic membership will provide 5 GB of storage space, tutorials, seasonal artwork and themed templates. For $50 per year, you will get 20 GB of storage, which is, according to Adobe, enough for 15,000 photos, four hours of DVD-quality videos or a combination of both. The reason why you would want to upgrade? The pitch is the general online back-up, which will "keep memories safe from computer failure or natural disaster, with access from anywhere."

There is no doubt that the trend in the industry points to services that will guarantee ongoing revenue sources. Slowly but surely we may be turning much more into a subscription than we already are. Besides subscribing to your basic utilities, cellphone, Internet, Tivo and perhaps magazines, you will soon be paying for your Microsoft Office software, image and video editing and other IT services on a per-month or per-year basis.

Adobe’s story isn’t quite as compelling as we would think such a service needs to be. At least for now, we are much more excited about Adobe’s soon-to-be-released Photoshop CS4, which is likely to include GPGPU acceleration.