Edit your photos online using Adobe Photoshop Express
We're big fans of pushing portability. Indeed, so are others, too. Did anyone see the feature in the Sunday Times, at the weekend? People are starting to realise that you can whack all your favourite applications, work files, documents and more, on a portable USB stick or iPod and then take this and work on any host computer. You could go one step further and forget the applications and use the rising number of online tools such as Zoho and the new Adobe Photoshop Express web service.
Adobe Photoshop Express is a web-only service that enables you to import and edit your photos. You can also link to your Facebook account, Piscasa album and more. Great for basic image editing, but the first thing we tried to do was to crop an image to a particular dimension. Not possible. So, for any serious photo editing, you may need to look elsewhere. Adobe Photoshop Express does ship with 2GB of free storage, if you want to use it for storing various images and photos.
Do you remember the old iView Media? This was a professional-level media and photo manager for the Mac and Windows platform that was bought by Microsoft a couple of years ago. This has been integrated in to the Microsoft Expression range of products and has had a few minor visual updates to the user-interface. To me, an old user of iView, it looks worse than the original version. Will be interesting to see how the Mac version stacks up, visually.
We've mentioned this a few times, but there is so much free photo management software, that commercial developers have to do something a little special to get noticed. To be fair, Adobe and Apple have achieved this with Lightroom and Aperture, offering advanced tools for the semi and professional photographer. These two tools stand out from many apps for this reason. However, iPhoto is enough for most Mac users and tools such as Picasa are excellent Windows photo editing tools.
Even using the very best digital camera, there are times when you'll need a paint program to touch-up your pictures. You won't want to give these to your friends when they look like they're taken by an amateur. There are quite a few commercial paint packages available. You're almost spoilt for choice. The snag with most commercial packages is that they're updated irregularly. Buy the latest version and you'll have to wait until the next version until any new features are included. With shareware or freeware, you'll often find the developers release new updates on a monthly basis.
There are times when you go on the road and someone needs a photo, an image resizing or part of the website re-working. However, the snag is that you've forgotten to bring your photo editor, so you can't make the changes. This can leave you stressed and feeling that - being out of the office - is stopping you from doing your work. There is an answer though, you could simply use an online editor to make the changes you require to the photo you need editing.
We spend months taking photos and storing them on our computer. The snag is, how do you get your photos across to your friends and family? You might want to share the 40 photos you took when you were on your visit to Dublin, but can't print them off nor can you justify trying to send them by email. They're simply too large. The best alternative is to upload them to a photo-sharing website and then enable your friends to have access. Flickr is one of the best around and, if you have a large number of photos, you'll need a tool to get them online, quickly.
Your broadband provider offered you free web space when you signed up, but how many of us bother to use the space. It's too small for backing up our data and there's not enough bandwidth to provide files to our friends and family. For this reason, our space goes unused and we resort to sending our photos and home movies to our friends by post or by email. If the other user has a slow connection, they're not going to be pleased if they receive a large email with an attachment of your latest holiday photos.
A while back, Adobe decided to release a free version of their photo management software, to gain a quick foothold in the emerging digital photography market. Adobe Photoshop Album Starter Edition was the result and it limited you to managing a small number of your digital photos as a preview to the commercial edition. Sadly Adobe Photoshop Album is no longer available, so there is no direct upgrade path from the free Starter Edition, but it's been primarily updated so it will take advantaged of Vista.
Only a few short years ago, anyone producing digital
photography software, magazines, websites or other literature, couldn't go
wrong. People couldn't get enough of the latest information about what camera
they should use and how they could get the most from their camera. The market
has flattened somewhat, yet there are still software developers producing new
photo management and sharing tools, although few compete with iPhoto on the Mac
and are never as feature-packed as Adobe Lightroom or Aperture.
There are so many photo managers, viewers and basic editors, you have to produce something very special to grab the attention of digital photographers. Both Apple’s Aperture and Adobe’s Lightroom grab your attention. They’re photo management tools aimed at the professional photographer.
Managing your many digital photos is a mammoth task. Your photo collection may consist of a number of sources. Images you've taken through various digital cameras or your mobile phone, images sent to you by family and friends and those you've downloaded from the Internet. Either way, you'll want to contain these photos within one user-interface and improve the photos before you send them to your printer or share them online.
Managing your photos through free photo management tools only enables you to take advantage of basic functionality. If you have a high-end digital camera, you'll want full control over the manipulation of the photos, how they appear on printed material and more. ACDSee was once a basic image and photo viewer, but since the advent of digital photography it has moved on and has become more of a photo management tool.
Photo management software can be such a contradiction. You go out and buy an expensive mega-pixel digital camera and then settle with the free photo editing software that shipped with the camera. This is often sub-standard and restricted. There are limited photo manipulation tools, the automatic image enhancement features do not produce a professional result and so on.
