Elliot Swan

Photoshop Express: More Than Just an Online Port, Lessons to Learn 12:19 am

I’ve been noticing an unusually high amount of traffic to the link I posted a little while back to Photoshop Express, so I thought I’d touch a little bit more on it. If you haven’t heard much about it yet, it’s an excellent little app written in Flash and I’d highly recommend giving it a quick whirl through their test drive.

This is probably the most feature-rich online photo editing application out there (at least that I have seen–if any of you have seen better ones, by all means send ‘em over to me), yet it’s not just a port of CS3 taking the features easiest to recreate for the web and slapping them on there. Instead, most of the features are specifically geared toward the quick type of editing one would want to do through a web-based application like this while keeping an extraordinary amount of speed and simplicity. This is something, as a web developer, that I find impressive–and so is what I want to actually touch on.

Lesson Number 1: Choose Features Wisely

The features in this app of course include your basic cropping and rotating, but also stuff like auto correct, exposure correction, red-eye removal, saturation, lighting, sharpening, and some color alteration filters. For the most part, all the sort of stuff that it’d be nice to have for quick online editing jobs. 

This is the sort of thing important to remember when developing applications for the web. Nobody really cares how many features you can stuff into your app–what people do care about is that the ones you actually develop are the ones they actually need. And, of course, that they are done well.

Lesson Number 2: Remember What’s Important

Unlike CS3 where you’d select a filter and then have to deal with a lot of sliders and settings, Adobe realized that if you’re using an online photo editor you probably just want to get the job done quickly. So, instead of being presented with lots of settings they give you several options to choose from: 

Hovering over one of these will give you a larger preview by changing your main image, and you can then choose to accept or cancel it. Most of the options work this way, which makes for really fast and simple use.

This is the touchup tool, or as we know it in other versions of Photoshop: the clone tool. Rather than using brushes, it uses a simple drag-and-drop sort of interface. Again, rather than just keeping the same interface that’s in the full version of photoshop, they made it something more suited to a web interface.

The pop color effect also works quite amazingly and is more or less completely automated. You pick the color, they give you the options. Again, follows a similar interface as the rest of the app:

The Exception

There is one feature I still don’t really get, and that is the distort feature. While I guess it’s cool, it doesn’t really fit in–I doubt a distort effect is something most people need when doing a quick edit job. At least it’s done well:

In Closing

Overall, a very well done app that keeps it simple. Deciding what to put in and what to leave out can be a tough choice, but when it’s done right you get something like this. Whether or not it’s something I personally would actually use, it definitely offers some interesting concepts when looked at from a designer’s perspective.