It appears Adobe is quickly responding to concerns about a surprising clause in its terms of service for Photoshop Express, the free Web-based software launched Wednesday that has otherwise been well-received.
Users were taken aback by a clause that basically gives Adobe the right to do anything it wants with their photos. As CNET's Lori Grunin first pointed out in her review on Webware, the clause in question goes like this:
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 and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.
Grunin's response: "I'm going to give Adobe the benefit of the doubt and assume someone forgot to put the choke collar on the lawyers, letting something this undesirable slip through." And she was right on the money, at least according to a report from Adobe blogger John Nack, who contacted Adobe with concerns about the terms of service.
Nack wrote that he got a note back from the Photoshop Express team Friday stating that it agrees that the clause "implies things we would never do with content," and therefore the legal team is making it a priority to post revised terms.
Adobe Systems opened up Photoshop Express on Thursday, its long-anticipated Web-based image editor aimed at the millions of consumers that want a simple way to touch up, share, and store photos.
Photoshop Express, available for free with 2 gigabytes of storage at www.photoshop.com/express, is a significant departure from Adobe's desktop software business and a big bet that it can make money offering Web services directly to consumers.
The application, which needs Flash Player 9 to run, pushes the limits of browser-based applications and will likely ratchet up the competition on the dozens of free and online photo-editing products available now (see our full review of Photoshop Express and gallery of screen shots of the application).
The MyPhotos page of Photoshop Express, a Web-based application for editing and sharing photos.
(Credit: Adobe)Since then, Adobe has expanded the scope of the project, one reason why the product launch has taken longer than expected, according to executives. Rather than only an image editor, Photoshop Express also has ties to social networking sites like Facebook and other image-sharing sites.
Also, Adobe needed to build the back-end infrastructure needed to offer the service directly to consumers, rather than partner with another photo-sharing site, as it did with its online video editor, Premiere Express.
"We've seen a convergence of trends where the everyday consumer is becoming overwhelmed with the number of images and they have the desire to share images in new and interesting ways," said Doug Mack, the vice president of consumer and hosted solutions at Adobe.
"We're at the point now with bandwidth that most consumers can use really rich Internet applications and also have a relationship with a service where they store and upload images," he said.
The service will go live in beta test mode on Thursday. Mack said that the company intends to use the test period as a way garner feedback from customers.
Adobe intends to offer more features to consumers who pay a yearly fee. Some planned features include a printing service, more storage, support for audio and other media, and the ability to read additional image file types (the service works with .JPGs now.)
Adobe also plans to build an offline client using AIR (the Adobe Integrated Runtime) so that people can edit photos offline, executives said.
Under the hood
Adobe already has a few other Photoshop-branded products--Photoshop Creative Suite 3 and Photoshop Lightroom are aimed at professional and serious amateur photographers, while $99 Photoshop Elements is a consumer-oriented product.
Photoshop Express is designed to be used essentially by anyone who uses a point and click digital camera, said Mack.
People can organize photos by dragging them into albums or create a gallery to share images. The service also lets people email links images stored online, embed them in a Web page, or download them.
When people hover a mouse over an image, a menu appears that lets people do tasks, such as rotating an image. The editing tools are designed for speed, with an autocorrect option, redeye removal, and a touch-up tool.
Adobe has sought to make Photoshop Express intuitive enough for people to use without any training but still have features that appeal to more sophisticated photographers, said Geoff Baum, director of Adobe's Express products.
For example, the touch-up tool will automatically choose a color from a surrounding item to, say, remove a blemish on a face. Or, a person can choose where to sample a color to replace the blemish.
Photoshop Express also includes several ways to tweak photos just for fun. There are a number of effects to change the color of one item in a photo, like a hat on someone's head, or blur parts of an image.
While editing, the application displays thumbnail images that let people view how effects will change a photo before saving it and people can revert back to an original. The connections to Facebook and other social networking sites let people edit and update images from within Photoshop Express.
First impression
Adobe engineers wrote Photoshop Express from scratch using its Flex development framework and ActionScript, its JavaScript-compatible language.
"We had some of the top Photoshop engineers who understand the technology and science behind Photoshop rewrite some of the algorithms in ActionScript 3," Baum explained.
Having used Photoshop Express for a short time, I can say that it is simple to use. It's attractive, too. The use of Flash animation makes for a dynamic page and smooth transitions between operations.
Adobe is hoping that people who use Picasa, Google's free downloadable application, will be tempted by Photoshop Express.
