Adobe Systems has announced major updates to its Photoshop Elements suite of video- and photo-editing software, including online sharing and mobile-phone options. In beta now, the software is expected to be on retail shelves in early October.
Photoshop Premiere Elements 7 adds significant features to video editing, while Photoshop Elements 7 incorporates major enhancements to the photo-editing program. Mobile features cover only a limited number of phones.
Many Enhancements
Have too many grumpy-looking locals in the background of your shot of the Eiffel Tower? Elements 7 promises you can “scrub” unwanted elements from pictures with its new Scene Cleaner feature. Quick Fix tools whiten teeth, enhance colors, and soften details, among other things. A powerful new Smart Brush allows users to assign repetitive tasks to the brush tool, then use it on multiple sections of a photo, like removing wrinkles.
The Premiere video suite gained a few IQ points with a new analysis mode that scans video files for picture quality, number of faces and sound levels, and applies Smart Tags as placeholders for what the software believes are the best clips. If you agree, you can just click a button to assemble a finished movie.
InstantMovie is a quick way to assemble a themed video. Dragging and dropping clips into a theme, such as Birthday, will add appropriate music, transitions and graphics. Green-screen technology has a Videomerge feature to superimpose you and the family going for a stroll on the moon, for example. Version 7 now outputs to DVD, Blu-ray and the AVCHD high-definition tapeless file format, and it supports instant uploads to phones and YouTube accounts.
Video and Photos to Go
To compete with online sites such as Flickr, Adobe announced an enhanced online service for Photoshop Elements customers called Photoshop.com. A basic subscription with 5GB of storage is available free for storing and sharing photos and videos. The plus package ups the ante to 20GB for $49.95. Both provide online backups of stored files. Plus members also receive additions to the software, such as new themes, tutorials, movie trailers, and special effects.
With Elements 7 cell-phone users can upload pictures directly to Photoshop.com from their phones. The application runs in the background, and Adobe promises it uploads photos while you talk, instant message, or use other phone options. The Palm Treo, Samsung Blackjacks, and Motorola Qs are supported now. The company Web site promises support for the Apple iPhone, BlackBerry Pearl, Motorola Razr, Nokia 5310, and Nokia 6301 in September.
According to an Adobe spokesperson, the Photoshop.com application now includes the online offering Expressions. Online content can be managed directly from within Elements 7 applications.
Photoshop Elements 7 and Photoshop Premiere Elements 7 will be available for $99 each. A bundle of the two will cost $149. Anxious customers can preorder at Adobe’s Web site or wait for it to show up at retailers.
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As anyone who has had the pleasure of doing web design and development through marketing agencies knows, Flash tends to be wildly popular among clients and wildly unpopular among, well, pretty much everyone else. Part of the reason for this is because Flash is so inherently un-Googleable; anything that goes into a Flash-only site is basically invisible to search engines and therefore, the world. That will no longer be the case, however, as Adobe announced today that it has teamed up with Google and Yahoo to make Flash files indexable by search engines.
This announcement has been a long time coming, as Flash developers have been wishing for ways to make their content searchable for close to a decade. Adobe acknowledges this in its announcement, saying that although search engines are able to index static text and links within Flash SWF files, “[Rich Internet Applications] and dynamic Web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states—a problem also inherent in other RIA technologies.”
This announcement may also result in some major usability changes (for the better) for Flash on the web. In a post to its Webmaster Central Blog, Google wrote that it can now index all kinds of textual content in SWF files, like that included in Flash gadgets, buttons, menus, entirely self-contained Flash web sites, “and everything in between.” Google can now also follow URLs embedded within Flash files to add to the crawling pipeline. This new indexing technology does not, however, include FLV files (video files that are found on sites like YouTube) because those are generated as videos and don’t contain any text elements like an SWF file does.
Google says it’s able to do this by developing an algorithm that “explores Flash files in the same way that a person would,” by clicking buttons and manually going through Flash content. “Our algorithm remembers all of the text that it encounters along the way, and that content is then available to be indexed,” wrote the company. “We can’t tell you all of the proprietary details, but we can tell you that the algorithm’s effectiveness was improved by utilizing Adobe’s new Searchable SWF library.”
