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Windows and Imaging News, Mid-May Edition

Mark 'marcus_soperus' Soper — Fri, 16 May 2008 10:59:47 -0500

A Smarter, More Powerful, Virtual PC

Microsoft has rolled out Service Pack 1 for Virtual PC 2007, its free desktop virtualization environment. VPC 2007 SP1 weighs in at 31.7MB for 32-bit versions of Windows XP Professional; Windows Vista Ultimate, Business, and Enterprise; Windows Server 2003; it's a bit larger (31.8MB) in its 64-bit edition. So, what's new?

- Support for Vista SP1, XP Professional SP3 and Windows Server 2008 as guest operating systems
- Support for Vista SP1 and XP Professional SP3 as host operating systems
- 64-bit operating systems can now be used to host VPC 2007 SP1 (however, you cannot run 64-bit operating systems as guests yet)
- Hardware-assisted virtualization (which takes advantage of the hardware virtualization features in the latest Intel and AMD processors)
- Multiple-monitor support for virtual machines

For all the details, download the Virtual PC 2007 SP1 Release Notes.

Update for Virtual Server 2005

There's also an update for Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1, Redmond's server virtualization tool, to support Windows Vista SP1, Windows XP SP3, and Windows Server 2008 as guest and host operating systems. Learn more and get the update from KB 948515.

Photoshop Express Gets More Social and Protects Your Originals

Adobe Photoshop Express, the online photo sharing and casual-editing web service we told you about in April, has just been enhanced with several new features. In a letter to users on Thursday, Adobe's Jennifer Stern announced the following updates:

Flickr integration We've officially hooked up with Flickr ;-) Now you can pull photos from Flickr into Photoshop Express, amp them up, then upload them back into Flickr to show them off to your vast and adoring fan base.

Embeddable player Take your photo slideshows to the wider webified world with the embeddable player, which lets you post your slideshows to Facebook, MySpace, and other sites where your audience awaits.

Save as Go version crazy with the new Save As feature. With Save As, you can keep the original shot of your best friend alongside all the ones where you gave him a tragically oversized head. (Your work is genius—why not save it all for posterity?)

I used the Save As and Embeddable Player features to build a simple Flash-based slide show embedded below (you might need to permit your browser to open ActiveX code, depending upon your security settings):

You can learn more about using Photoshop Express by checking out the free ebook from Kelby Training (a major Photoshop training and publishing resource) here.

Read a Good (or Bad) EULA or Terms of Service Lately?

Mark 'Marcus_Soperus' Soper — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 23:29:53 -0500

Does Anybody Read EULAs and Terms of Service Agreements? You Do!

Does anybody read end-user license agreements, otherwise known as EULAs? We found out recently that Apple Computer doesn't, as it let its Safari 3.1 browser for Windows ship with a EULA that prohibits any computer other than an Apple-labeled computer from running it.

That was a simple oversight, but when Adobe introduced its new Photoshop Express web-based photo editing and hosting software, sharp-eyed readers of this website discovered the following in Paragraph 8a of Photoshop Express' Terms of Service agreement:

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. [emphasis added]

Reader sc123 led the charge against this rights grab on the Maximum PC site (see the comments thread on the original article), and he wasn't alone. As Macworld.com reports, Adobe has received a lot of grief over this paragraph, and is going to be changing it soon.

Photobucket vs Adobe

Several readers suggested Photobucket as an alternative to Photoshop Express for photo sharing, so I thought it would be interesting to take a look at Photobucket's terms of service, specifically paragraph 3:

Photobucket does not claim any ownership rights in any User Content that you choose to post to the Site. After posting User Content to the Site,you continue to retain all ownership or license rights in your User Content and you continue to have the right to use your User Content as you did prior to such posting. However, by posting or making User Content available through the Site or via the Services, you hereby grant to Photobucket a nonexclusive, royalty-free, transferable, worldwide license to use, copy, modify, prepare derivative works from, distribute, publicly display and publicly perform (whether by means of a digital audio transmission or otherwise) and process your User Content, or any part of it, solely on and through the Site and Services, including without limitation (a) adapting the format of your User Content (for example by encoding or transcoding) for suitable display on the Site; and (b) displaying, in Photobucket's sole discretion, your public User Content in search results generated by the Photobucket search engine. In addition, where you have made your User Content public, posted a link to your User Content on another website or otherwise shared a link to your User Content, you grant to Photobucket a nonexclusive, royalty-free, worldwide right to sublicense the right to copy, modify, prepare derivative works from, and distribute your User Content as necessary to perform the Services, including without limitation the printing services offered by Partner Sites. In connection with the above license, you provide your consent for Photobucket personnel, including Photobucket contractors and service providers, to view your User Content at any time for the purpose of providing the Services and filtering content that violates this Agreement. You acknowledge that you are solely responsible for all Content you submit to the Site or provide to the Service. You represent that you either own the User Content or have the rights necessary to grant Photobucket this license.

