Adobe Photoshop Mix

» see adobe.com/products/photoshop-mix as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

photoshop mix was the kind of thing creative cloud subscribers in the design tier touched once and forgot. i am a computer engineer in ankara doing edge AI work on UAVs, my creative cloud window is small and mostly closed. by 2014 my photo editing was whatever came with the phone plus the gimp on linux when i needed it. mix sat outside that orbit.

adobe announced it at a june 2014 launch event in new york as one piece of the post-photoshop-touch decomposition. touch had died the previous may. the strategy was: instead of one paid tablet app trying to be photoshop, ship six free ipad apps each doing one thing well. mix was the compositor. you imported two or more photos, the app cut subjects out using adobe's selection engine, you layered and blended on a touch surface. saved projects synced to creative cloud, opened in desktop photoshop with the layer stack intact.

the android port came in 2015. for a stretch between 2015 and 2017 mix had a small loyal user base, mostly photographers and concept artists who used it to mock up composites on the road. then the updates stopped. by 2021 mix had not seen a feature push in over a year, the ios build was delisted from the app store that june, the android build hung on a little longer.

adobe announced the end of life in may 2024. june 4 2024 was the cutoff. the apps stopped working, the saved projects on adobe's servers became inaccessible the same day, no migration path to photoshop express which was the official replacement. the warning to download local copies went out a few weeks before the cutoff. plenty of users found out after.

~ the case file ~

~ the touch split that did not work ~

the post-touch strategy in 2015 was six apps: photoshop mix, photoshop fix, shape cc, color cc, brush cc, comp cc. adobe called it focus. the working photographers and designers who had paid ten dollars for photoshop touch on ipad called it splitting a workflow into pieces that no longer reached the same finish. mix was the one piece of the six that actually shipped a useful feature, the auto-cut selection that ran fast on iOS hardware. it was also the one piece adobe took most seriously through 2017.

by 2019 the whole apps-cc concept was unwinding. the smaller cc apps were already in maintenance mode by then. mix and fix were on the same path one year behind. when adobe finally shipped photoshop on the ipad in november 2019, the touch-era apps were redundant. the june 2024 shutdown was the cleanup, not the shock.

~ what happened to the files ~

mix saved projects to creative cloud as.mixpsx bundles, a custom format that wrapped layer info around source images. the bundle could be opened in desktop photoshop, with layer masks preserved. the format never had a third-party reader, the cloud-side server was the only place those bundles lived for most users. when adobe pulled the plug on june 4 2024, the bundles became opaque. a few people had backed up to local drives, most had not, the support forums filled up with users asking for a one-time export tool. adobe did not ship one.

the closest survivor is photoshop express, which inherited some of mix's compositing logic but not the project format. for projects that were already exported to flat PNG or JPG before the cutoff, life continues. for everything still living in the cloud on june 3, the file is gone.

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