Photoshop dot Com

A Better (free) Way to Edit

With the advent of so many Web applications, it’s incumbent upon us to make sure we know what they are and how we can use them. A common need from Online faculty on a regular basis is how to edit photos for Powerpoint presentations, Blackboard profile pictures, and more. As educational designers, instructional designers, or faculty, I’m sure you probably have seen the obligatory 2000 pixel image that is simply scaled back in a presentation. There are free tools out there we can provide for both faculty and students. One is created by Adobe and is currently free. It’s called Photoshop Express or Photoshop.com.  http://www.photoshop.com

Below is a brief video tutorial on how to use some basic functions from this free Web application:

General Overview

I’ve been a subsciber to this service since it came out.  It definitely has grown in functionality since it’s beta release.  One major criticism was the lack of cropping to a specific pixel size.  Adobe responded quickly and offers this as a feature.  As a general image editor, Photoshop.com works well to offer basic image editing and manipulation.  Because Adobe bought Macromedia, the interface is Flash-based which makes for lots of smoothness.  The downside of Flash is that the interface is sometimes sluggish.  Definitely not worthwhile tackling on anything less than broadband for speed.  It does offer social networking capability to pull pictures from Flickr and Facebook, and more outlets.  It’s a nice feature, but it makes me think of Okurt as a social networking tool.  It’s nice.  But people already use Facebook.  Same principles here.  It’s nice.  Pretty.  Slick.  But I don’t see it as anything other than a free image manipulation tool faculty and students can use to forego purchasing software and edit photos in a sluggish, but intuitive UI.

Have you used Photoshop Express?  If so, what do you think?  Post comments.  Contribute.  If you’ve found another tool, let us know.