Feature: Photoshop Express beta marks Adobe's entry into online photo editing
Idea: Adobe combines browsing, free storage with basic photo editing

With 5 online photo editors already out on the market (see our complete review here) , and most being awfully good and remarkably fast on medium-scale images (1200 x 1200 pixels or less), Adobe had to do something - and they have - Adobe Photoshop Express beta.

At first blush, Adobe has taken a novel approach. Photoshop Express emphasizes as much the browser, photo storage and album making capabilities as its photo editing features. And when you compare photo-editing with some of the other online photo editors noted above, Photoshop Express comes up distinctly short of many of the tools currently available. But if you look at the total package, suddenly Photoshop Express looks rather strong meeting a market. So let us look at Photoshop Express beta step by step.

Its easy and free to sign up just go to Photoshop Express and fill in the dialog to join. Users get 2.0GB of free disk space to store their images. Also all the browsing, album creating and image editing features are free too. I decided to load some big 2-3MPixel images to see if Photoshop Express would gag on the large files - but 13 (7MB in size)loaded in less than 3 minutes on a DSL connection.

If users are familiar with Adobe's Bridge or Lightroom programs, the browser interface is basically similar. Thumbnails with name and date of the image and a five star rating are displayed. User can easily adjust the size of the thumbnails with the slider in the upper right of the browser view. There are two other browser modes, filmstrip with one large image under a strip of thumbnails and tabular - with thumbnails of each image along the left and then all the photos attribute across the page such as Name, Caption, Albums its in(yes a photo can be dragged and dropped onto several albums), taken date, modified, date, uploaded date, width and height plus 5-star rating.

Now to add to the power of the browser there is a a photo options command available on each photos thumbnail or full view image when accessed in any of the three browser modes. Just hover over the image/thumbnail and a photo options command appears along the bottom. Click this and the following options appear:
As soon as I saw this pop-up menu in Photoshop Express beta I knew I had a very serious online browser as good as the best online tools (probably Flickr's Organizer). So I decided to push Photoshop Express' browser:
Edit Photo - puts the image in Photoshop Express' image editor(see below)
Rotate Right - rotates the image 90% to the right
Rotate Right - rotates the image 90% to the right
Revert - abandons all the edits made on an image since last save
E-Mail Photo - does that directly with your message attached
Link - copies the images link location to the clipboard
Embed - copies the HTML to access the image to the clipboard
Use As Album Cover - in the My Gallery browse mode this image is on cover
Use as Profile Cover - in General Browse mode, this image is your avatar
Use as Gallery Background - 50% transparency of image is background
Remove from Album - removes image from an album
Remove from Library - removes image from all albums + your 2GB library
Everyone of these commands worked - with appropriate warnings when required. As a web developer I really like the Link and Embed commands because it makes it trivial to add images to my or my clients websites.

With this success, I decided to really load up Photoshop Express beta with a pretty good stress test - ten files of at least 6Mpixels (or 1-2MB in filesize). No more easy image files. The upload of 14MB took just over 5 minutes on a good DSL connection. But more interesting, operations in the browser were just as crisp and as fast as before with one notable exception - Edit Photo. Now the load up time increased from 30 seconds to about 60-70 seconds (double the time for files that were 3-4 time larger than the previous 2.4Mpixels images). But what was most interesting was the edits were just as fast as before on the smaller files. Impressive!

So then I tried the two other Views of Images provided by Photoshop Express beta. My Gallery view shows the albums I have created (like Flickr's sets). In this view one can create several different albums, rename them , delete them, and a variety of other operations. This provides the Photoshop Express beta a powerful tool for managing your images online (remember 2GB of free file space).

The Browse view allows users to scan through and view others albums on site. I was surprised
to see only 1300 albums - but the website is only 2 weeks old at the time of this review. Users can view the photos in an album that other users have marked as shareable - and the Browser works like the browse mode in MyPhotos view which is summarized above.

In sum, Photoshop Express browser mode has been deliberately compared with Flickr. I am a Photoshop and Lightroom user so I find it easier to use than Flickr's tools. However, Photoshop Express beta does not match Flickr for such features as 1)Tags, 2) IPCT and EXIF photo metadata, 3)shared albums or pools of images with other photographers, 4)Search on tags or pools, 5)contacts with other Flickr members including messaging and groups. So Photoshop Express beta has still away to go to match Flickr except on one important point - it has its own Photo Editor.

