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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.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 6 and Premiere Elements 4

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 20:11:25 -0600

We’ve closely watched the Elements kids since their birth, and though we’ve generally been pleased with their development, we’re a bit concerned about Adobe Premiere’s and Photoshop’s offspring. While Photoshop Elements 6 continues to impress us and we’re sure she’s on her way to an Ivy League school and a happy life as a doctor, Premiere Elements has us worried.

First, the good news. Photoshop Elements is a darling. Now fully matured, she’s able to pull off some truly useful tasks, including merging a handful of bad group photos into one good photo simply by selecting a base image. You then pick and choose faces from other photos and Elements merges them into one perfect group photo. The new Quick Selection tool allows you to choose sections of an image based on nearby colors, so you can easily change the color of an object without having to use other selection tools.

Not all the new features are practical though. One new trick, the ability to merge portrait photos, lets you do such useful things as blend the eyebrows from mom and the mullet from dad onto another person’s image. While neat to play around with, you’re unlikely to actually use this feature more than once.

Many of Photoshop Elements’s other enhancements come in the organization and sharing department. While good for anal-retentive types, color us unimpressed because they don’t help those who already have huge photo libraries.

But enough about that overachiever. Premiere Elements, which we gushed about at version 2, hasn’t developed as quickly as his sibling. When he turned 3, he couldn’t display HDV content while it was being captured. He also couldn’t detect scenes when capturing high-def content. Now turning 4, Premiere Elements can finally display HDV content and detect scenes, but he doesn’t understand the AVCHD format—something other kids in his grade can do.

Subpar performance and low-resolution previews make Premiere Elements 4.0 a disappointing update.

Premiere Elements, once quick on his feet, feels sluggish even on modern hardware. Also annoying: Video previews are disturbingly pixelated. Adobe says it’s the side effect of an “improvement” it made to its video-scaling algorithms. “Unfortunately, these algorithm changes unintentionally affected the preview resolution, which appears different when a clip or photo has a different resolution than the project resolution. Users can work around this issue by first rendering the clips that have a different resolution from the project,” explained an Adobe spokesperson. The upshot is that previews are unacceptably bad.

We also had issues creating still-image slide shows—they looked choppy. But it was actually that little do-gooder Photoshop Elements’s fault. One of Premiere’s recommended newbie ways to create a slide show is with the photo organizer in Photoshop Elements. Unfortunately, the tool is crap. We achieved more satisfactory slide shows using Premiere Elements’s native (albeit far more complicated) still-image support.

Not everything is bad here. Elements does have some niceties, such as top-notch titling and better online file-sharing capabilities—and that freeze-frame button is still handy. The stock title menus and art are also superior to that of other products. The interface is also tweaked to be friendlier to newbs, with easier access to guides that walk you through tasks and improved media catalog management.

As a pair, Photoshop Elements carries the water for the underperforming Premiere Elements. As a stand-alone product, Photoshop Elements 6 would garner a 9 verdict, but being bundled with Premiere weighs the package down.

Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 and Premiere Elements 3.0

Gordon Mah Ung — Thu, 17 May 2007 17:14:37 -0500

If you’ve been computing long enough, you can probably tick off some of life’s touchstones that occurred around the time of each major Photoshop revision and on occasion tell yourself, “Wow, I remember when Photoshop was just born, err, released.”

To make you feel even older, Photoshop’s and Premiere’s offspring are well on their way to becoming grown-ups too. Photoshop Elements has now hit 5.0, and Premiere Elements has reached 3.0. But are these applications growing up to be as well groomed as their parents, or are they destined to work at the Quick Stop with Dante and Randal?

As the older of the two, Photoshop Elements 5.0 appears to get most of the attention from the revision bump. You now get finer control over black-and-white conversion and curves as well as the capability to correct for barrel distortion and corner vignetting. The organizer side of Elements also gets a healthy dose of new layout options, including album pages, a flipbook effect, and online backups of your photos.

One thing that irks us about PE5 is the number of services Adobe pushes your way. The online backup uses Iron Mountain Digital, which you get for free for a whole 30 days! Yippee! Want to upload a photo stamp or create an photo book? You have to pay for those too. We’re not asking for free services, as we know you can’t get stamps for free, but at times, it feels like Photoshop Elements is just a middleman that takes you to other sites where you’ll need to have your credit card ready.

If you can avoid all the add-in services, it’s pretty apparent that the DNA of Photoshop is still in Elements. But while perspective correction is somewhat effective, as with many PE5 features, you always feel as though you want to crank it up a notch, and the program just won’t let you. And when the scripts don’t quite work, newbies are left to fend for themselves in the cold, cold land of Photoshop layer hell.

