Web-based Adobe Photoshop Express - Features
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Photoshop Express is a public beta, meaning that it’s not the final product. It was released in beta stage so users from all over the world are able to use and test it. They also can—better yet, should—send their feedback regarding its performance. The idea behind Photoshop Express was to deliver a free online service that allows users to alter their images in a non-destructive way and share them online.
Adobe offers 2GB of free image web storage space. You can upload your personal images, maintain galleries, and even create slideshows to show off your creations. Public social sites, such as Facebook, are supported and this is a huge plus in the eyes of today’s social-networking addicted generation.
“Photoshop is trusted technology that has changed the visual landscape of our world. Now, Photoshop Express allows anyone who snaps a digital photo to easily achieve the high-impact results for which Adobe is known. Photoshop Express is a convenient, single destination where you can store, edit and share photos whether you’re at home, school or on the road.”
~ Doug Mack, vice president of Consumer and Hosted Solutions at Adobe
First of all, in order to use this service we need to sign up. Head over to the Photoshop Express website and create a new account. You may eventually take a test drive, but I strongly suggest joining by creating a new account since it is free anyway. The first element that caught my eyes was that currently, only the United States is supported. This does not mean that users cannot sign up from other countries… but other countries aren’t added to the list of the drop-down box in the registration form. Check it out!
Chances are that by the time you are reading this article, this might be fixed and the list will become populated, but I still wanted to point it out. Right after you have finished creating your account, you need to upload an image to work with, unless you plan to work on some of the free available samples. You’ll use the tool below.
I’m sure you have noticed by now that its user-interface is pretty straightforward and intuitive. Adobe targets users from all walks of life, and that’s why they wanted to reduce the complexity of the Photoshop CS desktop application. There was no point to including thousands of filter effects, the ability to use layers, and hundreds of other extra tools that design artists or professional photographers may or may not use.
Considering that it is a web-based image manipulation service, it offers most of the “on-the-go” features that one might need before sharing pictures. These are the so-called retouching or altering functions; they are to be used to polish images before sharing them with your friends or relatives. Check out the following list of features. Their usage is truly easy and requires no professional experience.
The sharing features are also amazing considering that you can not only create slideshows, but also mold them into cube-like shapes and so forth. Before doing this, you can enhance your images, apply some effects, such as tint or pop color, play around with various hue settings, and even distort body parts, such as facial expressions, to achieve a humorous slant. You can fine-tune your images: sharpen, highlight, focus…
On the basics level, you have crop & rotate, auto-correct [this is an interesting and very useful feature, since it uses an automatic optimization algorithm to correct common image flaws (lightning issues, etc.)], red-eye removal, touchup, exposure, and even different levels of saturation. Using these easy-to-use tools lets you quickly polish your images before you’re ready to show them off!
As a final note, keep in mind that Adobe Photoshop Express does not target professionals, so they didn’t include “layers,” the ability to work with layers, and other pro techniques. If those functions were to be added, you could work with images “destructively,” and Photoshop Express claims that they offer features that only allow users to edit their images in a non-destructive fashion.
Therefore, Photoshop Express is not a complete desktop image editing application. Yes, it is built and designed on Photoshop’s standards, so it is a high quality web service available free of charge, but it is by no means a replacement for Adobe Photoshop CS or other alternatives, such as Paint.net, the GIMP, and so forth.
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