Adobe Systems on Friday introduced a new Photoshop app for iPhone users that lets them edit photos from both their phone and their online library on Photoshop.com.
The app is free of charge and offers tools such as cropping, image rotation, color controls, and simple one-touch filter effects that can change the look and feel of shots all at once. It also features undo and redo controls so that if users make a mistake, or want to revert back to the original, it takes just a few taps.
As soon as users are done editing any photo, they can either save it back to their phone or upload it to their Photoshop.com account. The app also doubles as a photo-taking tool since you can simply take a photo, then have it upload right away.
What makes the app notable (besides from being from Adobe) is that the entire editing control set works off gestures. Instead of using dials or sliders, users just need to swipe their finger across the screen to change things such as brightness or color values. The same goes for its filters, which can be whisked from one end of the screen to the other instead of taking up more screen real estate or using a drop-down menu. It's one of the more intuitive control methods I've seen on a mobile photo-editing app, and can be quite precise once you get the hang of it.
The app is available now and is free of charge, although Adobe's free Photoshop.com service has a 2GB limit, which can be expanded with an annual paid storage plan.
Photoshop for iPhone lets you do all sorts of things to your photos, including beaming them back to Photoshop.com when you're done.
(Credit: CNET / Josh Lowensohn)More pics after the break.
... Read moreI use and enjoy Flickr. But with each passing month it worries me more that when I visit a photo page on the Yahoo photo-sharing site, it looks essentially identical to when I first started using it four years ago.
Flickr has typical online photo site abilities to upload, share, and print photos. What sets it apart, though, are features that make Flickr a community: discussions in comments below photos, groups for like-minded photographers to share their work, and social networking attributes that let people stay on top of their contacts' doings.
Flickr revamped members' home pages starting last September, drawing more attention to recent activity such as people who added you as a contact or who commented on your photos. The change was smart: Flickr was a socially wired site before social networking became all the rage, and photography is a great way for people to stay engaged with their friends and relations.
But now it's time for the rest of the upgrade. Here's what pains me most:
• The photo page. With Flickr, you can have large photos or you can have comments and navigation, but you can't have both. Photos are best viewed larger than Flickr's default 500-pixels width. Clicking "all sizes" to see lavishly large views sends you down browser dead end: you'll have to click the back button when it's time to add comments or navigate to the next photo.
• The photostream page. Flickr organizes your photos as one giant filmstrip called the photostream. But viewing somebody's most recent shots on the photostream page again forces you back into the small-monitor past. The default view for me shows 18 small photos, 10 sets, and an ocean of white space even on my laptop.
• The profile page. I rarely look at people's profile pages unless I'm trying to contact them or figure out who's behind a cryptic username. But there should be a way to make the profile page the anchor of a Flickr user's online identity, the public face presented to Flickr users. People judge others by their photostreams, which in my case these days is more about family photos than works of art or moving photojournalism, so I'd like to show them an automatically updated page of my top picks instead.
Fortunately, Flickr is working on several improvements detailed below by product strategy chief Matthew Rothenberg. But he kept mum about timing: "We're planning to be progressively rolling out enhancements over time," he said.
Show 'em how it's done
"Innovation happens elsewhere" is a worn-out Silicon Valley business cliche, but there's some truth to it. It's especially appropriate for Flickr, because the site lets others built atop it using Flickr's API, or application programming interface. Tasks such as flipping through a person's photos, adding comments, looking up interesting shots, and uploading photos all can be done without having to touch Flickr directly.
The Flickroom beta software presents a new face on Yahoo's photo-sharing site.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)The power of the Flickr API was shown most clearly to me a year and a half ago, when I tried Photophlow, a site that makes Flickr into a photo-centric chat room. Photophlow lets people collectively breeze through photos, marking photos as favorites and leaving comments as they go
Now there's a new kid in town with some other ideas, a beta application called Flickroom. It's built atop Adobe Systems' AIR foundation and presents a fashionably dark background for viewing pictures. There are plenty of icons and control panels to traverse photos, search photos, join a chat room, and see what your contacts are up to.
Flickroom has some bugs and idiosyncrasies, and fundamentally it's not shifting any Flickr paradigms beyond the user interface. But it does manage to illustrate what can be done with Flickr's raw material. I especially liked the flip through the large sizes of a user's photos.
