Photoshop Express

May 28, 2008 · Filed Under Technology

Everybody loves taking pictures.

Not everyone loves editing picutres..

Photoshop has long been the king of image editing - both on PC and MAC. Arguments can be made but no other software is as proven or feature-packed. The price tag is hefty (especially compared to GIMP). But for professional image editing nothing else comes close.

With the growth in online applications we’ve seen some newer sleaker quasi-image editing apps roll out. Google made the biggest splash years ago buying Picasa and making it freely available. Although not a web-app it integrates with Googles online image service and allow for simple, end-sure friendly image editing. Quickly other online apps of similar nature rolled out in the line of though - simple, end user friend, not as feature rich as photoshop by any means - but highly usable.

Adobe wasn’t sleeping.

Eearlier this year Adobe rolled out Photoshop Express. A web-based ‘lite’ version of their full application. Photoshop Express is more of a photo-sharing site that contains various worth-keeping image editing features.

To end users dismay, Photoshop Esxpress is not as competitive as one would expect. As much as we’d like it Adobe has no plans to add the premium features of Photoshop into the online application.

Instead, they settled for the usual simple editing available in many other applicatoins and online apps. Granted it is a free - but it just doesn’t meet our hopes.

The four main functions are:

photo editing
organization of files
sharing
community sharing

Competing with services such as Photo bucket, Face book, and Picasa, photoshop express has a way to go.

Flicker integration is not available as of the moment but sooner or later it will.

To give you an idea of what it is like, the program is a mixture of iPhoto and Adobe Bridge CS3 with manageable features that a first timer won’t find hard to operate!

Joining, of course is free and easy; all you have to do is to sign up for a free account and log in your username with password.

To upload, you can get your images either from your computer or from other services. Moreover, your files can be arranged into albums and put a caption on it for faster searching.

Soon after release Adobe came under fire for the TOS of the online app. Seems that they claimed ownership of any file that was edited using the system. They have since modified those terms and conditions to remove the claim of ownership (pretty rude eh..)

All in all another free online photo editing service is good - but Adobe disappoints us with the effort.

Photoshop Express took so long to roll out that we really hoped it would be slicker, refined, and more feature-full.

Perhaps the next revision.

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