Adobe announced at its Max conference today that it’s bringing Photoshop on the iPad in 2019. The app will rely on a new file format called Cloud PSDs, which will track edits and sync them automatically to Creative Cloud, letting users work on the same file from any device. We got to use an early version of the app for a week, and our Art department had a lot of thoughts on whether it’s actually “real Photoshop” or not.

Nilay and I spoke with Adobe chief product officer Scott Belsky on the 18-month journey to bring the powerhouse program to the tablet. Below is a brief, edited transcript of our conversation on Adobe’s latest strategy of getting people to embrace the cloud.

This transcript has been condensed and edited for clarity.

Nilay Patel: When I think about Photoshop, I think about file management. You’re going to composite images together. You need image files. You make a PSD, then you have a PSD. iOS is not known for being a great file management platform. There’s Dropbox, there’s the Files app, there’s your own cloud service. How are you handling that problem?

Scott Belsky: I’m going to go on a limb here and say that the era of the file is over. I think that a creation is really a combination of components. Look at a Photoshop “file.” What is it really? It’s a collection of fonts, images and layers of edits and other things taken in from other places, composited together. It’s a collection. All those components, those ingredients of that composition both still exist in their original form as well as their combined altered form, which is ultimately the composition you’re making in a PSD.

What we’ve done — what powers Photoshop on iPad — is what we call the Cloud PSD. The Cloud PSD is in a sense, a manifest of all of these ingredients together.

“I’m going to go on a limb here and say that the era of the file is over.”

Underneath the hood, this is a manifest of all the components that you sourced from original sources and then altered into this composition that is what you visually see in Photoshop and iPad, and Photoshop on desktop when you open it. When we ship Photoshop on iPad, [Cloud PSDs] will also run and automatically show up on your desktop product. Suddenly, you’ll have this cloud-powered roundtrip experience akin to a Google Docs experience, where literally the source of truth of your Photoshop creation is in the cloud.

One of the things that we’re going have to overcome is our obsession with the organization of files in the desktop, file, folder, format. We have a lot of customers who live by that. I think that we’re finding some creative ways to bridge people over to this new world. In order to have a multi-surface first-class experience of a product like Photoshop, you do need to abandon the constraints of the traditional file system.

Nilay: Very practical question: is this gonna work if you don’t have a network connection? Because you’re talking about all the truth being in the cloud.

Yes. To get a little technical here, but we store everything you’ve done in cache on the client side, on your device. You can do a lot. In fact, you can have a full workflow with either a new file or something you’ve been working on locally. We keep most of your recent documents in cache, so you’ll have that flexibility. We certainly do not want people to have the most creative moment of their lives at 30 thousand feet and realize, “Aw! Gogo! You’re not letting me Photoshop right!” We don’t want that.

Nilay: Gogo has killed most of the creative moments of my life, I’m going to be honest with you. Second very practical question: You mentioned Dropbox earlier, but it sounds like Cloud PSD is your service. Do these files work if I have OneDrive or Dropbox or whatever, or [does this require] a subscription to Adobe for the Adobe Creative Cloud?

Well, I should say that every Cloud PSD obviously can be saved as any of the formats you’d want, including a traditional PSD file that you can then email to someone or store in cloud storage. The way I’m thinking about it is really from the customer-centric view: if you are creating something on one device and you want to go to another, we just want to make that seamless. We want to eliminate the need for people to make copies of things and have one version here and fork another version here and all that kind of stuff. It gets a little messy in any creative work flow.

That also puts the onus on us to figure out great ways for teams and individuals to collaborate with each other, and maybe sometimes have renditions of files in different places just to have organization around some of the madness. There’s a lot of these things which we’re exploring, and frankly, still exploring even though we announced Photoshop is coming to iPad. These are the right questions, and we want to have the right solution for customers and their workflow.

The hardest part of any technology company and product leader is to decide the somewhat unnatural things you force now, because you know it’s the future, as opposed to the things you just continue to accommodate because of the past. At Adobe, as a product leader, I have that problem in spades, because we have a lot of incredible power users who have been using our products for years, if not decades. They have various established workflows that we need to respect.

Yet, at the same time we can’t leave the new generations behind, and we can’t deprecate the power of our products because of the accommodation. It’s always a balance, which is why you see things like Lightroom Classic and Lightroom CC and some decisions that others scratch their heads at. We’re just trying to do the best thing for our customer, and we’re constantly having that debate internally for better or for worse.

Nilay: What would you say is that bet that you’ve made with Photoshop on iPad?

I think one of them is the Cloud PSD format. The PSD is an iconic file format; it’s like a repository of creativity in every single file on people’s drives. Here we are saying we’re going to rethink this architecture, and there are consequences, certainly for how customers are accustomed to organizing all of their different files.

We’re saying, the future of creativity is not bound to the desktop, therefore, it cannot be bound to the file format in traditional sense, therefore it needs to live in the cloud. It’s just a logical sequence and there are certainly valid arguments against us making this move.

My attitude is, “Hey, if Adobe were to be founded today and wanted to empower the world’s creatives to do their greatest work, what would we do?” Obviously, we would have an infrastructure like this modern one. We have to be very careful and have really easy onboarding and bridges for our customers that are really akin to the desktop flows. We’ve also made that very easy as well, which I think is the right balance to achieve.

Dami Lee: As an artist who prefers working on the desktop over the iPad, one of the biggest hurdles for a regular user is probably pricing. Procreate is at most, $10. Do you have a plan for how Photoshop on the iPad will be priced? Will it be subscription-based for Creative Cloud subscribers?

We haven’t announced any pricing for the product, other than to say that if you’re a paid Creative Cloud customer using Photoshop on desktop, you’ll get this system upgrade, if you will, as part of that subscription. That’s our philosophy; we want you to be successful across multiple surfaces and that should be something you expect with Creative Cloud. It is called Creative Cloud, after all.