Photoshop Express Beta

[roland.g]

I'm going with lame. The full version costs too much. Elements is too weak though I haven't seen the latest release. I use a lot of layers and layer effects and what not. This looks like a weaker version of elements with online hosting, garbage candy for noncreative types to pretend their creative. Personally I use iPhoto and .Mac galleries for the easy stuff but want photoshop for more pro stuff. Adobe give us a $200-300 photoshop lite that isn't meant for print production but allows the creative freedom that layers, effects, filters, with full text support.

 

[sgibson]

The way most people treat digital photos, it is no better than the old days of having hard copies of photos floating around unorganized in shoe boxes.
What happens if you spend years building your web galleries on Flickr and they decided to go out of business, sell out, start charging, etc.

Technically, if you actually want to get much out of Flickr, they do charge.

More to the point, do people actually use places like Flickr as their actual repository for their images. I have all my photos stored and organised on my computer (both the PC and the MacBook), backed up to an old 20gig iPod and synced to my iPhone. I burn off DVDs as needed to be kept offsite and am thinking about signing up to Amazon's S3 for alternative offsite.

What I use Flickr for is uploading my favourite photos that I want to share with the rest of the world, family etc. I never imagined people saw these as an actual storage area rather than a way to share photos they liked.

 

[irun5k]

What I use Flickr for is uploading my favourite photos that I want to share with the rest of the world, family etc. I never imagined people saw these as an actual storage area rather than a way to share photos they liked.

Sadly, many people either don't know how or don't want to bother with backing up their computers. This means when they get a new machine every few years it is like starting over. So I don't think they *intentionally* mean for Flickr to be their primary storage, but it ends up being the only place they invested any effort.

I'm around computer/tech types so much that it really amazes me when I run into an average (non-techie) Joe and see how helpless they are. Of course, hardly any of them have Macs, so you can't blame them for being overwhelmed with their PCs.

 

[pubwvj]

Electricity goes out? Batteries. Heck, I run on batteries much of the time. That's part of why I bought a notebook.

Email? I can write and read my email while not connected to the internet. Then when I am in range again my machine actually sends the mail and picks up new mail. No full-time internet connection needed.

Internet connections are not available in many places. Maybe living in the city you are fully connected but we're not out in rural areas. I don't want software that requires an internet connection to run.

Unplugged and happy for it!

 

[echoout]

Hmm. you might be surprised. My buddy has been working on this for the DS. I could see mini graphics apps taking off.

I'm sorry but people don't want to edit photos on a small low resolution phone screen.

 

[gusapple]

Ha ha! I find it ironic that they have a picture of a person texting on an iPhone, whilst most of you whine about no iPhone support.

 

[jettredmont]

I'm a bit less excited about this. It's pretty crippled and most of the tools are of the "just for fun" variety.

When they let you resize images I'll use it.

Me too. In my limited playing around on the test drive, some of the tools (Distort) weren't even working.

Even fully functional, though: why not just use iPhoto? What is the added benefit to counter the loss of control and security?

 

[gifford]

i hope is fails miserably for adobe

 

[36183]

In my opinion, there is a larger issue here than what appears in the TOS. The issue also relates to Picasa, Flickr, Kodak Gallery, or whatever the gallery of the week is.

The way most people treat digital photos, it is no better than the old days of having hard copies of photos floating around unorganized in shoe boxes.

I don't want some 3rd party "owning" my stuff. Even if they don't legally own it, they actually do in practice. What happens if you spend years building your web galleries on Flickr and they decided to go out of business, sell out, start charging, etc. You've spent hundreds of hours organizing your collection, adding comments, etc. And now you have nothing.

Plus, I know many peeps who take as many digital photos as I do but they couldn't show me a comprehensive collection of there digital photos if they tried. Some got uploaded to Shutterfly, some to this place, some to that place. Some online services won't even let you get at the original, full sized image you originally uploaded (presumably sometimes they don't save it and other times have reasons for not wanting to let you see it again.)

Personally, I take a two staged approach. The first stage is batch renaming all my photos based on the Exif data, losslessly rotating the ones that need it (also in batch) and organzing them on the file system into a directory structure based on year and then event. This all gets backed up via time machine and once a year I cut a set of DVDs and give it to a family member to keep in a safe place.

