Zoom-in Online

Adobe unveiled a new web application this week, built on Flex and Flash, called Photoshop Express. This new web based tool is poised to potentially trump other online photo editing resources like Picnik, Fotoflexer, by combining sophisticated image retouching features (including crop and rotate, healing, exposure, red-eye removal, saturation, white balance, sharpen, soft focus, and effects like pop color, hue, black and white, tint, sketch, distort and more) with the community aspect of really slick gallery, sharing and free hosting functionality. And of course, this is Adobe's engine for doing these image related tasks, so we're talking top-dog quality. The site does not purport to be a replacement for Photoshop or Photoshop Elements. It's not full-featured image "editing" as it were. You can't create anything from scratch like shapes, lines or text. It's a photo retouching and finishing toolset - a photo processing application. Adobe does indeed go one step further - maybe more. Photoshop Express is also a website where users can host their galleries (2GB of storage during the beta for free - reports that this will be the standard into official release as well as potentially offering a premium version of the service), and share with your community. Adobe's cool CS3 icon set (you know, the icons Adobe has pastiched from the periodic table of the elements) is now complemented by a Photoshop-blue square with Px on it. Px... pics... get it? Very cool.

Directly competing (in function if not intentionally- yeah right) with sites like PhotoBucket and Flickr, which, as I'm sure most of you know, focus on a combination of the image hosting and sharing aspects, Px looks like a tool that sees itself as a one stop shop for all of these social features including allowing you to make your pictures look better. Trading on the Photoshop name, which has been the cornerstone of the image editing industry for what... two decades now?

Another interesting aspect is the all-too-Adobe look and feel of the app. If you've used Adobe Bridge or Adobe Media Player... it sits in the GUI group with those apps. Charcoal greys, thin, sharp, small text, squared off buttons... it looks nice, but I wonber if it might not feel a little intense and "pro" for the Interweb two-point-oh folks... Just pondering that. It's obviously a big factor. Form and function. People gravitate toward tools that make them feel good to use. Web 2.0ish UIs like Flickr and Picnik have the benefit of being soft, light and inviting by definition, AND by having arrived on the scene earlier than Px... but you know what... that's Adobe's MO - wait on delivery till it's (close to or totally) right, timing be damned, the tools rock, here they are finally, use them, love it, good night. Hey, I use them every day.

TechCrunch's article by Erick Schonfeld has some interesting things to say (including some quotes from Picnik CEO Jonathan Sposato) about Picnik's apparent lack of concern, but I wonder if the Adobe name won't automatically nab a huge section of the audience, just based on the ubiquitous presence Photoshop has in photo related discussions and circles world-wide. Far be it from me to prognosticate about the potential success of this tool - part of me just thinks it was the first best thing Adobe could come up with to really show off the power of Flex and Flash - which also promising users an Adobe AIR desktop/web client that will allow users the comfort of personal bandwidth for editing, and then a "publish" feature of some kind to push everything up to the Adobe servers after all the clicking and editing is done. We'll see - I think it's a natural fit for the technologies, and clearly is a space where Adobe shines, so I remain optimistic. I plan to direct everyone I know who have cameras and don't own Photoshop to the site, as well as those who need a slick place to host and share images and don't want to use .Mac or any of the other trendy sites.

That's part of it... and I know I'm thinking out loud here... but I almost choked on a LARGE disc of cucumber at lunch and nearly needed an Heimlich maneuver from my friend Sarah... (she's about 1/2 my size) - and I'm experiencing a nice combination of devil-may-care and carpe-ing of the proverbial diem at the moment and so I'll tangent here momentarily: I believe there are a lot of people who are photographers (pro or amateur) who haven't gotten into Flickr or PhotoBucket for the same reason they don't have MySpace or facebook pages... "That's what the kids are doing, and I really don't quite get it." Photoshop Express - online gallery and hosting and sharing and editing and... cool... I get it... it's Photoshop, only online. Cool. Done deal. Even if that's not totally true, it's what the average person who owns Photoshop (or wants to) might think of it when they hear about it. In this moment of ever-changing landscape and evolving technology, you have to have the right first impression. I think it's going to be huge.

One other thing that's really sweet about it all... is the actual user interface. I have to applaud the folks who put this together (why isn't there a software developers IMDB where I can link to the people responsible right now and give them some well deserved kudos) For most of the effects... you choose an effect (like the saturation in my aerial pomelo example, which my wife shot) and your photo is in the main frame, and up above are a series of thumbnails that represent "already processed" versions of the image, and you simply mouse over them and you see what that change would look like, in real time, in your main image. You find the one you want and you click it. It's a total departure from the select it, wait, see, and undo approach of most regular software. There has always been the preview feature in Photoshop, but hey, this is the web. And it's not built for professional image editors. Who knows what version 5 of this will be like, but for now I think it's a great start, and I hope it's embraced by some of the people out there who have a lot of great personal art to share and just haven't gotten into it yet.

Some people say to this day that "everyone on the internet today is an early adopter." What happens when every school, every administrative office, every artist's retreat, every person is connected to one another via this web of ours? I don't know... do you?

Check out my first gallery on Photoshop Express!!