Photoshop in a browser?
Adobe just announced the availability of Photoshop Express. Photoshop Express is a browser-based photo management tool and photo editor. Without having to install anything on your system, you can upload, manage, edit and share photographs right in your browser.
No, it’s not the “full” Photoshop, but a reasonable subset of functionality that makes it really useful for a lot of quick photo manipulation tasks. I don’t know how often I was at a computer (friend or family) where a basic photo editing tool was not available and I wished I would have had something that would allow to me make some quick edits, without having to download and install some freeware/shareware package first.
After uploading a few photos to the web-service, you get the “My Photos” view as shown below:
This view allows you to group photos into different Albums, rename photos, rate them and add captions to your shots. Double-clicking on a photo switches over to the Edit Photo screen:
All the tools on the left side allow you to perform some basic touch-ups of your photographs. Pia loves the “tiny head” distortion.
Every operation is performed on the client-side (your browser) and for most operations you get “previews” of what the photo would look like after performing an edit-step: for example, clicking on “Saturation” will bring up a view that shows 7 thumbnails with more or less saturation than the original. Just hovering over one of the thumbnails shows you what the photo would look like with increased or decreased saturation. Once you commit a modification, the result is sent back to the server.
Photoshop Express preserves a history of all your edit-operations and it’s easy to go back to undo any operation that you may have applied to a photograph.
If you happen to have a Facebook/Picasa/Photobucket account, you can also directly manage your photos on those services from within Photoshop Express. Modifications are immediately “written back”.
Give it a try - I’m sure you’ll like it …