Another good example of what can be done with Flickr's API is Darckr, which shows what Flickr (not entirely badly) believes to be your most interesting shots set off against a black background. I'm not going to be showing my photostream as my portfolio, but my interesting shots on Darckr aren't so mundane.
There are plenty more. Photoshop.com from Adobe, for example, not only gives a new interface to Flickr but lets you edit your photos, too.
Google's Picasa Web Albums is set up more for showing family pictures than for spawning a community of macro or Holga photography, but it can teach Flickr a thing or two. Google boasted in June of a revamp that makes photos load much faster, even at full-screen size, and it wasn't idle boasting. And even if Picasa photos are framed by more clutter than Flickr's photos, at least the photos can be viewed larger.
Photoshop.com offers online image editing and sharing.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET) The good news
Flickr may not be moving fast enough for me, but happily, it's not standing still, either.
"The core photo-sharing experience on Flickr is the area we want to spend most of our time on now," Rothenberg said. He pointed toward "the photo page in particular, the photostream, photos from your contacts--all aspects of site core to the photo-sharing mission of Flickr but that haven't really been brought in line."
Also, probably not just to throw me a bone because I'm a fan of location tags in photos, he added, "Even geotagging, (we'd like) to bring it more into the core experience."
He couldn't comment on my specific gripes about wasted screen real estate, though he did mount a bit defense of white space. However, it's clear Flickr understands the issue, because he did take pains to mention Flickr's new search tool launched Tuesday. It can take advantage of available screen size.
Photophlow, though its development is dormant for now, can make it fun for groups to browse and comment on Flickr pictures.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Flickr's absolute priority is a page on which the photo looks good, but the site must also balance that with social and navigational features. "There's a large amount of information we store and display and allow people to interact with--sizes, licensing, location information, comments, favoriting," he said. "We want to make all those options as easy and efficient as possible."
Flickr also wants to improve navigation and organization, two areas that I believe the computer industry always will face. Rothenberg
Lowered expectations
Rothenberg lowered my hopes regarding a handful of other areas I could see improved.
• Threaded comments: I find it hard to traverse longer discussions, in which people sometimes try to address each other with the @username convention, but Rothenberg pointed out fairly that most photos don't have such complicated discussions. "For most people it's question of whether getting any comments on the photo," he said. "We want to make that social aspect of photos matter to members more than it does today."
• Beefed-up Flickrmail: Flickr isn't designed to replace Yahoo Mail or Gmail, he said, but that doesn't mean e-mail and photos don't go together (as Yahoo's acquisition of Xoopit indicates). Rothenberg hinted at future integration: "For a large percentage of people on the Internet, the way they share photos is through e-mail. For Flickr to be the most useful site for our members, it needs to work well with all the ways they share photos."
• Face recognition: A Google-like approach to face recognition doesn't look likely, either. Facebook's social approach to getting people identified in photos is more in keeping with Flickr's style than Google's computer-based method. "We try to optimize toward social interactions rather than algorithms," he said.
• Longer video: Flickr is happy with its 90-second video limit, which was set not because of any hardware limits at Yahoo but because of an aesthetic liking for what Rothenberg terms "moving photos."
• Tags drawn from metadata: I'd love to sift images by camera, lens, shutter speed, and the like, which is information Flickr extracts from data cameras automatically embed in most photos. That's a technical matter Flickr has pondered, but "we don't have any immediate plans," Rothenberg said. "In general we want to make it easier to find the photos most important to you on Flickr. There are other areas we can improve on more immediately."
None of these are really grating issues for me, though, and I can see Rothenberg's point of view. So I'll willingly cut Flickr slack here.
As for the other fixes, I'll console myself that Rothenberg and I see eye to eye when it comes to the site's vision and priority: "Flickr needs to be the best place to be a photo if you're a photo."
Photoshop.com offers online image editing and sharing.
(Credit: Screenshot by Stephen Shankland/CNET)Adobe Systems is discontinuing Photoshop Album Starter Edition, the lowest rung on its ladder of image-editing software products, and the company is nudging its users toward the online Photoshop.com site.
Adobe launched Photoshop Album Starter Edition in 2003 as a free, bare-bones image cataloging and editing package. Adobe discontinued the line, though, and support for it ended June 30.
So what's the alternative? In a customer note, Adobe puts its online service front and center.
"As part of our commitment to providing customers with a free photo-editing solution, we have created Photoshop.com, an exciting new online service that lets you upload, organize, edit, store (up to 2GB free), and share your photos," the note said. Afterward is a list of steps for exporting photos from the software to the Web site.