However professional you believe photos appear to other users, there's always room for improvement. For instance, did you use professional lighting to make your object appear as it should, in the correct lighting conditions? I bet your camera saved your photos as compressed JPGs, which means that they already suffer from noise, however many pixels your camera supports. You need to work with RAW or uncompressed TIF images, if you want professional-level photos.
If you want to get the most from your digital photos, forget the free software that shipped with your digital camera. Indeed, go beyond the usual freeware and other cheap commercial alternatives. You're best sticking with professional-level software that will enable you to organise and tweak just about every aspect of your collection.
Most of us are looking forward to our summer holiday and we'll be bringing our digital camera along with us. However, we get home and realise that, when we show family and friends the holiday experience, it's difficult to portray the landscape using standard 6 x 4 inch photos. You could get a special widescreen camera and print widescreen photos, but that costs money. The alternative is to take multiple photos and then stitch them together using a panorama tool.
You only need to take your digital camera on holiday, give it to your kids for the weekend and you'll soon find they've taken hundreds of photos. You can't easily process these within the camera, so the only alternative is to download them all to your computer and then decide which ones you want to keep, sort or print and give them to the family. To do this, you need a commercial-grade photo manager, which will enable you to import and manage your collection.
When we purchase a new digital camera, we'll go with a model with the largest number of megapixels, so our photos can be printed on large-format digital photo paper. However, what we forget is that the digital photos are often huge and too big to email to our friends and family, who only want a quick preview of our images. You could compress them and send them as an archive, but then you need to be sure that the other person can handle and understand your archive.
From time to time, we'll be on Messenger and a friend will send us across a digital photo. Alternatively, you may see an image online that you want to preview in full, so you'll download to your desktop. Either way, you could do with a powerful image viewer that enables you to open and view the photo, quickly, with the minimum of fuss. You won't want to load Photoshop, nor will you want your photo management tool to catalogue the photo.
Designers and professional photographers have their favourite image editing tools, but these commercial tools get updated rarely and we often have to wait 1 to 2 years before we see any new features. Ok, this means that our favourite software is stable for production use, but it also means that new technologies take time to be implemented and supported within your software.
Managing your digital photos is a relatively easy process. You can categorise, rate them depending on the quality and search for duplicates. However, getting the most from your digital photos isn't always easy. You need to find a way of getting the photos to your friends and family, without having to post them on a CD or print the photos and send them in the old fashioned way. There must be a better option.
There was a time, not long ago, where viewing images and photos quickly was the key priority. However, many basic image viewing tools decided to get in to photo management, which meant that if you double-clicked on a photo on your desktop, you'd have to wait for the manager tool to open, and often for it to load in previews of your stored photos, before you viewed your intended photo.
There are plenty of free photo views and basic manipulation tools on the market. There are few fully-fledged photo editors. The Gimp is one, Xara XS is another free tool. These applications enable you to touch-up your photos, edit images and convert between formats, free of charge. Of course, there's a basic paint tool included within the Windows, although it's not an advanced application.
There are plenty of tools to help you manage, edit and print your digital photos. These include commercial and freeware applications. However, there aren't too many tools aimed at the (semi)professional photographer. Apple have their Aperture, which is Mac-only. This tool enables you to import your RAW photos, touch-up each photo individually, export and even create your own photo book, slideshow or homepage.
Only a few years ago, with the rise and popularity of digital cameras, software developers were falling over themselves to produce digital photo editing and viewing software. There were a fair few commercial apps and a selection of freeware. These days, there aren't that many decent free image viewers that provide the basic tools to view, manage and edit our photos.
When we travel on holiday, we take our digital camera with us and take photos of just about everything, attempting to capture the feelings we experienced. We get home and load the photos in to our computer and realise that it's difficult to show off the various buildings and landscapes with standard 4:3 photos. One answer is to to take a few photos and then stitch them together, creating a panoramic wide photo.
If you simply want to touch-up a photo, cut a section from an image or simply convert to another format, loading and waiting for the 'big' image editors, such as Adobe Photoshop, could be overkill. These tools start loading various plugins, addons and other tools before you can even start to edit your image. The ideal solution would be a lightweight, free image and photo editor that would enable you to do the basics, then quit the application.
Digital photography enables to capture a particular moment, but many of us don't really do much more than simply print our photos on standard printer paper. You could turn them in to desktop wallpaper, but that might be overkill. Another option is to display photos, randomly on your desktop, so you can be inspired by your photos.
There have been some major new releases this week but I'm more excited about the new version of ACDSee rather than Vista RC1, Office 2007 refresh or the other big releases. ACDSee is a fantastic image viewer that enables you to quickly view photos and images, without spending time waiting for an app to load before you can view an image.
Why is it that most Windows applications seem to fight each other to take control over your system filetypes? A filetype is the information that Windows uses when deciding which application to use to view/play the file. For instance, install Photoshop and you've got a JPG on your desktop that you want to view quickly and, you're right, it will open in Photoshop.
Digital photography is still a growth area and stands out from nearly every other computer-based activity, apart from digital music creation. It's a subject area which can be judged by the popularity and availability of digital photography magazines.