Photobucket's licence agreement, like Adobe's, has too much legaese for the average non-legal reader (including this author), but it makes an attempt to clarify what the legalese means, unlike Adobe's now-notorious Paragraph 8a. And, unlike Adobe's terms of service, Photobucket's terms of service don't include any claim to "derive revenue or other renumueration from" your photos. That's the big sticking point for would-be users of Adobe Photoshop Express - and hopefully the legal eagles at Adobe will strike that clause from the revised terms of service agreement.

It Pays to Complain

As Adobe's promised about-face on Photoshop Express' terms of service suggests, it does pay to complain, rather than to swallow hard and click OK to sign off on an unjust EULA or terms of service agreement. Don't forget that Windows Vista users' complaints about activation problems inspired Microsoft to drop Vista RTM's reduced functionality mode for unactivated copies in favor of visual reminders to activate (or get a legal copy of) Vista SP1. You have the power!

Need a Quick Photo Fix? Photoshop Express to the Rescue!

Mark Soper — Tue, 01 Apr 2008 22:56:50 -0500

Photoshop Express Brings Photo Editing as Close as Your Browser

If you need quick fixes for some photos and don't have a photo editor installed on the system du jour, what can you do? Adobe has the solution: Photoshop Express. Photoshop Express is a free web-based photo editing, uploading, and sharing solution. Get started here.

Register or Test Drive - Your Choice!

You don't need to register to give Photoshop Express a try. After you enter the site, click the Test Drive button to work with a wide variety of existing photos already on the site. You can't save your changes, but you can see for yourself what it can do. When you register, you can upload your own photos (you get 2GB of space), browse galleries, and use Photoshop Express's wide variety of photo repair tools to fix common problems.

Picture Tools

To rotate, e-mail, link, embed, download, or use a picture in other ways, just click it and select the option desired.

Basic Picture Editing

To edit a photo with problems (or just to change it for fun), select Edit Photo. Basic changes include:

- Crop & Rotate supports traditional photo sizes, and features an adjustable grid for straightening crooked photos.
- Other adjustments, such as Auto Correct, Exposure, and Saturation, offer a variety of previews of different adjustment levels. As you move your mouse across the previews, the main photo changes accordingly.
- Touchup offers a low-end version of Adobe's healing brush.
- Red-Eye Removal provides one-click removal of you-know-what.

Beyond the Basics

The Tuning menu provides a variety of preset adjustments for:

- White balance
- Highlights
- Fill light
- Sharpening
- Soft focus.

The Effects menu adjusts:

- Color
- Hue
- Tint
- Sketch effects
- Distortions
- Black and white conversions

Sharing Your Photos

You can specify which of your albums to share using the My Gallery menu. You can also use Photoshop Express to edit photos you have displayed on other popular sites including Facebook, Photobucket, or Picasa.

Photoshop Express, a Photoshop Elements Killer?

That's like asking if apple eaters never try oranges.

Photoshop Express puts a nice combination of features and ease of use at your fingertips - but if you need to really fix up a bad photo, you'll miss familiar tools like Levels, white balance by skin tone, and others.

Photoshop Express can't use TIFF or RAW files, either: it's only for JPEG photos. You can't upload anything larger than 10MP or 4000 pixels in height and width: anything larger than 2880x2880 is resized, and don't try to feed it more than 100 photos at a time.

It's designed for Windows XP, Vista, MacOS 10.4 or later, 1024x768 or larger screen, IE 6 or 7, Firefox 2 or later, or Safari 3.0.4 on Macs (if you're trying Safari 3.1 for Windows, tell us - and Adobe - if Photoshop Express works for you).

It's no application killer, but it's a handy extension to whatever you're using now that can bail you out of a tight spot, give you another place to stash some photos, and provides a generally responsive way to have some fun with your pictures. It's a beta, so it can only get better. And best of all, it's web-based, so it's always ready.