The move reflects the growing importance of Web-based applications even for software powerhouses such as Adobe. Web applications, even when using relatively sophisticated technology such as Adobe's Flash, are typically primitive compared to what can run on a computer, but they offer advantages in sharing, maintenance, and remote access from multiple computers and mobile devices. And of course the Web is gradually growing more sophisticated as a foundation for applications.
It should be noted that Adobe's note also encourages customers to "consider an upgrade to Adobe Photoshop Elements 7," the consumer-oriented software that right now costs about $37 including a $20 rebate on Amazon. Adobe also sells the combination of Photoshop Elements 7 and a one-year Photoshop.com Plus membership for $90. The Plus membership offers subscribers up to 20GB of storage, tutorials, album templates, and "creativity-inspiring ideas."
Adobe Systems has delayed by a few weeks the release of some upgrades to its Photoshop.com online service and to its high-end Photoshop CS4 software.
The upcoming Photoshop site upgrades include features to import address book entries from Hotmail, Yahoo Mail, and Gmail to improve photo sharing; an uploading tool to synchronize software on a person's PC with the version stored online; and new pricing options. They had been due Tuesday but now will go live "later this month," Adobe said in a statement Monday night.
Also slipping a few weeks is the Photoshop CS4 Configurator, a tool to let people create customized control panels for the image-editing software. It had been due in October, but now it and another new CS4 option, the Pixel Bender filter gallery, won't debut until later in November, John Nack, senior product manager for Photoshop, said in a blog post. Pixel Bender is a technology enabling high-performance special effects that Adobe hopes will be easier to use than earlier plug-in filter technology.
"We decided to give both tools a little extra bake time, so look for them to appear on Adobe Labs within the next two weeks," Nack said. "Also stay tuned for a Camera Raw update for CS4 that'll include a number of nice little surprises."
Adobe plans new options next week to give its Photoshop.com a bigger social destination and to help the service stay in sync with people's computers.
Photoshop.com can be used to store, edit, and share photos, but today those activities happen largely in isolation. That will change November 11 as the company releases an AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) application called AIR Uploader that will let people synchronize photos stored on their own computers and on the online photography site, Adobe said.
Another change will let site members import address books from Google's Gmail, Microsoft's Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail so that photos can be sent to family members or other contacts more easily. And another social dimension will come with the ability to sign up to receive updates whenever contacts add new photos.
Photoshop.com is closely tied to Adobe's consumer-oriented photo and video software, Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements, and the online site could mean extra revenue for Adobe if it takes off.
People who've bought the latest version 7 of those packages now can get new Photoshop.com storage options: basic membership costs $19.99 per year for 20 GB of storage, 40GB costs $39.99, and 100GB costs $99.99.
The higher-end Plus membership, which adds album templates and tutorials, costs $49.99 annually for 20GB, $69.99 for 40GB, and $129.99 for 100GB. And for people who don't have the Elements software, online-only customers next week will be able to buy storage at $19.99 per year for 20 GB, $39.99 for 40GB, and $99.99 for 100GB.
Updated 5:12 p.m. PST to note some of the new storage options are available now.
Photoshop Elements 7 prominently promotes Adobe's Photoshop.com online service.
Adobe Systems has begun shipping its enthusiast-oriented Photoshop Elements 7 image-editing software and Premiere Elements 7 video-editing software--and is offering a promotion to try to lure users to its online Photoshop.com site as well.
The Elements software costs $99.99 each or $149.99 as a bundle. New with this version, Adobe also is offering a $179.99 price that includes a one-year Photoshop.com Plus membership. Ordinarily, a Photoshop.com Plus subscription costs $49.99 a year, so you're basically getting a $20 price break, at least until the time comes to renew for another year.
Photoshop.com offers tutorials, online albums for backing up and sharing your shots, and access to the Photoshop Express online editing tool. The free basic version comes with 2GB of storage, and the Plus level comes with 20GB of storage.
Pricing isn't the only promotion. CNET reviewer Lori Grunin found it annoying how prominently Elements touts the online option in the software itself.
... Read more
The Photoshop.com Mobile beta lets people with Windows Mobile phones view and upload photos.
(Credit: Adobe Systems)Adobe Systems has gradually extended its Photoshop brand from its beginnings as high-end image-editing tool to its Elements consumer-oriented photo software and its Express online photo-editing site.
