Photoshop Express Beta

[walkinTas]

I am a firm believer in so called rich internet applications (RIA). I envisage a day when many people won't buy software to use at home, but rather will hire software and use it online - 5 to 10 years from now maybe. This model has many advantages to the software developer including no (or limited) piracy and a steady income stream. It has advantages and disadvantages to the software consumer. The main advantage is in only paying for software you need. Instead of paying $400 - $800 dollars (or much more) for an application, you can hire it for a weekly fee only when you need it. Online applications also make it easy to share your efforts with others. The biggest disadvantages are privacy and bandwidth related.

Google spreadsheet and other Google applications are early examples. OK, so it might not be your Utopia and not everyone will share the vision. But I believe it is part of the future. So I was most interested to read this article announcing the release of Adobe Photoshop Express Beta. This rich internet application allows you to upload and edit your photos and, if you choose, present them in a shared public gallery or just store them in a private folder. I thought some bushwalk.Tasmania forum members might like this one since it is currently free.

I do have a couple of complaints. There is no apparent way to resize an image (so you need to resize before uploading), and there is no way to disable printing in the public gallery. On the up side you can crop, auto correct and make a number of adjustments including red eyes, saturation, white balance, sharpness, softness, hue, tint, black & white and even distortions. It is not an equal to any of the photo manipulation packages you can install on your PC, but I don't think it is aimed at that market either. It is not the first online album software either, but it is an example of a rich internet application. And it is a nice bit of software that shows what can be achieved with online applications.

Anyhow, enough ranting, if you are looking for a place to upload a few pictures (maybe to share on this forum) or you need a bit of software to make a few changes to a picture, then click here --> Adobe Photoshop Express (your browser will need the Adobe Flash plugin).

Here is my example album.

Most of the photographs I link to on bushwalk-tas are now hosted in the "private storage" part of this site. It is not necessary to have a public album.
Linking is easy. Just hold the mouse over an uploaded image then click the "Photo Options" menu and choose link. In your gallery post, right-click and choose paste. Finally, wrap your pasted link in ["URL"] ["/URL"] markup.