Photoshop Express Photo Editor

I had wondered where the Photoshop Express Photo Editor would come out relative to some of the existing online photo editors. For example Splash-up has an online interface that looks very much like a desktop Photoshop session from maybe 4 or 5 years ago - see our review here. Splash-up and Fotoflexor both set very high online photo editing standards with one drawback - as the files pass about 1MB in size the response time for editing commands tends to drop off notably.

Photoshop Express Photo Edits reverse these characteristics for bad and good. The screenshot

above shows why. First, there are a lot less photo editing commands and tools available in Photoshop Express than in the other two online photo editors - that is the bad news. The good news is that the Photoshop Express photo editor can handle large files of 1-4MB in size much more quickly than the other online photo editors. However, to get this quickness, the image load and save times are slower. So speed of operations is the trade off for less photo editing operations in Photoshop Express vis a vis the competition. Also the Photoshop Express browsing experience is much better than the other online photo editors.

So lets see what operations are available in Photoshop Express. The commands are grouped into 3 major headings:
Basic
Crop and Straighten - this is so good, Adobe should bring it back to desktop PhotoShop
Auto Correct - works like Photoshop Elements general fix command
Exposure - brightness and contrast corrections
Red Eye Removal - one of the most desired commands works well
Touch up - provides simple cloning and patch up features
Saturation - allows image wide (no masking as in Splash-up) saturation changes + or -
Tuning
White Balance - corrects the images overall tonal range
Highlight - fills in the the details in some of the lighter tones
Fill Light - adds lightness to just the image's darker tones, like having a flash after the fact
Sharpen - brings Photoshop's Unsharp mask to online images
Soft Blur - Softens an images edges
Effects
Pop Color - changes image to a Pop duotone with user selected color
Hue - change the images over all hue/color feel
Black and White - converts the images to gray scale
Tint - colorize the image for sepia or pewter toning
Sketch - emphasize and darken the images edges
Distort - shades of Photoshop, 3 image distortion/manipulation effects
In comparison to FotoFlexer, Photoshop Express has about 1/3 of the editing commands - ditto for Splash-up. But even more notable, advanced capabilities like masking in Splash-up are nowhere to be found in Photoshop Express.

Instead, Photoshop Express takes a simplifying approach to Photo edits. There are few options settings for each command. Instead most command (like in the screenshot above) provide a series of preview thumbnails across the top with graded changes in the image with the command changes applied - Sketch in the screenshot above. This makes changing your image dead simple in many cases and has the virtue of speeding up the processing - the changes are applied to the thumbnails first and quickly; then when you chose a thumbnail its applied to the full image.

So the Photoshop Express photo editor has chosen speed and simplicity over richness of commands. Then the question becomes - has Photoshop Express missed some essential command needed in most photo editing. Unfortunately yes - resizing and framing. When finishing images for online websites, I inevitably want to make the image as small as possible so the image won't add too much time to the web page download. Also many clients want either a small white or black border around- and since HTML in the browsers is so inconsistent on this I prefer to do it on the image. Despite this missing features, I was impressed with Photoshop Express photo editor for some of its features - Crop and Straighten, Distort and Fill Light are best of breed. And Photoshop Express is so simple to operate I can tell some of my clients to prepare their images in a shareable album on Photoshop Express- and I can expect they will make the cropping, color and touch up corrections themselves. Then I come in and do the final edits prior to loading them on their websites. Nice.

Summary

Photoshop Express beta is exactly that - a beta. So its feature set, designed to match some of the online storage and browsing sites like Fotki and Flickr, has missing gaps. But with its online editor and the ability to photo edit reasonably large files with good response time, Photoshop Express has also taken some leads right out of the gate.

In comparison with other online photo editors, Photoshop Express again has a trade off. Much better browsing features, simplicity of operations, and faster response time but much fewer operations. The argument can be made that photo edits in Photoshop Express are easier to do - they are certainly faster for big files. But it is ironic that Splash-up has a better desktop Photoshop interface than Photoshop Express.

However, remember this is beta. And if there is anything that Adobe Photoshop users know is that Adobe is relentless and often quite innovative in improving its products. I suspect that Photoshop Express, already outstanding in some of its features, will see that same fervor brought to its online Photoshop version.