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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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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There’s a few applications that would help make Linux more of a mainstream OS, but don’t expect to see them ported to Linux anytime soon. One of the least discussed in this fashion? Adobe Photoshop.
Yes, I know I’ve said before that in my purview Linux doesn’t need mainstream success to be “succesful”, but this is one of those canards that gets waved under my nose often enough that it needs to be addressed at least once.
Why Photoshop? For one, apart from Microsoft Office, it’s one of the most broadly used programs in the whole of the computer world, both Mac and PC. Everyone either wants Photoshop or “a program like Photoshop.” And in many cases, they don’t have the luxury of choosing: they’re in a graphic-arts or design job where Photoshop is mandatory, not optional. By far the most overriding reason is support for CMYK colorspaces (you can’t do proper graphics work for print without CMYK support). Lack of proper CMYK support is one of the biggest reasons why GIMP, the open-source Photoshop-like app for Linux, hasn’t been able to displace Photoshop in a professional context.
And why no Linux-specific version of Photoshop? First, and most likely, Adobe probably believes there just isn’t a market for Photoshop on Linux — yet — especially since the perceived size of that market isn’t even a fraction of its total sales, whether for Mac or Windows.
There’s also the question of commercial application support on Linux, a topic which deserves its own post but which can be summed up this way: Closed-source apps generally only get supported on a couple of distributions at a time — Red Hat and SuSE are two of the biggest, although Ubuntu is turning up more and more — since the effort involved for more than a couple of distros is more than many software companies want to take on.
(This is where I agree at least in part with Alex Wolfe about there being too many distros — too many for the software makers, but that still means a plurality of choices for the users.)
What’s ironic is that a while back, Adobe had an IRIX version of Photoshop available for a number of Silicon Graphics computers. I played with an SGI O2 workstation that had it running, and it operated exactly like its Windows counterpart. Surely it wouldn’t be difficult to take the work done for the IRIX version and apply that to a Linux edition? Probably not — programming for IRIX, Linux, and the Mac OS are almost certainly as unalike as it gets in many ways.
Finally, there’s the problem of third-party add-ons. Photoshop has a giant library of plug-ins, and many Photoshop users are married to their plug-in collections. Said plug-ins would not work on Linux, unless a) they were rewritten from the ground up (not terribly likely) or b) the Linux edition of PS had, say, some kind of back-end into Wine that allowed the plug-in to run correctly. There’s always the possibility of running the Windows edition of Photoshop in an emulated Windows session or in Wine, but that sort of defeats the point.
So if Adobe ever bothers to offer Photoshop for Linux, I suspect it’s going to be for very specific breeds of Linux, and not Linux generically. I’m dead certain Adobe is not about to make Photoshop into an open-source product; they’re going to be as stalwart about this as Microsoft is about Office. But again, it’s a question of how much Adobe feels it’s likely to get back for that effort — which, at this point, is probably not a lot at all.
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