The younger of the two programs, Premiere Elements 3.0, gets fewer
apparent updates, but the major change is aimed at user friendliness. We lauded the previous version for being Premiere Pro with training wheels, and Adobe tries to make the app even easier to use here. Unfortunately, one of the major fixes doesn’t work for us. Adobe added a new storyboard view, but not all of the features work. For example, we included a title overlay in timeline view, switched to storyboard view, and then found that it didn’t display our title. We stayed in the timeline view for the rest of our project.

Adobe is finally touting the ability to capture and edit HDV-resolution material, but the company neglects to mention that the feature is half-assed. The preview window and scene detection don’t work, so if you want just one scene, you have to queue it up on your camera and manually capture it or capture the entire tape and hunt for your footage. That’s pretty pathetic. Even weaker, there’s no support for burning to Blu-ray or HD DVD drives. You just output to MPEG-2 and find some other way to publish your HDV content.

These issues aside, we found it hard to hate Premiere Elements 3.0, because so much of what we liked in the previous version is still here. Performance is quite good, thanks to the Premiere Pro DNA. While it took several hours to encode our 20-minute project on a dual-core Athlon 64 FX-60, at least it pegged both cores through the process.

That leaves us a little torn. We gave the previous bundle a 9 verdict and a Kick Ass award for being so feature complete and powerful. You don’t lose any of the features or power with this bundle, but it’s just not as satisfying as the last upgrade. Both applications are like children who have just turned into awkward teenagers. We think it’s probably a phase they’ll grow out of, but sometimes you never know.

Adobe Photoshop Elements with Premiere Elements

Gordon Mah Ung — Mon, 27 Feb 2006 14:45:53 -0600

The newest update to Photoshop Elements 4.0 is just a bunny hop forward from the previous iteration. Adobe really sweetens the deal, however, by bundling the home-user edition of Photoshop with the home-user version of Premiere—Premiere Elements 2.0.

Don’t take that to mean that Photoshop Elements doesn’t get any worthwhile new features; there are quite a few, including some that had even our designers’ mouths watering. But the more noteworthy update is to Premiere Elements. While Premiere Elements 1.0 was a decent 1.0 version, it was a rough product.

The most noticeable change to version 2.0 of Premiere Elements is the removal of the surfeit of palettes that Adobe normally buries you under. With Premiere Elements 2.0, as you grow or shrink particular palettes, the other palettes adjust accordingly. It’s a nice touch that we’d like to see in other Adobe products.

Premiere Elements 2.0 also now lets you create your own DVD menu templates. You can set your background video or image and customize text but, sadly, button editing is verboten, as are edits to the graphical overlays used for the templates. The templates themselves, however, are quite polished and exhibit none of the general cheesiness you find in competing products. The titling capability of the program is also enhanced and the stock of included Adobe fonts is pretty spectacular.

The real gem of Premiere Elements 2.0 is its performance. Because it’s based on Adobe’s pro-level Premiere Pro 1.5 engine, Premiere Elements sings—just sings—with today’s hardware. If you’re running a dual-processor or dual-core machine, Premiere Elements’ multithreaded engine chews through video in a way that will make any hardware-head giggle with joy. Several of the video transactions are rendered on the GPU as well, for additional speed.

Rev 2 also allows you to import video using High Speed USB with cameras that support the interface (FireWire is also supported), and the app can encode audio to the space-saving Dolby Digital 2.0 codec instead of using uncompressed PCM audio. Adobe also catches up to the competition by letting you import VOB files for editing. The VOBs must be unencrypted, though—so you won’t be able to edit Sophia Copola out of The Godfather III, but you can re-import your movies once you’ve burned them to DVD.

With Photoshop Elements, Adobe mostly polishes the award-winning image-editing app. You still get a good taste of Photoshop without any of the pro-oriented pre-press stuff. The most notable changes are the skin-tone tool that lets you easily tweak skin tone in images, and the Magic Extractor. Every old Photoshop-hand knows what a daunting task it can be to clip images from photos; with the Magic Extractor, you easily separate your cat, kid, or car from the background. A similar tool called Magic Selection Brush lets you easily select objects. Both tools are far from perfect, but even if you think the Magic Lasso should be used exclusively by Wonder Woman, you’ll be able to clip and edit like a Photoshop pro.

Where Photoshop Elements 4.0 is lacking is in performance. Next to its multithreaded sibling, we found ourselves waiting an inordinate amount of time for Magic Extractor to complete. Admittedly our test clip is complex, but we were testing on a machine with four CPU cores and 4GB of RAM. Uninspiring performance doesn’t outweigh the positives of the program, but after coming off a hardware high from Premiere Elements 2.0, the lack of any real multithreading was a bummer.

Purchased separately, the apps would total $200, but as a bundle you get both for $150. That might still seem like a lot, but between the pair, you’ll be able to handle 95 percent of the image and movie chores you’ll ever be tasked with.

Month Reviewed: March 2006

+ 8MM: Dual-core and GPU support in Premiere Elements.

- VHS: Adobe Photo Downloader can be quite annoying.

VERDICT: 9
kickass=yes

URL: www.adobe.com