Adobe Photo, Expressed

It’s not that tough to find a decent image management package on the Web these days; Flickr, KodakGallery, Snapfish, Photobucket, bunches of these guys offer archive and gallery systems that usually also provide minor editing capabilities. Or there’s the powerful 1-2 punch of Google, pairing Picasa with Blogger to build some really interesting online photo libraries. Or Apple, with its .Mac service.

Adobe, with the lion’s share of the professional image manipulation crowd, hasn’t really done a heckuva lot in this space. Now they’re catching up by releasing a junior-grade version of Photoshop online. Photoshop Express is in beta right now. It also (apparently) doesn’t support Linux at this time, but Windows and Mac users shouldn’t have (m)any problems…aside from the critical gaps I note below.

Unfortunately an Israeli friend discovered that the beta’s only open to US citizens. I understand the need to keep things manageable but as far as I’m concerned, given the global nature of the Web, that’s a really bonehead maneuver.

If you’re in the US, though, you sign up for a free account, verify it’s really you through e-mail, and Adobe gives you a library space on its servers plus a bunch of image management tools. They bear a strong resemblance to Adobe Lightroom, if you’re familiar with that interface. First thing you do is upload a bunch of photos–so far the program hasn’t choked at 7.7MB–and you can batch the uploads so you’re not clicking all day.

You can organize your library photos into “albums,” or upload directly into an album, name and rate them as you do in Lightroom–I called the one below “Plants,” not surprisingly–and now you’re ready to play.

Hover over a photo (with the mouse), and a transparency panel appears at the bottom of the image. Click the options button, and up pops a menu of options.

Clicking “link” copies the URL address of the image into your computer, a handy thing that’s accepted practice on the Mac, not on Windows XP. Same thing happens if you choose “Embed,” i.e., the HTML “img” code needed to add this image to your Web page automatically copies over.

You can opt to share your album, i.e., open it to the public. In fact it’s almost too easy to do that, especially if you’re new to the Web.  Being an intellectual property maven, well… just be aware that sharing is more than just viewing; people (including Adobe) can use your images on their own websites and such, so make sure you’re comfortable with that before hitting the “share” button.

(Addendum: Apparently I wasn’t the only one concerned about that, from what I read in this blogpost, and it appears that Adobe is putting a leash on some of its IP legalese.)

The big deal, though, is the “Edit Photo” choice. Clicking it opens up the photo in a new workspace that offers most of the standard “imaging lite” tools and a few surprising ones.

The tools let you crop/rotate, white-balance, sharpen, add fill and highlights, correct saturation, and do a few special effects things such as “sketch” which makes the image look as if it were hand-drawn. The tool offers a bracketed range of choices, and as you skim them with the mouse the large image changes to match. You select the setting you want by clicking on the green arrow at top right.

Critical gap: Probably the most common task the average person performs with online imaging is to resize photos, either changing the actual dimensions or reducing resolution to optimize pictures for Web and mail. So far I’m unable to find such tools in this release, which pretty much makes it useless for the very group of people that are most likely to need this tool. 

Other warning: This application is apparently built in Flash, which has a 2048×2048 size limitation (or it might be 2880×2880–the documentation contradicts itself). If your file is bigger than that, it’ll resize it (down) for you. 

But assuming you aren’t worried about those two problems, once you’ve gotten the photos the way you want them, you can view them in some fairly cool slideshow modes. I found them most effective with photos that had dark/black backgrounds; the images seem to pop and float all over the place.

As far as I can tell this thing reads JPG files pretty exclusively, or at least when I browsed for photos to upload it ignored any .DNG, .NEF, .PNG, or .TIF files in the folder; all I could see were the .JPGs. And if you’re looking for Photoshop-like control, i.e, the ability to manipulate pixel-by-exact pixel, forget it. Even the TouchUp tool is limited to fairly large sizes. And there doesn’t seem to be much in the way of bridging to Photobucket, Facebook, Picasa, etc.–you have to completely log out before you can use those services, which would seem to make batch image management between those applications rather difficult.

Still, I can see Adobe setting up for lots of features and services from this beginning. And ain’t nothin’ wrong with free….but free with a decent image size/resolution tool would be even better.

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