Photoshop Express: photo editing goes social
Perhaps it was just a coincidence, but Adobe released the beta of Photoshop Express the weekend prior to the Photoshop World expo, held here in Orlando a couple of weeks ago. I was fortunate to be in the audience when Adobe Sr. VP John Loiacono demonstrated the new application, which is entirely web-based. To “oohs” and ahhhs” from the audience (a tough crowd to impress) ordinary snapshots were converted into creative and attractive photographs – all online, and all within just a few keystrokes.
Express isn’t meant to replace Adobe’s flagship product Photoshop CS3, but instead makes a set of features immediately accessible to people who want to do basic photo-editing tasks such as cropping, removing red eye, color correcting and – for the teen and college crowds- removing visible signs of newly-acquired body piercing before sending snaps to Mom and Dad via email.
John Loiacono said that during the first weekend of its release, users had uploaded several terabytes of image data – indicating that there is a potentially huge market for this easy-to-use web-based photo editor. The beta release of Photoshop Express is currently free to users and provides 2GB of storage.
With Flickr providing a social network community of photographers, and Photoshop Express providing powerful editing tools online, the future of digital imaging looks ever more collaborative and accessible, which has to be a good thing.
Tags: digital photography, social media, web apps