Now, the company has begun taking the next step with Photoshop.com Mobile (see previous coverage). The software is the "easiest way to upload, view, and share photos online from your Windows Mobile phone," according to Adobe.
This software lets people upload photos from their phones to Photoshop.com and view photo albums stored online, according to the site. The beta software, a free download for people in the United States, works on several Windows Mobile-based handsets.
If your device isn't supported, Adobe recommends using Shozu mobile phone software, which lets people upload photos, among other things.
Personally, I'd like to see a mobile phone app that could perform some really basic adjustments--cropping or auto-fixing exposure, for example. But, so far at least, this isn't that application. However, Photoshop itself is about to enter its 11th major version, CS4, and mobile phones are getting more powerful all the time, so the possibility is there.
But more likely, Adobe sees this software as a tool to increase its customers' online activity. Photoshop Express can be used for those sorts of adjustments, although even high-powered phones such as Apple's iPhone can't use it yet. But with gradually increasing network capacity and mobile-phone processing, this market will become much more mature in a few years.
For a few cautions and further details about Photoshop.com Mobile, see the release notes.
Update at 8:23 a.m. PDT: Shozu sent out an announcement of its own, saying its software lets 350 different cell phones upload pictures to Photoshop.com. The software also works with Facebook, WordPress, and Google's Blogger, and can send photos to multiple e-mail addresses.
Adobe released details Monday about Creative Suite 4, its first update to more than a dozen design and editing tools since Adobe CS3 some 17 months ago.
The costs of the applications, set to reach consumers in October, haven't changed since CS3, but remain hefty. Should longtime users upgrade?
Click on this image for more details about the Adobe CS4 suites.
(Credit: Adobe)Of course that depends on the specific tools you need. However, we suspect that only the most well-heeled will jump at the chance, as CS4 shares the majority of tools with its predecessor. Perhaps more dramatic, life-changing alterations will come with the next Creative Suite. That said, time-saving tweaks to Illustrator and Flash in particular could lure professionals immersed in them to upgrade.
With CS4, Adobe aimed to unify the interfaces of more than a dozen applications, including Flash and other former properties of Macromedia. You'll see similar pull down menus for toggling among workspaces that you can customize, as well as Flash-based panels that nicely snap open and shut. Corporate design departments will find plenty of enhancements for their teams to share work more quickly.
Adobe continues to improve integration among the applications. After Effects, as only one example, can import Photoshop 3D layers and export content directly into Flash.
Options for working with high-definition video and mobile content expand too, with support for the latest formats as well as for making Adobe AIR applications. Among other highlights:
Photoshop CS4 will use your computer's graphics chip for the first time, while offering support for 64-bit Windows.
At long last, you can handle more than one project at a time in Illustrator, thanks to the new multiple Artboards feature.
Flash CS4 has a rebuilt animation model, so you can make objects move on the stage in two quick steps. And Flash introduces a new, XML-based file format.
Dreamweaver provides plenty of shortcuts to CSS coding, including within the Properties panel.
We've been toying with the beta code of CS4 for several weeks. Check out our first take reviews and videos of the six suites and their individual applications for more details. We'll report back with rated reviews after working with the final code.
Adobe Systems on Monday let loose its plan to reinvent its image-editing software: the convergence of desktop, Webware, and mobile photo applications.
In late September, Adobe will update both Adobe's Photoshop Elements and Premiere Elements with version 7, rebrand Photoshop Express as Photoshop.com, and debut a mobile Photoshop (of sorts) for Windows Mobile.
Syncing with the new Photoshop.com
Whereas Photoshop Express (review) began life as an experimental, Web-based offshoot of the Photoshop brand, Adobe's new strategy to automatically sync photos from desktop to Web to phone and back again now gives Photoshop Express a starring role on the Photoshop playbill, albeit using a different alias. Don't let that fool you--although the product will now be Photoshop.com, it will retain its editing features and the ability to post photos to Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, and Picasa. The bigger difference is that the new Photoshop.com will sync with the two Photoshop Elements applications and the new mobile software.
A sneak peek at Adobe Premiere Elements 7.
(Credit: Adobe)To sweeten the deal for existing users, and perhaps to lure new ones, Adobe is bumping up the free, basic membership plan from 2GB to 5GB of storage. However, Adobe is no doubt hoping that users will get hooked on online storage and go with the Plus membership, which will dish out templates and tips in addition to serving up 20GB in locker space for photos and videos. The 'Plus' plan is sold on its own for $50 per year or bundled with the desktop software for $140.
