After reading about this and watching Kelby's interview with Hogarty, it appears that Adobe is essentially equating "photographers" with Lightroom. It would seem that the enhanced aspects of a CC-based Lightroom (versus a box copy) would be aimed at the Cloud-related ability to access raw/smart preview files on desktop and mobile devices and also to be able to publish to various sites, etc. There are some interesting comments regarding the photographic workflow and how it is ostensibly migrating to mobile devices, including Kelby's assertion that one may actually want to be editing files on a tablet (iPad) because that is where the majority of people view photos nowadays. That is, it is better to edit on that device with that output device in mind, because that is where most people will view your images - color management is not controllable per se, but at least iPads displays across users are relatively similar, so one would hope to have a better shot at having their iPad-viewed images be more consistent across users. It is definitely a different way to look at the issue of preparing images for public consumption versus a fully color-managed workflow likely targeting print output.
So, for whatever you end up paying monthly, you will have Adobe host your images so that you can have them (including the smart previews) available on all of your devices - sorts, categories and edits you perform on one platform will sync across devices. Sounds like Apple's iCloud, apps and music. Duh, no surprise that this is the upshot of the upcoming Lightroom experience. Given all of the discussion here about copyright and ownership, it will be interesting to see how Adobe frames this cloud hosting in terms of image and file copyright/ownership.
This is the "discussion" Adobe has started - Hogarty kept coming back to the notion that this transition is the beginning of a discussion. Interesting. It will also be interesting to see how Photoshop fits into this discussion, as Adobe appears to be segmenting photographers primarily into the Lightroom category. Once they introduce layers into Lightroom, that will pretty much be reason enough for "photographers" to abandon Photoshop and depend solely on Lightroom - at least that would be my highly uneducated guess. My guess is that, once layers occur in Lightroom, Lightroom will no longer be a box-product and will join the CC as a stand-alone photographic workflow where Adobe can provide you most of the Photoshop-like experience, across multiple devices, and host all of your images for you for the monthly fee model. I think this is how Adobe is essentially acknowledging that Photoshop is a monstrous tool that "photographers" don't really need most of, so they have refined the essentials and called it Lightroom. Makes total sense when you consider that the full name of Lightroom is "Adobe Photoshop Lightroom." I can understand where some, maybe many, photographers prefer the all-in-one solution of Lightroom - so, it appears that if this is the way you prefer to work, then the Lightroom experience that Adobe has in store for you may make your preferred workflow even better. However, if Lightroom is a sometimes thing, it will be interesting to see how workflows adapt or look elsewhere as Adobe's roadmap takes shape, especially considering that alternative raw conversion workflows may lean much more heavily on Photoshop.
Another aspect of all of this will be the way Adobe's development of the mobile platform takes shape when they will obviously be targeting Apple products as a significant hardware base. Developing for desktops and laptops where Apple has such a small market share is one thing, but the mobile device environment is, I would imagine, very different. Should be good fun to see how this shakes out. Emphasis on the mobile device market is a no-brainer.
kirk