Of course, Google (and eventually Yahoo) won’t be able to index everything embedded within a Flash file—at least not yet. Anything that is image-related, including text that is embedded into images, will be invisible to the search engines for the time being. Google also noted that it can’t execute certain JavaScripts that may be embedded into a Flash file, and that while it indexes content that is contained in a separate HTML or XML file, it won’t be counted as part of the content in the Flash file. These are all issues that are being worked on, however, and are likely to change in the future.
Yahoo is also working with Adobe to index SWF files, but doesn’t appear to be as far along as Google just yet. One player that is noticeably missing is Microsoft, though. From Adobe’s announcement and the language used by Google, it appears as if each search engine has to work with Adobe to make this possible—meaning that Microsoft has either been excluded by Adobe for this round or has decided to voluntarily sit this one out. Either way, with searchable SWF files down, usability experts can now focus all of their attention on other Flash-related concerns, like blatant design perversion and excessive animation abuse.
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Adobe Systems has committed to shipping a beta version of its online image-editing tool, Photoshop Express, this year, and said it will be complete in 2008.
“By late this year, we anticipate having a beta version,” said John Loiacono, senior vice president for Adobe Creative Solutions, speaking at the 6sight digital imaging conference here. And next year, the online service will be “available to anyone,” he said [video].
Loiacono showed Photoshop Express running on an Adobe server connected over the Internet, he said. But when the average person experiences the software, it likely will be through partners such as Shutterfly or Photobucket, he said.
Unsurprisingly, Loiacono left unmentioned Flickr, which said in October it will use Picnik’s online photo-editing tools.
Photoshop Express is a profoundly important project, and Adobe’s schedule indicates that its repercussions are near-term and not academic.
For Adobe, the project is the spearhead of a transformation from a seller of boxed software to a provider of services in an increasingly rich Internet experience. And for the industry overall, it signals that Internet technology is maturing enough that companies are willing risk extending the brand of respected PC software to the network.
Photoshop Express, as its name suggests, isn’t a full-fledged version of Photoshop proper or even of its hobbyist-oriented sibling, Photoshop Elements. The intent is to reach a much larger audience than the company currently reaches with its higher-end boxed software products.
A look at Photoshop Express
Loiacono demonstrated several features of Photoshop Express, hampered only fleetingly by a couple Flash error messages. He selected photos to edit from a group, removed red-eye, cropped, adjusted color tones, used a healing brush to erase a skin blemish, and replaced the color of a red sports car with various other hues.
The demonstration showed the relatively limited set of features available in Photoshop Express. There were three top-level menu options: quick fix, tuning, and fun.
“Fun” options include replace color, which Loiacono showed to change a red sports car into blue, purple and green. Other options are huge, black-and-white, distort, sketch, and tint.
“Quick fix” options were crop and rotate, blemish removal, red-eye removal, auto correct, and sharpen. Tuning options were white balance, exposure, highlight, fill light, saturation, and soft focus.
Computational photography
Loiacono also offered a glimpse into what Adobe and others call computational photography–the achieving through the combination of photography and computers what can’t be achieved with either alone.
With digital cameras, some computation already happens in cameras themselves, but Loiacono predicted more.
For example, today people can combine two photos that are exposed differently–one for a subject in the foreground illuminated by a flash and another with natural light in the background. Merging those two photos could happen earlier in the process so people don’t have to futz with processing the photos afterward, he said.
“What we’re moving to is an environment when your camera will be able to take two shots, process them in the camera, and give you the desirable output,” Loiacono said.
He also demonstrated a video variation of stitching still images together into a single panorama. A video taken panning across a view of an African waterfall was converted into a wide panoramic pan of the same waterfall, with the water flowing across the full scene even though it was taken from different frames of the video.
He also showed a view of Adobe’s light-field camera work, which processes multiple images taken simultaneously so the computer can effectively construct a three-dimensional model of the scene.
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