Wednesday, April 09, 2008
Photoshop Express Online
Just discovered Photoshop Express, a new online photo gallery and online photo editing tool by Adobe. It boasts 2GB of free private or public (or both) gallery space to post your JPEG's for non commercial purposes. (I didn't know non-commercial purposes still existed!!!) It also has online photo editing, also free. From the terms and conditions, I suspect that paid accounts are just around the corner.
Any company that can create a tool like Photoshop deserves a look when it puts an editing tool online and gives it a name that demands such respect, fear even, in photographic, graphic and artistic circles. However, if you already are an intermediate or beyond Photoshop user, I think you will be a little disappointed with the editing tools. While it has some of the right choices of tools, they work in a kind of meat axe way, letting you choose one from a just very few modifications to the original. Unfortunately, most of the choices are are widely different. This leaves you with sort of a which-one-do-I-dislike-least choice/dilemma. I often found myself choosing the original.
All this means to me is that the site is new and that they are trying out the first few steps in what holds great potential. Adobe won my heart a long time ago, and deepened the bond when it first released Lightroom Public Beta!!! So, I remain hopeful that they will also work on providing a bit more useful and user friendly tools.
Does it compare to Picassa? No Photoshop Express is completely online so there is no downloading. The tools have some overlap of purpose but work quite differently online. Photoshop Express does not have any photo organizing of material on your computer. I only took the tools around the block, not on full test drive yet, so I will reserve further discussion on comparisons and detailed reviews of features.
I also notice that Photo Express does not presently handle anything but JPEG images. I really see that as a weakness and kind of shortsighted. More and more cameras in the hands of non-pros are using raw formats, and TIFF's have been common for a while. Adobe argues that raw and TIFF are too large to support. I say they are too useful and widespread not to support. Many of the proprietary software that comes with these cameras are either lacking in usefulness or friendliness, plus you're not always at your handy home computer to handle images. Isn't this a bit of what Photo Express is for? An online tool that would at least convert a raw file for you could be an extremely attractive feature for many people. If you have to convert your photos first with other software, you might as well do the rest of the fixing there too. Why do you need Photo Express?
There is one really nice thing about registering. Your gallery is posted at http//_________.photoshop.com where you get to fill in the blank at the beginning. Pretty cool having a gallery at photoshop.com. In fact, I am now so cool that I can hardly stand it. Yeah, right.
Check out Photoshop Express
Gary Brown
Come visit me at
http://brownfinephoto.com/
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