Second, I add the photos to albums organized by year inside of a shareware image publishing package that I developed. I have all the HTML content locally and it also gets published to my web site. But ultimately I own everything. One could use iPhoto here also, since even if iPhoto goes bust some day at least you have the content locally and could parse the XML files if you needed to get the user content into a different format.

Maybe I'm anal, but I'm sure my kids, their kids, and so forth will appreciate having the memories stored in a usable way. If the JPEG format ever looks to be going south, I can will run a batch job against all my photos and convert them into whatever the great new format is.

I think there is a distinct difference between using an online resource or organise your digital photos and relying on it. Sadly it is common for many people to solely organise their digital content on websites such as facebook.

Personally I think this technology is great, I am totally wowed by the whole thing, Adobe have done a great job on this. My only concern is who are they marketing this to, no professional is going to use it seriously. I doubt anyone is going to start uploading their digital library onto the adobe servers to do a task they could do locally. In which case the only place i can see this technology really hitting off is in conjunction with other existing web applications, the majority of people who upload their photos online will do so to share them with their friends in which case they use website such a Facebook and Flickr, adobe would have to be very optimistic if they believe people will stop using existing photo sharing website and switch over to theirs. If they licence this technology out to websites such a facebook or allow subscribers to use the adobe technology on existing websites it would be a massive hit. How exactly this would work I am unsure of I assume adobe would have to make a web photoshop API of some kind. If such a thing happens it would be hot!

 

[Dave00]

Doesn't seem to work at all on Firefox for Mac. Big blank screen. Works okay on Safari, but seems a little slower than Picnik. That TOS is pretty darn disturbing. Unlikely they'd actually try to sell your stuff directly, but using your photos for their promotional materials, using it for sample images and clip art, etc. all seems possible. I'm sticking with local editing and picnik.
Dave

 

[36183]

Ha ha! I find it ironic that they have a picture of a person texting on an iPhone, whilst most of you whine about no iPhone support.

What some people expect the iPhone to do is ridiculous.

People expect the iPhone to do almost everything, It recidivous

i hope is fails miserably for adobe

Care to explain why ?

 

[I Am Designer™]

It's Not So Great...

I've tried it out and it gives you very little control over what you cane actually do with an image.

All the various controls have a set number of options - i.e. hitting black and white gives you 6 choices of black and white and so on...

It's incredibly limiting even for the home user who might want to 'play' more - I imagine Adobe are going to enhance the service through time - especially with sharing images and galleries. I can foresee them allowing basic video editing one day too - and then compete with youtube / flickr / (maybe even blogging/basic website creation capabilities) in a single service.. they have the desktop apps - they just need to roll out theses average website services under a single banner.

 

[Chewieez]

well I joined and checked it out. Since I'm already a paid member of Flickr, the Adobe site offers very little to me. Flickr (and photobucket) has their own remedial photo editing features built in which are more than enough for me. I do not need to do intensive edits online anyways and I do not care for the interface in Adobe. I am using it on a Macbook and when you go to edit mode, there is very little screen real-estate left to actually view the photo you are trying to edit.

Seems to me it's too little too late. There are soo many companies out there offering exactly what the Adobe site offers so it just comes down to where someone decides to join first and commit to. I've committed to Flickr so even if something else comes out that's a little bit better, I probably won't switch unless it's a lot better. A lot of the reason I use Flickr is to view other people's photos and they have a huge community built up over the past few years. Adobe is trying to come into a market that is already full.

I find it strange that Picasa and Photobucket can be linked to Adobe but not Flickr.

oh well... maybe I'll use it for something in the future.

 

[gifford]

Care to explain why ?

bloated, crap UI, proprietary, unintuitive, stifler of innovation, oldskool dinosaur,

 

[HLdan]

No Microsoft Yayyy!!!

I like the new Photoshop editor. Just signed up and all's well. Thank you very much that Microsoft is not behind this or I.E. would be required and Silverlight. Sick of Microsoft trying to own the internet. Yayyyy Adobe!!!

 

[nostaws]

Adobe is not going to sell your images, they arent that stupid.

I think they are that stupid.