New Photoshop Elements
Phase two of Adobe's photo-syncing project is to update the desktop-bound Elements applications to make them compatible with the new Photoshop.com. They'll get a few additional features and enhancements along the way. For instance, Photoshop Elements 7--which is expected to sell for about $100 or $80 if you're upgrading--will automatically back up photos online, deliver new templates, and will contain new image-enhancement tools. CNET Senior Editor Lori Grunin has an in-depth preview and her own take on Adobe's efforts to stay relevant.
Premiere Elements 7 will see the bonus features in Elements 7 and raise them with new movie-making tools, support for AVCHD, and automatic video upload to YouTube. Grunin weighs in on that update, too.
You'll be able to upload, share, and view photos, but not title or caption them from Adobe's beta mobile app.
(Credit: Adobe)Photoshop on the phone
Adobe's mobile presence has so far been restricted to utilities--a mobile PDF-reader and Flash Lite for playing Flash videos on the mobile stage. To that end, Photoshop.com Mobile beta is Adobe's first attempt at creating a mobile version of one of its consumer offerings, although the app will primarily remain a vehicle for simple uploading and downloading to and from the revamped Photoshop.com.
Based on the Flash Lite Player, Photoshop.com Mobile beta will let you upload all the photos on your mobile phone to Photoshop.com, which will then automatically sync to either Element 7 app, if you have one. The preview build we saw is divided into three rudimentary actions. The first is to upload select phone photos to Photoshop.com for sharing with friends or for using as a backup. The second has you viewing thumbnails of all the photos in your online gallery, and the third lets you peruse any albums you've created on Photoshop.com and Elements 7. There will be no photo-tagging, titling, or captioning in the initial release, and we admit that's a letdown, especially when competing photo apps can already do this on multiple mobile operating systems.
That's a competition to which Adobe can't help but be attentive. Traditionally a publisher of desktop software, Adobe has been slow to adapt for the two fastest-growing software platforms--mobile and the Web. While we expect a bare bones Photoshop.com Mobile beta, the app's ability to connect with the Photoshop.com hub gives Adobe more relevance for existing users. We're skeptical that folks using Picasa, Photobucket, and Flickr will abandon them for Photoshop.com, but the ability to quickly post from the phone to those sites, from the Web to the desktop, and from the phone to the desktop via Adobe's servers, may keep users of the Elements desktop apps from bailing in favor of a competitor.
Like Adobe's other releases, Photoshop.com Mobile beta will be available in late September, first for Samsung Blackjack I and II, Moto Q 9h and 9m, and Palm Treo 700 w/wx and 750, with support for other Windows Mobile phones expected to follow.
My favorite types of Web apps are those that try to emulate the look and feel of software. Cutting-edge UI can be useful, but sometimes you just want something that feels familiar. In the case of Pixlr, a new browser-based photo-editing tool, the target is clearly Adobe's Photoshop.
Pixlr lets you grab photos from your hard drive and edit them in a software-like environment. Included are some advanced tools like customizable brushes and multiple layers. Most people won't need these features, but they're there--and free of charge. There's also a small collection of filters and adjustments. The results are a little more polished than other Web photo-editing tool offerings, but some are harder to tweak. I was able to create some truly brilliant looking effects on a bland photo without too much work. It helps if you've used Photoshop or something like Paint.net before, as some of the menu structure is the same.
After editing a shot the only way to get it off is to download it back to your hard drive as a JPEG or PNG file. There's no uploading to other services, nor does it yet have the capability to pull down shots from photo hosts you're already using--two things that have become a bit of a standard.
When stacked up to Fotoflexer, Picnik, or Photoshop Express, Pixlr shows some of its early age. It's a crowded market and these tools have been stacking on cool and useful features at a rapid clip. The inability to crop, add text, and redo anything you might have undone is a bit of a deal killer for me. Also missing is a history tool, something which, after having worked with Photoshop for a few years, I find to be an absolute necessity--especially when working with layers. Still, despite its shortcomings, I've got high hopes for this photo-editing app. It's very fast, free, and amazingly developed by just one person.
Pixlr looks a lot like a desktop application, but it runs right in your browser. All you need is Adobe Flash.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
