9/7/2011
Announced 9/7/2011, Adobe Revel (formerly called Carousel) is a solution for accessing and synchronizing your photos across a variety of mobile devices and computers. Revel is an attempt to address the difficulty of using a mobile device to connect to all of your photos, and to make the photo browsing/editing experience look and feel similar on different devices. Revel for iOS and Mac launched in September 2011 (under the Carousel name), and Revel for Android and Windows is slated to appear in the first half of 2012.
Revel will allow you to browse, adjust, and share any of your photos from an iPad, iPhone, or Mac computer. When the Windows and Android versions launch, the experience will be nearly identical across all platforms.
Revel supports an unlimited number of photos and offers real-time sync. When you add new photos on one device, those photos will automatically be populated on other devices running Adobe Revel. In addition, Revel will allow collaborative access to the photo library or to specific carousels (collections) with other users you may authorize. Each user can mark photos as favorites, and other users can see which photos have been marked as favorites by others. Revel also offers features for emailing photos and sharing to popular photo sites and social networks such as Tumblr, Facebook, and Twitter.
But Revel is not just a photo browser; it offers editing tools as well. This is presented in a "Develop" mode where you can go to make adjustments. Available adjustments include white balance, exposure, and contrast. Each of those adjustments offer a deeper level of fine tuning. Develop mode also includes a selection of predefined "looks" to choose from, which work like filters or one-click effects. There are also tools for cropping and rotating. When you edit your photos in Revel, the edits are immediately propagated to all your other devices. However, edits are non-destructive across devices and can always be reversed.
Behind the scenes, Revel uses a combination of local storage and "a content-aware mesh" on Adobe-hosted encrypted servers (in "the cloud"). Revel handles the storage in an intelligent way--on computers, the full resolution files are always stored locally. On mobile devices, only the data which is needed is stored. For normal browsing, it brings in full-screen previews, and the full-resolution file will only be downloaded only when you choose to edit a photo.
Of course, Adobe can't give away all that server space for free, so that means Revel comes with a subscription fee. The first 30 days are free as a trial period. In the first few months, Revel will be offered at an introductory price of US$59.99 per year or $5.99 per month. Customers who subscribe during the introductory period will be able to lock in the discounted price for an another two years. After January 31, 2012, the price for new subscribers will go up to US$99 per year or $9.99 per month.
The Revel software can be installed on as many devices as you wish, and you can import as many photos as you want. However, you are limited to five photo carousels, and each carousel can be shared with up to five people. People you share with will get a free Revel account to access your shared photos, but if they want to add their own photos, they will need a subscription.
A few other items of interest:
- Revel will only support JPEG photos at launch.
- It includes export options, but not printing.
- There is no web-based access to your Revel carousels, but Adobe is working on it.
- Color management is not available, as it is not supported in iOS at this time.
- iPhone 3GS and 4
- iPad 1 and 2
- iPod touch 4
- Mac running Lion
The difference between Revel and Cinq Photo is that Cinq Photo does not utilize any third-party servers--the Cinq Photo connection is direct from your home computers and your mobile devices, and therefore does not involve any subscription fees. Cinq Photo does not offer any editing or adjustment tools, either. And, based on the demo I was shown, Revel is a more refined experience compared to Cinq Photo.
So what do you think? Is the seamless experience promised by Revel worth $100 per year to you? Will you be an early adopter, or will you wait for future developments as Adobe expands the feature-set, and other developers come out with competing solutions? I think Adobe has a dilemma here--the people who are willing to pay the subscription fee are more likely to be serious photographers who want camera raw support, and the people who only work with JPEG photo files are probably not interested in a solution with ongoing subscription fees.
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