Adobe's Photoshop Express Allows Online Photo Sharing (NewsFactor)
Barry Levine, newsfactor.com 11 minutes ago
Multimedia powerhouse Adobe Systems released on Thursday a public beta of Photoshop Express, which provides online tools for photos. Express, a free hosted application, lets users store up to two gigabytes of online photos at no cost and share them in a variety of ways, including uploading and downloading from social-networking sites like Facebook. It is accessible from any recent browser with a Flash Player 9 plug-in.
Pop Color, Gallery
Adobe Vice President Doug Mack described Photoshop Express as "a convenient, single destination where you can store, edit and share photos" regardless of where you are.
Photos can be edited nondestructively, which means the original file is left intact, and they can be shared anywhere via a Web browser. Editing capabilities include removing blemishes and red-eye, converting to black and white, cropping, and resizing, among other things.
Pop Color is a tool that lets the user select an object in the image, lessen the background colors, and swap colors in the object so it stands out. With sketch effects, photos can look more like drawings, and a distort feature lets the user stretch and exaggerate faces and objects. You can also select from a sample of photos that already have visual effects applied, and those effects will be applied to your photos.
For sharing functions, an online, Adobe-hosted gallery enables users to upload images and share them individually or as slideshows. One technique may become the modern version of the "blinking link" from years ago, suddenly popular and then abandoned as overused -- animation that, according to Adobe, "makes photos float and fly across the screen." Denizens of social-networking sites and personal blogs can embed or link photos without exiting the application.
'First Entry'
Ron Glaz, an analyst with industry research firm IDC, said the significance of Photoshop Express is that it is Adobe's "first entry into creating their own online editing and sharing application" for photos. He noted that the company has already allowed Premiere to be used online, as Premiere Express, for video editing and mashups with sites such as Photobucket and MTV.
He added that Adobe will still emphasize its Photoshop Elements for those who want a light desktop tool and who are not ready to tackle the full Photoshop CS3. Express offers the most common tools that consumers want for photo manipulation, he said, such as red-eye removal or cropping. In fact, he noted, these common tools are often offered right in the camera and, in terms of capabilities, Express doesn't offer much that isn't available in similar apps.
What it does offer, he said, is access from anywhere via a browser, even potentially from cell phones and personal digital assistants, and it offers the comfort of the Adobe brand.
Created with Adobe's Flex, its open-source framework for building Rich Internet Applications, or RIAs, Express also offers the comfort of the same-user experience across various browsers. RIAs are online applications that have features comparable to desktop apps.