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Adobe Puts Free Photoshop Online
Amit Agarwal writes "Adobe today launched a basic version of Adobe Photoshop available for free online. Photoshop Express will be completely Web-based so consumers can use it with any type of computer, operating system and browser. According to Yahoo! News, Adobe says providing Photoshop Express for free is part marketing and part a strategy to create up-sell opportunities. It hopes some customers will move from it to boxed software like its $99 Photoshop Elements or to a subscription-based version of Express that's in the works."
Read the ToS:
Section 8 (a):
Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. 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.
Thanks I will stick with GIMP instead.
Of course, if you need free stuff, there is always The Pirate Bay.
"The New Age. The New Beginning."
Why would I want to move from this to Photoshop Elements. Elements sucks hardcore. It is hard to use while proporting to be easy to use. It holds your hand wand walks you right off a cliff. I'd much rather either have this simple express version or the full fledged CS3 version for many hundreds of dollars. It's as simple as that. If I wanted something in the middle I would use GIMP and Inkscape for free.
Sounds kind of like Picnik, which provides free basic photo editing and is integrated directly into Flickr. It's pretty handy for doing some tweaks on your photos. Picnik has some advanced, paying-account-required features, though, so maybe Photoshop Express will be better in that regard.
Here is what I have noticed so far.
Requires Flash 9. to install.
They have a notice that basically says
Account creation is heavy today it may take 60 minutes to recieve your e-mail.
Mine (done 4 min. ago) took about 1 min.
Super fast uploading! 1 3mb pic took all of 3 seconds to upload!
Very basic editing tools, but has a few cool distortion features. One neat thing to note is links to external sites such as Picassa, Photobucket and Phacebook! (er uh Facebook!)
Gallery and gallery sharing is neat, but slow (probably due to high use right now)
This won't come close to replacing your pirated versions of PS you all have at home. It'll be interesting to see if they add new tools or leave it as is.
How much is your data worth? Back it up now.
I had a quick go at 'editing' a photo in the test-drive thing, and there didn't seem any way of actually drawing anything. I'd say it's much closer in concept to a drastically simplified Photoshop Lightroom - it's even got the same colour scheme and vague general layout. Except where Lightroom will manage untold gigabytes of photos on your own computer, doing on-the-fly conversions and adjustments from raw format, Express looks more like an advanced, online photo management system.
It's definitely not Photoshop Photoshop.
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
Adobe's Online Office Productivity Suite:
:)
Photoshop Express (Photo Editor)
https://www.photoshop.com/express
Buzzword (Word Processor)
http://www.buzzword.com/
Sliderocket (Presentation Software)
http://www.sliderocket.com/
Blist (Spreadsheet)
http://www.blist.com/
***
Did you buy stock? I did a while ago...
If your on a windows system why not use Paint.net http://www.getpaint.net/
Not a flame, but it is the dealbreaker he is talking about when it comes to GIMP vs Photoshop: GIMP's inability to do CMYK or something along those lines. So it is not professional grade (I may be simplifying it), not something you can turn in to a professional printing company, but for the hobbyist and/or FOSS fan, it's enough.
It's cropped up often enough in these type of GIMP vs Photoshop stories.
What specifically can you do in Photoshop that I can't do in Gimp? Its probably just a matter of what you're used to. I grew up on gimp. If you stuck me in front of a Photoshop rig, there is very little chance that I would be able to do ANYTHING with it. CMYK, Pantone in particular but mostly it's down to the horrible interface that GIMP comes with. Gimp is basically a programmers idea of how a creative tool should look.
By the way - as a supplement to the comment above, here is a simple example of the difference between 8 bit and 16 bit colour:
Benefits Of Working With 16-Bit Images In Photoshop, Page 2shaunjohnston.com
Nope, that's Photoshop!
The only change I made to the text rendering settings was to disable hinting in The GIMP - which is a single click in the checkbox just beneath the font size, so it's not a remotely hidden option.
Photoshop's got even more rendering options, and its text editor thingy is way more capable, allowing different styles in the same text (kind of like a word processor) - but the idea that The GIMP's actual text rendering is rubbish is just a myth...
Tedious Bloggy Stuff - hooray?
I work in a prepress job and I've noticed two things:
Time makes more converts than reason
That's fine but off-topic. You asked what specifically Photoshop can do that GIMP cannot, I responded with two items, which you then attempted to bin by relegating them to the status of irrelevant. I shoot stitched panoramic landscapes and I would say the largest transition in image quality for me was when I made the jump from using 8 bit jpgs as my base exposures to 12 bit Canon RAW converted to 16 bit TIFF. 16 bit image support is very relevant to me, not so relevant to you, but its relevance to either of us individually doesn't negate its value.
shaunjohnston.com
(Though they are only a convenience, in that you can achieve the same effects with regular filters, just not in a non-destructive way.) Image -> Transform -> Guillotine.
If you want it to create the HTML code for you as well, there are several plugins you can download (eg Py-Slice).
Save as -> GIF, PNG or JPG. Adjustments are in the save dialog.
Toggle the preview checkbox for lossy-compressed formats such as JPG. I'll grant you there's no built-in function for it, but I also can't conceive of a useful reason for doing so.
Converting a single bitmap image into a PDF is a grossly inefficient operation for no benefit.
(Where the file format can sensibly be exported to PDF, most open source software does provide it; eg Inkscape.) Instead of macros, GIMP is fully scriptable. Considerably less convenient, but much more powerful.
(Of course, in an ideal world GIMP would support both.) Uh, View -> Fullscreen? Middle-click drags the canvas. Drag the dialog to a dock window. You get two by default: the main toolbox and Layers/Channels/Paths.
You can have one or many. Predefined sets are available under Dialogs -> Create New Dock Another valid point. Lack of proper color control is a well-known deficiency with GIMP.
(It does now support color profiles, but it's a bit of a hack.)
I wouldn't use it for professional print purposes; but for my personal artwork, yeah, I have sent RGB for print. I've got a local print shop that does a really good job of converting screen-space color. Good enough for my needs, and it's not like my home PC has a color-calibrated monitor anyway.
Lack of CMYK support and 16-bit+ color are real legitimate complaints against GIMP. I'll grant you filter layers too, as they would be handy (and are in development). Most other complaints are just unfamiliarity with the interface.
Here are my three main gripes about Photoshop's interface:- Why is undo (ctrl-Z) single-level by default? If I'm using a tablet, one pen stroke usually ends up as multiple steps. Why do I have to hold down ctrl-ALT-Z?
- Why am I forced to select something before doing most operations? If nothing is selected, surely it's logical I want to do it on the whole image.
- What is Photoshop's equivalent to "Alpha to Selection", which I use all the time? (I'm sure it has one but damned if I can find it)
Want me to go on?