Photoshop for free?
Posted by Kathleen Maher on April 7th 2008 | Comments Closed
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Photoshop Express is Adobe’s free online application that links to popular online sites like Flickr, and Facebook. Here, I used the Sketch feature to make my friends look mysterious and pensive. They usually aren’t.
Adobe has made the latest version of its Photoshop software available absolutely free. Photoshop Express is yet another example of an online application but it has quite a bit of sophistication in comparison with other sites that we have used. Now, for the sake of honesty, we’ll say tha we use primarily Picasa on the desktop and Flickr online. Photobucket is one of the latest contenders and we haven’t gotten a chance to play with it yet. However, with any luck at all, we’ll be able to explore it through Photoshop Express. We had good luck exchanging images between Facebook and Picasa online.
The site includes simple editing tools, but it has a nice tool bar that lets you choose from a range of options and it’s amazingly fast. Hovering over a choice shows you what it will look like. The crop and rotate includes a simple feature I’ve become addicted to and that’s a composition aid that divides the image area into 3x3 sections so you can use the rule of thirds to better compose your image. If you’re not familiar with this, it’s worth looking up. The idea is you usually don’t want to put your main point of interest dead center—of course you knew this—but rather you want to compose the elements in the photo to move the eye around and the rule of thirds helps you identify key areas of the image. As far as I know, Corel was the first to offer this tool in a photo application but it’s appearing in other programs. I was delighted to see it in Lightroom, for instance. Images are easy to upload and they seem to get up there in a right snappy manner.
Photoshop Express gives users 2 GB of storage, which is decent and it limits the file size to 4,000 pixels, also reasonably decent compared to competing sites. The idea is that users can store images in higher resolutions and share the sizes as they need. There are some that are carping about the storage limit already and Adobe says it has plans for various options and subscriptions including more storage and services. At the moment however, they’re just trying to make friends.
A free Photoshop Express brings up two major questions. Question #1: Will people really store their photos online? The executives we talked to said they believe people are becoming less hesitant to upload their images online and furthermore people are more willing to trust Adobe. Another, really interesting point they made was that younger users are pretty used to uploading images online and downloading music and they’re not really thinking about the transitory nature of digital data. (It’s the those darned “kids” explanation we’re seeing all the time. For example, our kids know how to program computers, play games, edit video. In general, we haven’t found this to be overwhelmingly true. What is true is that kids have more time on their hands.)
Oh yeah, and Question #2: Why would Adobe do this? Adobe has several very good reasons. First of all, they have no choice. There are plenty of other sites already offering photo storage and some level of editing. At least they might introduce people to the Adobe world. There are several classes of users—some who do not want to fool with their images much at all and these are not customers that Photoshop stands to lose even for its entry-level product Photoshop Elements. At least Adobe can sell them a subscription for more storage or additional services. And, there might be some users who discover that they really enjoy playing with their photos and want to do more. We have no doubt that Adobe will make it very easy to buy Photoshop Elements and who knows, they might even move up the ranks to Photoshop itself.
The software is available online as a Beta at https://www.photoshop.com/express/. Adobe has already run into a little firestorm as users worried about their level of privacy. Those people who actually bothered to read the terms of agreement found that Adobe didn’t lay claim to users’ original content but, it did feel like putting one’s content out there publicly gave Adobe certain rights to wit:
“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.”
The observant freaked out. Adobe blogger John Nack posted an answer from the Express team that said:
“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.”
And, most recently, we got a follow-up from Adobe that then stated that the company did revise its agreement.
Adobe’s Rights—Adobe has retained only those limited rights that allow us to operate the service and to enable you to do all the things the service offers. If you decide to terminate your Photoshop Express account, Adobe’s rights also will be terminated. Adobe doesn’t claim ownership of your content and won’t sell your images.
Shared Content—Adobe clearly states the rights you’re granting other users when you choose to publicly share Your Content.
The terms of service will take effect on April 10th.
In sum
I would dearly love to use just one service for my online images and Adobe’s tolerance of higher resolution photos is nice. I don’t think I’ll really trust all my photos to an online service even if it is Adobe, but it is a nice back up and a way to feed photos to Facebook and to share them. The bottom line is that the industry is on the right track. I can easily envision a time when where your photos, your community profiles, your email, your blogs, and your web pages will be centrally managed and all that can be online, and safe. It will happen sooner than you think.—KM
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Commenting is not available in this section entry.Kathleen Maher
Kathleen Maher has worked as an analyst and journalist in technical fields for more than ten years. In addition she has been a founding editor for several publications including the Austin Chronicle, a successful politics and entertainment magazine which has won several awards and has launched the careers of many notable writers in the fields of political journalism, entertainment, and fiction. In addition Maher helped launch Interactivity, a monthly multimedia magazine that defined the need for informational resources for creative professionals. She was Editor-in-Chief of Cadence Magazine, the award winning resource for CAD users. Formerly, Maher was the Editor-in-Chief of The Peddie Report, one of the most respected insider reports published today. She is the author of several well received reports including the DVD Study and the regular Quarterly Report and a frequent contributor to several publications including Communication Arts.
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