Photoshop Express - How to edit your photos for free
By Todd Carpenter | March 27, 2008
For any professional who wants to display images on the web, Photoshop Elements is a highly recommended tool. It’s a stripped down, affordable version of Adobe’s full Photoshop program, an industry standard for photo manipulation. The Elements version offers less tools, but for the most part, it’s all a web savvy sales professional will ever need.
Today, Adobe launched an even simpler product. Photoshop Express (let’s call it PSX). It’s feature set is even smaller, but the price can’t be beat. It’s free. PSX is not actually software. It’s a web based toll. That means it will work on any computer with web access. It’s another cloud computing tool like Google Docs.
I set out this morning to test out PSX’s viability as a tool for prepping photo’s for the web. The first step was to sign up. The service is free, but you do have to register.
Once you complete the registration form, a confirmation email is sent out. It could be because of launch day traffic, but this email took several hours. Once you confirm your account, simply sign in.
Before I an edit a photo, I need to upload it. PSX’s landing page points you in the right direction. Just click on “Upload Photos”.
This brought me to an upload page and automatically open a file window on my computer so I could choose the picture I wanted to edit.
I have a mac, so your folder might look a little different. Find a picture, click on it, and hit “Select”.
PSX offers up a confirmation page, giving you the option to upload the file to an existing Album, or upload additional pictures. We’ll skip that and just hit “Upload”
Now that our picture is in the system, PSX offers up a confirmation page, letting me know the upload was a success. Hit “Done”.
Now we are sent to the “Most Recent” section. Mouse over the picture you want to edit (in our case we only have one to choose from), and select “Edit Photo” from the drop down menu.
Now our picture is loaded into the editing tool. It’s a photo I took of the Denver Art Museum. I like how I captured the building, but it’s too dark, and I’m not sure I like the tree branches on the right side. Also, the resolution of this picture is too big for the web. I need to shrink it down so it will fit on my blog and loan quickly. We’ll use PSX’s basic editing tools to prep this photo for the web.
First I tried playing with the “Auto Correct” feature, but it didn’t seem to have much effect. Next, tried the Exposure tool. PSX offers up a scaled row of over and under exposed filters. I choose to move one step lighter in exposure. Just mouse over the one you want, and click on the green check mark.
The saturation tool works the same way. I choose the maximum setting. The “Fill Light” filter is was key in getting the picture where I wanted it color wise. Here’s a list of all the tools, and what they do.
Now we’re ready to crop out that tree. Click the “Crop & Rotate Button”. This brought up a grid over the photo. It wasn’t apparent to me how to proceed. Then I noticed little squares at each corner of the picture. By moving one corner (Square) at a time, I was able to select the area I wanted to crop out. Then I just hit that green check mark again.
I wasn’t really happy with that result. The tree is gone, but the picture is very square looking, and not nearly dramatic enough. I clicked the “Crop & Rotate” button again, and this time I played with the “Straighten” slider on the top of the menu. This lets you rotate and re-crop the image. It’s hard to explain, but easy to use. You’ll just have to play with it. Now I have the picture I want! I went ahead and saved it. (Click “Save”).
The save process took nearly a minute. Sort of slow, but it all worked.
Everything looked great except I still needed to resize the picture. I couldn’t figure out how to do it, so I refereed to the help menu. After finally making it to a Adobe support forum, I see that there is no option yet for resizing an image. This is a major bummer because this would be the perfect tool for 90% of bloggers who want to edit their photo’s for the web. A rep from Adobe has listed this as a “feature request”. I’ll come back and edit this post if things change.
Luckily, there’s a bit of a band aide solution. PSX gives you the ability to download the image back to your computer in three different widths. One of them is 256 pixels. A little smaller than I wanted, but much better than the 1477 pixel image I have created. Here’s the final result.
One other note. PSX offers file storage for your photos, but I would not recommend it. There’s some ambiguity in their terms of service that suggests that Adobe is claiming rights to them. For this reason, I would choose a service like Flikr for storing images online.
Overall, this is an extremely easy and cheap way to work on photos. Once it can resize them for the web, it will be pretty much perfect.
Topics: Web Tutorials, blog |
March 27th, 2008 at 2:23 pm
I highly recommend picnik.com, there is a free version and a version that costs $25 for a year. I am using it almost as much as Iuse photoshop elements.
May 19th, 2008 at 3:08 am
Well you seem to have taken this in stride fairly well. But I see this for what it really is…an advertising, publicity stunt. It’s so blatantly obvious. I would be willing to bet that most of us photo edit geeks both crop and “resize” our photos??? Gee, maybe one of those bright minded software writers at Adobe was up way too many hours writing PSX and it just simply slipped his mind to include adding the critical “resize” option, you think?! Personally, I am sooooo tired of people insulting my intelligence and wasting my precious time. Thank you.
May 19th, 2008 at 3:11 am
Actually, I think I’ll just stroll over to isoHunt torrent site and download the full version for free. DICKWEEDS.
August 18th, 2008 at 2:55 pm
Teresa, thnaks for your comment. I agree the picnik.com seems to be the way to go.
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Humm… interesting,
PSX is great, simply because it offers so much and is free!
Anyway, thanks for the post
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It’s so blatantly obvious. I would be willing to bet that most of us photo edit geeks both crop and “resize” our photos??? Gee, maybe one of those bright minded software writers at Adobe was up way too many hours writing PSX and it just simply slipped his mind to include adding the critical “resize” option, you think?!
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