Adobe's Photoshop Express - A Review

I've been waiting on Adobe to toss its hat in the ring. Finally, it's been tossed. About six months ago, Adobe started promising an online photo editor totally web-based, and totally free. In the mean time, I've had my students explore Picnik.com, Splashup.com, Fotoflexer.com and Flauntr.com to make their blog pictures. We haven't been disappointed, either. As Picnik.com became more powerful and added more premium features, viewers trialed them and then asked they be made free. Picnik.com listened and about a month ago, started using advertising to subsidize these features so that everyone could enjoy these upgrades without a cost. What a smart move. Just in time to hook users a tad before Adobe would make its debut in the photo editing webware world.

Understand, I am a HUGE Photoshop fan; I love all it has to offer -- except the price one must pay for it. I'm not looking for a free replacement to what Photoshop CS3 can do (I believe that's called Gimp), but I was disappointed when I went to take Adobe's Photoshop Express for a spin today.

It sports a nice Flash interface, and is overall, very sleek and easy to use, but wow, does it lack features. Users can upload pictures and do basic adjustments (crop, resize, change saturation, tweak brightness, etc.) but that's about it. I was really hoping for filters and borders 0-rama, something that Picnik.com seems to deliver. What about some layers, or the ability to collage items? Nada. Express did not even allow me the option to add text to my picture, save a mere caption. I did enjoy the online slideshow that Photoshop Express could make, but this is hardly enough to make it my first stop online editor. Yet, I'm well aware of this. Why would Adobe give us something really good for free? It would mean a decline in their sales of Photoshop CS3 and Elements and I'm sure they don't want that. So they offer us Express, with just enough power to touch up photos and store about 2GB worth online. But at this point, with competitors fast on their heels, it's a token gesture, at best. It will be hard for them to straddle the commercial software world and the free world of webware. Word is, they hope to later offer something more powerful, but of course, for money. I guess that's how you straddle the two worlds. But what will not fly is the fine print many will fail to read when signing up for Photoshop Express ...

"... 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."

Beware. When you upload to Photoshop Express, you are essentially giving away your rights to your images. That one will be a hard one for many to swallow. No more glossing over those Terms of Services, it seems. Will I be spending class time to let students test drive this baby? Probably not - or at least not until it gains more "horsepower. It has potential, but it does not yet possess the 'wow' factor I was hoping for.