I use Flickr (while having a hard drive and DVD back up of my photos) because I use a lot of other people's photos through creative commons licensing. I also like to share what I have as a result. Creative Commons is a poor man's corbis. It is pretty great.

 

[sonor]

Adobe are going to change the terms

John Nack at Adobe writes about this issue on his blog

http://blogs.adobe.com/jnack/2008/03/a_note_about_ps.html

"...This afternoon I got the following note from the Photoshop Express team:

We've heard your concerns about the terms of service for Photoshop Express beta. We reviewed the terms in context of your comments - and we agree that it currently implies things we would never do with the content. Therefore, our legal team is making it a priority to post revised terms that are more appropriate for Photoshop Express users. We will alert you once we have posted new terms. Thank you for your feedback on Photoshop Express beta and we appreciate your input.

I'll post an update when I know more."

 

[asdavis10]

I think its good that a large and respected software company like Adobe is getting in "cloud" apps. This is where computing is going eventually.

http://xcerion.com/internet-os/

 

[Abstract]

As posted, it explicitly gives them the rights to derive revenue from the images. The problem is, most people won't read the terms and will upload stuff to the gallery without realizing they're essentially giving away the rights to their work. It's unlikely a professional photographer will get stung by this but it is a dangerous precedent.

I understood that to mean, "Adobe may use them for advertising", and if they gain more customers, it's technically a money-making thing, no?


And I don't see why people are bagging this already. It's a beta. It'll change. It just got introduced yesterday. If you think this is limited, then you haven't used early beta software before. Lightroom was weak at first, and now I love Lightroom.

 

[sonor]

the only place i can see this technology really hitting off is in conjunction with other existing web applications, the majority of people who upload their photos online will do so to share them with their friends in which case they use website such a Facebook and Flickr

Scott Kelby's company Kelby Training have already made online tutorials for Photoshop Express, so he must have known about it for a fair while. This is how he describes it on his blog...

"...Although Photoshop Express does use some Photoshop technology, it’s designed to be a totally different experience (after all, it’s free), and it’s aimed at a totally different audience (18 to 22 year-old MySpace and Facebook users, who aren’t going to spend $600 to $900 to buy Photoshop CS3, or even $99 to buy Elements).

My buddy Terry White put it perspective for me. He said, “Imagine a kid going to his parents and saying “I need a hundred bucks to buy Elements to fix the photos I’m putting on my “MySpace” page.” Now you know why Adobe created Express, and who it’s made for."

http://www.scottkelby.com/blog/2008/archives/1220


But I think he must have made these comments before the Terms Of Service issues came to light...

"...because Photoshop Express has such great Flash-based online galleries, and you can post your images there for free (you get 2 Gig of online storage free), and put a web gallery of your work online today, with no Web experience whatsoever, I think we’ll all be surprised at how many serious shooters and pros wind up using at least part of Express."

 

[bretm]

You can't be serious.

This will kill the iPhone battery. Leave the iPhone for what it was meant to be: a phone + iPod + some smartphone capabilities.

You might want to reverse that list. It is primarily a smartphone/pda, then a great ipod, and then a mediocre phone. And with the 2.0 system, it's going to pretty much be the enterprise phone to beat.

 

[bretm]

Ha ha! I find it ironic that they have a picture of a person texting on an iPhone, whilst most of you whine about no iPhone support.

I think she's surfing macrumors.com actually.

 

[danielruiz]

Read the fine print, it's very important

If you read the fine print Adobe not only owns your images you upload but has the right to use and or sell them as they like. So Adobe let me be the first to say nice try but I'll never use your piece of..... software!

 

[CaptSaltyJack]

Thumbs way way down. Doesn't work in Firefox. Just like their "Kuler" app (kuler.adobe.com). Way to go, Adobe.

 

[ChrisA]

Adobe give us a $200-300 photoshop lite that isn't meant for print production but allows the creative freedom that layers, effects, filters, with full text support.

I've not seen Element 6.0 yet but I'm sure it will have layers, layer masks and adjustment layers. It may even have Smart Objects. PSE 4.0 was close to having all this

There is a trick with the "old" Elements. You can't make some kinds of layers using PSE but if you open a file that already has them (made with the full PS) then you can use the already created ones.