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With
Adobe’s release of its new Photoshop Express comes an
obvious question: Does the world really need another
free photo editor?
There
are many excellent programs out there already. For slick
and easy, try Google’s Picasa. For speed, Irfanview.
Broad functionality? The open source GIMP. Such
programs, which you download to your PC, cost you
nothing (though they are expensive and/or time-consuming
for their authors to develop and maintain). It is
tempting to joke that maybe Adobe expects to make up its
costs on volume.
However,
Express is a different kind of program, one worth
checking out even if you don’t plan to use it. After
all, Express is a Web-based application—no downloads
required. All the tough stuff is on Adobe’s computers;
yours is just a window into what is going on elsewhere.
Adobe
says it is trying to attract first-time users, who
presumably will then go on to buy its pricier Photoshop
Elements, Lightroom and Photoshop itself. Adobe also
appears to be aiming for an eventual piece of the online
photo sharing and printing business.
While it
is nice to be able to store photos online, it is even
better to be able to touch up, e-mail, Web-ify and print
them from any computer. Potentially, that brings
sophisticated photo retouching down to the level of
palmtops and smart phones. It also eliminates dependence
on the Windows operating system.
Photoshop Express isn’t there yet, but in its beta
version (available at photoshop.com/express) you can
already see the hand of a company that’s been doing this
stuff longer than anyone else. It has all the basic
tools: cropping, sharpening, color adjustment and
various filters to, for example, convert to black and
white. When you upload a photo to Adobe’s servers, you
get thumbnail previews that show how your picture will
look when you apply various tools. That makes the
process remarkably speedy, even with large photos, and
suggests Adobe could incorporate even more features.
The
program has one trick that could make a regular user out
of me: a white-balance adjustment for standard jpegs
that’s akin to the RAW editing function in Adobe’s
for-fee programs.
White
balance is a perennial problem for automated photo
retouching. Put simply, colors have to be adapted to the
type of light illuminating the scene. Full sun has a
different color balance than shade or cloudy conditions.
Fluorescent light is different from incandescent. Most
point-and-shoot cameras try to adjust for this
automatically, and some let you select the specific type
of light from a menu. Invariably, the auto-balance makes
a mistake, or you forget to reset indoor lighting to
outdoor. The result is ugly.
Most
editing programs have fully automatic systems for
correcting color, and typically have manual controls,
too, including sliders to adjust temperature and tint.
But these don’t produce ideal results, particularly if
the scene lighting was problematic in the first place.
Express
provides multiple thumbnail variants of a photo. At that
point, you pick which one is the most natural-looking.
If you haven’t tweaked white balance on your photos,
this is worth a shot.
Problems? There are many. It is, after all, beta
software. It can’t handle RAW files, a trick that Picasa
manages with ease. While it lets you upload directly to
some online services, including Facebook and Photobucket,
it doesn’t support other popular ones, including Flickr.
You get only 2 gigabytes of online storage free. And for
now you can forget about pixel-by-pixel retouching or
the layers that are found in its big brothers.
And then
there’s the competition. Although I don’t like its user
interface as much, Picnik, another online retoucher, has
been winning rave reviews from users of Flickr, its
sponsor. Others worth a look are PhotFlexer and LunaPic.
They’re all reasonable alternatives for those times when
you can’t get a “real” editing program. |
