Photoshop Express for web edits
Photoshop Express launched today. Express borrows the most essential pieces of the full Photoshop, and offers them as a web based service. You won’t see us giving up on the desktop version of Photoshop pro anytime soon, but it instantly struck us how useful it could be for our clients.
It’s a constant struggle to get clients set up so that they can maintain their own website content. Text is no problem, -but images often derail. Here are the usual hurdles:
- Resizing. Although our CMS systems do most of the resizing for you, -good luck trying to squeeze a megapixel photo up a modem connection. Usually you have to scale pics down a bit to start with.
- Cropping. Whether it’s for artistic or practical reasons, even cropping can be difficult on a PC.
- Color correcting. Most people don’t bother, but it can make or break a site.
- Formats. Although most cameras these days deal in web ready jpg’s -we’ve seen more than one CMYK tiff try to sneak into a site.
Luckily Photoshop Express solves all of these in a fairly intuitive way. It’s the kind of program where no manual is required. Best of all, it’s free for up to 2GB of storage. For all but the most prolific web editors it should be more than enough. It sure beats $100 for LE, -and beats the pants off the $700 for the full Photoshop.
We’ll have to experiment with it more, but it very well may become the main editor we recommend for simple updates. The biggest question is how well the upload manager will work on low network speeds. If Adobe gets that part right, it will be an easy program to recommend.
Hopefully in the future Adobe will offer an API or an embedded version. It would be ideal to include this inside of an admin.
https://www.photoshop.com/express/landing.html
(There’s a demo area if you don’t want to sign up for a full account)
Here’s another option if you want to root for the under-dog.
http://www.picnik.com/