Real World Computing
Photoshop online?
Bitmap editing was always going to be a challenge online, but Photoshop Express should compensate when it comes to photo sharing - and, after all, letting others see your photos is why most of us took them in the first place. Photoshop Express certainly makes it easy to email photos to your contacts, but only one at a time, and you're not actually sending the original but a small thumbnail with a link to the original. To show off more than one photo at a time, you invite your friends to come and privately view an entire album, which is where Photoshop Express really shines - images are presented not in dull thumbnail galleries but as interactive and attractive animated slideshows, complete with a choice of 3D, strip or circular views.
It's easy to make such slideshows available to the public and browse others' albums, but only in a shallow way because Photoshop Express offers no tagging and no community features such as voting or commenting. That means there's no way to find images by theme across users and albums, and no quality control - you just get thumbnails of the most recently added public albums, with no idea what they contain apart from the title. It feels more like random voyeurism rather than Flickr-style sharing: a travesty.
So far things aren't looking too good for Photoshop Express. There's clearly no contest with high-end Photoshop CS3, but even against the consumer Photoshop Elements it looks unacceptably slow, offers a small subset of Elements' editing and organisational power, and misses much of the potential of online sharing. On top of which, while the 2GB service may be free, buying more storage is likely to end up costing more than a one-off purchase of Elements. Put like this, Express sounds like a complete non-starter.
But oddly enough, in practice the overall Photoshop Express experience is surprisingly impressive. That's because of the technology on which it's built, namely Adobe's Flash, whose interactivity, animation and media handling are most obvious in those high-impact slideshows. However, it's actually the subtle use of Flash throughout the application that really matters: the way screens fade in and out, thumbnails resize themselves, panels open and shut, and so on. Adobe understands that Flash is most effective when it isn't being flashy.
Photoshop Express isn't the only online photo service that takes such advantage of Flash - one of the reasons that Flickr took off is its effective use of Flash slideshows. However, Photoshop Express is completely different since it uses only Flash, with no HTML at all, and as such it's a great example of the new breed of self-contained rich internet application (RIA). This is made possible by another Adobe technology, Flex, a programmer-friendly integrated development environment (IDE) designed specifically for producing Flash-based RIAs. This Flash-only architecture means no clunky page refreshes, which have always seemed part of the web browsing experience even in advanced applications such as Flickr. Photoshop Express acts in all respects like a self-contained, fully interactive, modern desktop application. As such, Photoshop Express is the best example of an RIA I've yet seen. Indeed, if you hit its "full screen" command you can completely forget that the program is running inside a browser.
But the fact that it is running inside a browser provides Photoshop Express with an unbeatable advantage over any desktop equivalent: near-universal access. Photoshop Elements ties you and your photos to a single PC, but with Photoshop Express all you need is an internet connection, a browser and the latest 9.x Flash player to access your pictures from anywhere and from any supporting device. Currently, most of us are forced to gather the family around the desktop PC or laptop to show off the holiday snaps, but using Photoshop Express you can show them on any supporting set-top box or smartphone, and edit them, too. With a Flash-compatible camera-phone and browser, you'll be able to shoot, upload, enhance and share your photos all while you're still on holiday. Throw in the fact that all your Express photos are automatically backed up and safe even if your house burns down, and it's clear that Photoshop Express has a lot to recommend it.
