You’ll soon be able to edit Photoshop projects with others at the same time
Adobe is starting 2025 with a highly anticipated innovation Photoshop Special feature. Adobe announced Tuesday that its latest Photoshop beta feature will be Live Co-Editing, a tool that lets you and your team work on a project at the same time. Live collaborative editing makes it easier to collaborate with multiple people, organize feedback, and implement changes without having to save and share the same file over and over again.
“We knew it would be a big technical challenge, and we wanted to make sure we got it right,” said Stephen Nielson, senior director of product management at Photoshop, in an email interview exclusively to CNET. “We’ve heard from many of our customers that they want co-editing capabilities so they can better collaborate with their teams, customers, students, teachers, and more.”
Two or more designers can actively work on a project at the same time and track the changes made in real time. (Nielson said there is no “hard limit” on how many editors can work at once.) This feature improves Photoshop’s collaborative capabilities. other editing software like Canva and Figma have had similar multi-user editing capabilities for some time.
When editing with multiple people, it’s similar to Google Docs, where each user has a different colored avatar that lets you know where other users are and what they’re editing. In the history section you can view a complete log of changes made by each user. A small group of Photoshop users have already tested the feature. Adobe reports that they liked the more seamless collaboration.
You can Sign in Join the private beta now to test it and provide feedback before future release.
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The tool is intended to help developers optimize their work, especially when multiple people provide feedback and recommendations on a project. You can adjust permissions on files to limit who can edit – a useful restriction for creators who need to get feedback from large groups of people. For example, creators can share ongoing projects with clients and allow them to view and leave comments (not edits), even if those clients don’t have a Photoshop subscription.
Last year Adobe left All-in on AI in its Creative Cloud programs, and Photoshop has a number of them generative AI tools and updates. While AI won’t be behind every update this year (including live co-editing), AI will “absolutely” be an ongoing trend, Nielson said. He also hinted that a certain AI-powered tool, Project perfect mix which was demonstrated at Adobe Max last fall, is one of the AI
“We have really exciting plans for 2025, with some incredible capabilities enabled by generative AI. We are always pushing the boundaries of what is possible, which will drive our releases this year and in the years to come,” said Nielson.
“This year, our goal is to continue making Photoshop the ultimate creative design app, making it more intuitive, accessible and powerful than ever before.”