As someone who uses Picasa for both work and personal photo editing, I'd say that Photoshop Express is indeed tempting because it's slick yet easy to use. You can get edits done quickly, particularly using the thumbnail preview feature.
However, launching the editor and actually saving changes is far slower than Picasa. That's not surprising, given that Photoshop Express has to download photos and upload changes, while Picasa doesn't. By design, Photoshop Express also has a broader range of options for sharing photos on other sites.
For a first review of from CNET Reviews, click here..
Photoshop Express has a timeline below the image that lets people view and undo changes.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET News.com)Update: we have added a video of the Photoshop Express demo.
CHICAGO--Adobe Systems gave a public viewing Tuesday night of an online version of Photoshop, its popular image-editing application.
During a sneak peek session at its Max 2007 developer conference, Adobe product manager Geoff Baum gave a demo of Photoshop Express, the Flash-based image editor that runs inside a Web browser.
The application is aimed at consumers, rather than professional developers, and complements existing versions. Baum showed how people can quickly make changes to images with the program.
With one click, people can fix red eyes or blemishes. The application also generates a thumbnail of an image with various effects, like sepia tone, which people can click on to select.
Below the main image editing window, there is a timeline of thumbnail images that lets people view all the changes they've made to a photo and revert to older versions.
The features that got perhaps the most applause from Max attendees was the ability to selectively change colors in an image.
Baum edited a photo of a car by changing only the color of the car and only the background. He also showed how people can quickly alter the image with different distortion patterns, like curving straight lines, by dragging the cursor over the image and clicking.
With the image editor, people will also be able to create slide shows, share pictures with others and embed photos in Web pages, Baum said.
Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen told CNET News.com about the online version of Photoshop in February of this year, saying it was a way for Adobe to offer a low-end consumer-oriented product to compete with free desktop photo editors.
At the time, Chizen said Adobe would have a beta version within six months, a deadline it has missed. Since then, the company hasn't said when it plans to ship the product or whether Adobe will offer it directly or through partners as it has done with its online video editor Adobe Premiere Express.
This was the second public viewing of Photoshop Express. John Loiacono, senior vice president of Adobe's Creative Solutions Business Unit, gave a demo at Photoshop World in September and the company supplied a screenshot.
Photoshop Express lets people selectively change colors in an image.
(Credit: Martin LaMonica/CNET News.com)The application is structured around a display of text. People can synchronize images and effects, such as a video snippet and transition, with text by dragging icons into a column next to the text.
Visual Communicator 3 will let people switch between three cameras and use blue and green screens for background images.
Adobe also showed off "Flash Home," a project that lets people personalize their cell phone screens. The phone starts Flash when it boots up. The platform will allow people to customize the display. During the demo, Ken Sundermeyer of Adobe showed how calls from a New York area code can display the Statue of Liberty as the call comes in.
Photoshop Express, Adobe's online image editor
(Credit: Adobe)With a new product called Photoshop Express, Adobe Systems is coming through on its promise to deliver a lightweight online version of Photoshop.
At the Photoshop World conference on Thursday in Las Vegas, John Loiacono, senior vice president of Adobe's Creative Solutions Business Unit, briefly demonstrated Photoshop Express and gave some details on how it is intended to work.
In February, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen told CNET News.com that the company was planning an online version of Photoshop for release within three to six months. Chizen said the product was meant to appeal to consumers and to compete with free and other low-end image-editing tools, such as Google's Picasa.
The product is aimed at consumers rather than professional photographers and is designed to complement existing products Photoshop Creative Suite 3 and Photoshop Elements, according to company executives.
"It's a new member of the Photoshop family that's meant to make Adobe imaging technology immediately accessible...to large numbers of people," Photoshop product manager John Nack wrote in a blog posting Thursday.
Nack said that Adobe Photoshop Express is a Flash application that runs in a browser and that it is still in development.
"Loiacono showed that it was possible to adjust an image just by rolling over the different versions shown at the top, previewing the results & then clicking the desired degree of modification," Nack wrote.
In a press release issued Thursday, Adobe said that the product is in development, but gave no indication when it would be available. A company representative on Friday said Adobe won't be releasing any additional details at this time.
Earlier this year, Adobe released Premiere Express, a Flash-based online image editor that it offers through third-party sites, including Photobucket. In February, Chizen said that Adobe could offer its online version of Photoshop directly to consumers or through photo-sharing sites.
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