Adobe is going to see if the iTunes Music Store method of selling rights-managed media will work on a much more expensive level. From their new, Creative Suite 2, graphic design applications, designers will be able to comp and purchase stock photos for their designs without having to leave whichever program that they find themselves using--allowing a more seamless work flow in the same way that music can be purchased through iTunes without ever leaving the application.

Adobe Stock Photos lets designers download non-watermarked comp images from an elite selection of image providers and then purchase them, without leaving such applications as Photoshop and InDesign. “Adobe Stock Photos is an innovative offering for creative professionals and we’re pleased to be one of the stock photo agencies to launch with this service,” stated Alan M. Meckler, Chairman and CEO of Jupitermedia Corporation. “With the great brand loyalty Adobe has built amongst creative professionals, this will be a tremendous new distribution channel for our images,” added Meckler.

I’m sure that there will be some part of the sale that ends up in Adobe’s pocket--likely little more than enough to cover development and support costs--but the real value comes from selling a more useful application to users like me. With Quark finally getting around to releasing a new version of Xpress, Adobe likely sees this as an opportunity to continue to make inroads with customers who grew tired of dealing with Quark and the exceptionally slow Xpress development cycle.

Professional graphic designers generally use Photoshop since there really is no other professional level image manipulation program in production; everything else is, honestly, an also ran. For page layout and illustration, though, the crowd has long been split between Adobe and its competitors, with Adobe spending the last few years clawing their way back to prominence in the page layout arena. With designers being opinionated and stubborn creatures of habit, there has to be a compelling reason to change loyalties in design applications (and in operating systems, but that’s another story altogether); by adopting a value add in the iTMS vein, Adobe is trying to give users that good reason to switch.

Would iPods, the part of the entire music service that makes money for Apple, have been as popular without the software and the integration of services? Probably not. As an Adobe fan (I use Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, and GoLive on a nearly daily basis), I hope that this is successful; as a professional designer, I hope that it’s as useful as it sounds.

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Update: Adobe is also releasing Acrobat 7.0 reader for Linux. Cool.