Photoshop Express: Online Photo Retouch

[This is a simple saturation tweak]

Adobe recently launched Photoshop Express, a free web-based photo editing application. That's right. Free Photoshop with 2GB of storage space for your images.

Obviously, in order to get a free version of Photoshop, features have been trimmed to a consumer level. The application is quick and responsive and is very easy to use. All of the tools focus specifically on tweaking photographs, not graphics or other artwork. It offers three levels of editing: Basics, Fine Tuning and Effects (the descriptions and groupings seem a little arbitrary to me but its not a huge list so tools are easy to find, if not logically organized).

The basic features are cropping, red-eye and exposure. Tuning features are more simple adjustments: White Balance, Highlight, Fill Light, Sharpen and Soft Focus. The Effects options are Pop Color, Hue, Black & White, Tint, Sketch and Distort. Pop Color offers a list of color chips culled from your photo and asks which color would you like to pop. When selected, it will turn the rest of your image black and white and let you skew that one color. The adjustments are easy to use with a list of visual thumbnails showing the image at different settings.


[An example of the Pop Color adjustment]

At present, images can then be shared with Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa. If Adobe can hook-up with Flickr, then I can see an advantage to using this over waiting for Photoshop CS 3 to load on my laptop to tweak the exposure on a snapshot but it will not be a substitution for the endless layers and masking options for a full application.


[This is the Fill Light option that allows you to open up the shadows pretty quickly]

The catch for their kindness:

8. Use of Your Content.

Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.

According to Craft Magazine, Adobe has started to consider rephrasing their legal terms based on a large number of comments from users (or potential users). So proceed at your own risk.