10 Gallon Hat I can’t believe I ate the whole thing

Photoshop Express – It’s about time

After graduating from college and losing my cheap student software licensing privileges Photoshop fell out of favor with me.  I tried GIMP for a while (GNU Image Manipulation Program) which is essentially a Photoshop clone, but the controls are slightly awkward. I also have found for the most part both Photoshop CS2 and GIMP 2.4 to be very feature rich and far to complicated for basic photo editing and processing.

Photoshop finally announced their online Photo Editing suite called Photoshop Express.  The answer to the layman’s photo editing needs.  While the online factor is cool – I think the most important thing is you can get your photos back when you are done with them. Photoshop Express could have just as easily been a desktop install, but that is not the way of the software world these days.

Photoshop Express is still in Beta, but it is available to everybody and you should definitely try it out and see if it is right for you. 

First thing I noticed was the 2GBs of free storage, not bad – but with 7 megapixel cameras being the norm this will fill up fast if you use the service regularly.

However, the 2GBs free is probably just a way to bait you into purchasing a larger ‘digital locker’ to keep all your photos in. A not half bad idea considering then your photos are safe (or safer anyway) from a hardware catastrophe at a reputable location.

Another interesting features – it allows you to login into other Web 2.0 worlds where you may have pictures stored and edit them directly. Currently you can edit pictures from Facebook, Picasa and Photobucket – so you can essentially grow your storage capacity by using external sites that integrate with Photoshop Express.

All the photo editing options are extremely easy to understand and show you 7 ranges for each effect and allow you preview each interval within that range in real time.  Good enough!  Some of the coolest editing features are the ‘Pop Color’, which allows you to create a grayscale image except for one color you isolate and the ‘Exposure’ which lets you quickly fine tune the exposure of your photograph.

There are also some standard Social Networking elements that all web 2.0 sites require. In this case you can share and browse Galleries. Essentially albums you have uploaded and selected as public.  Hopefully – if you don’t select them to be public they are in fact private. (Facebook I’m looking in your general direction….).

The biggest advantage I see is all the processing is on their end, as long as you have a high-speed Internet connection, the age of your computer shouldn’t really affect performance, unlike installing the full blown Photoshop.

For now, I think it is a pretty good tool and so far it is free.  I will continue to use it until I forget about it, which always seems to happen.