Adobe’s kicking off 2025 with a much-awaited new Photoshop feature. Adobe announced Tuesday that its newest Photoshop beta feature will be live co-editing, a tool that lets you and your team work together simultaneously on a project. Live co-editing will make it easier to collaborate with multiple people, organize feedback and implement changes without having to save and share the same file over and over.
“We knew it would be a big technical challenge, and we wanted to make sure we did it in the right way,” Stephen Nielson, senior director of product management for Photoshop, said in an email interview exclusive to CNET. “We heard from a lot of our customers that they wanted co-editing capabilities so that they can better collaborate with their teams, clients, students, teachers and more.”
Two or more designers can actively edit a project at the same time and see changes being made in real time. (Nielson said there’s no “hard limit” to how many editors can be working simultaneously.) This feature levels up Photoshop’s collaboration abilities; other editing software like Canva and Figma have had similar multi-user editing functionality for a while.
When you’re editing with multiple people, it looks similar to Google Docs, where each user has a different color avatar that lets you know where other users are and what they’re editing. You can see a full log of changes each user makes in the History panel. A small group of Photoshop users have already tested the feature, with Adobe reporting that they enjoyed the more seamless collaboration.
You can sign up to join the private beta now to test it out and give feedback before the future release.
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The tool is meant to help creators streamline their work, especially when they have multiple people giving feedback and recommendations on a project. You can adjust the permissions on files to limit who is allowed to edit — a useful caveat for creators who need to solicit feedback from big groups of people. For example, creators can share work-in-progress projects with clients and let them view and leave comments (not edits) even if those clients don’t have a Photoshop subscription.
Last year, Adobe went all-in on AI across its Creative Cloud programs, and Photoshop got a number of generative AI tools and updates. While AI won’t be behind every update this year (including live co-editing), AI is “absolutely” going to be a continuing trend, Nielson said. He also hinted that one particular AI-powered tool, project perfect blend demoed at last fall’s Adobe Max, is one of the AI innovations they’ll be working on this year.
“We have really exciting plans for 2025, with some incredible capabilities made possible by generative AI. We’re always pushing the bounds of what is possible, which will drive what we release this year and in years to come,” Nielson said.
“This year we are committed to continuing to make Photoshop the ultimate creative design app and making it more intuitive, accessible, and powerful than ever before.”