Adobe Photoshop Express released
Adobe announced a new version of Photoshop, but this time as a web application. Photoshop Express is a Flash - Flex application that allows basic editing options. It is not intended for professional users, but for the easy manipulation of images for mainstream consumers. It can directly access images on Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa and upload and manipulate images on these services, which makes the beta very appealing for users of these platforms. You can now easily upload images to facebook and edit them online without ever needing any other software. It's only 17 features, which are mainly filters intended for tuning and effects, but I think they are suitable for quick and dirty manipulations. Additionally to upload the images to other services Photoshop Express itself offers 2 GB online storage, where images can be uploaded and shared with others as albums and slideshows. An interesting side note is, that the platform is intended as a show case for Adobe's Flash/Flex framework, which Adobe is heavily trying to push out.
The Interface
The interface of Photoshop Express is a clear adaption of Adobe Lightroom. The Browser has almost the same functionality and behaves similar. It is possible to select the size of the thumbnails, give rankings and description to each image. Furthermore there are three browser modes: a) thumbnail view, b) thumbnail + full size and c) tabular view, just as in Adobe Lightroom.
Most of the editing functions work in very basic modes. For instance the sharpening function allows only to select between 6 different sharpening levels. No manual input of level or even other options like smoothing or pixel size are available. The same applies to auto-correct, exposure, saturation, white balance, highlight, fill light, soft focus, pop-color, hue, black & white, tint and sketch, where only different options are offered for selection. All operations and filters can be undone, by simply unchecking the filter on the left side. The crop function is almost identical to the one in Adobe Lightroom. If a crop is made another version of the image is stored in order to go back to a previous version.
The image upload to Photoshop Express features a fancy multi upload interface without the need to start a java client. This makes it easy to upload huge bunch's of images at once.
In the end this is a pretty nice web application, that demonstrates that online application will become more and more mature. But the functionality lack a lot of what is there on the desktop version still. If you just want to make a picture with your iPhone, upload it to the various sharing sites and may want to edit it while still on the road Photoshop Express is right there now. You don't need to install any software. Just go to the website, register and edit.
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