There are cool tools on the new Adobe photo sharing website

My last post shared news of the new iPhone app from Adobe, a soft of mini,ultra-lite Photoshop for your mobile phone.  Along with that new application Adobe also recently opened up a new online sharing website for your photos.  Anyone can sign-up for their basic account which is free and entitles you to (right now the site is restricted to U.S. residents... additional access is coming in the future).  

The basic membership includes 2 GB of online storage space (which can be increased to 20GB, 40GB or 100 GB (at different price levels).  There is also a 'Plus' level account that provides additional storage, templates, albums and artwork.The 'tools' behind this new online photo (and video) host website have actually been online since March 2008 with the launch of Adobe's Photoshop Express.  This was an online offering to get folks who thought the software application of Adobe Photoshop was either too expensive, too difficult to learn or both.

Here are the tools available to account holders at mobile.photoshop.com

• Crop & Rotate—Turn it, straighten it, or crop out the background.
• Resize—Changes the size to fit a web or mobile display or to e-mail it to friends and family.
• Auto Correct—Automatic, one-click, optimal lighting and contrast adjustment.
• Exposure—Changes the brightness of the photo.
• Red-Eye Removal—Removes red eyes caused by some camera flashes.
• Touch-up—Removes scratches and other imperfections.
• Saturation—Ramps up the colors to blinding brightness, dampen them down to black and white, or anywhere in between.
• White Balance—Ever notice how people look different inside an office with the ugly fluorescent tubes, as opposed to outside on a bright sunny day? White Balance adjusts the white balance and you change the type of lighting in the photo.
• Highlight—Lets you brighten or darken just the brightest part of the photo (that is the highlights), without affecting the darker parts (the shadows).
• Fill Light—If you take a shot facing into the sun, your subject can end up too dark due to the camera's automatic exposure adjustment. Fill Light brightens the dark area without over brightening the background.
• Sharpen—Makes everything come more into focus.
• Soft Focus— Creates a subtle blur for artistic effect.
• Hue—Changes all the colors in a photo at once.
• Black & White—Controls how the colors are converted when you change a photo to black-and-white.
• Tint—Changes a photo from black-and-white to red and white, or pale brown and white (sepia) for that old Western look.
• Sketch—Makes any photo look like you drew it yourself.
• Distort—Stretch, twist, or bulge specific areas of your photos.

Here is a glimpse at the Gallery Interface (click on the image to see a larger view).

If your digital / still camera delivers high-resolution images, you should know that Photoshop Express (at Mobile.Photoshop.com) supports a pixel map of up to 16.7 mega-pixels, but no more than 8,191 pixels either high or wide. So you can work with fairly high-resolution images... however, the editor can only save files with a maximum of 2,048 pixels in either direction, so the resulting file can be no larger than that.

One unique function available at Mobile.Photoshop.com is the Group Album. You can designate other Adobe.com members (free or paid) to be part of a Group album.  All of you can add and share the contents loaded into this group album.  You can choose to have other albums which are private or public depending on your settings.

Overall I enjoy the features and tools available at this newer website - though the increasing trick here is which online photo website do you choose?  I have photos in accounts on Mobile.Photoshop.com, Photobucket, Picasa, Facebook, Exposure Room and SmugMug (and maybe another site or two I can't recall).  I would think a person should find a favorite and stick with it... that way you have just one URL, just one website to go to yourself and to share with friends and family.  My favorite remains SmugMug - I shared my reasons in this previous post here at Your Technology Tutor: SmugMug is my choice for online photo sharing & storage

Comments

[Joana Leighmoore]

It's amazing how our phones are slowly but surely incorporating a lot of these programs into their interfaces, making them more functional. Of course, there's no replacing the real stuff, but at least these versions get people interested.

[Chet Davis]

Agreed Joana, There are amazing (and increasingly powerful) apps available for us on our smart phones...but we often have greater capabilities on the full applications available on our desktop and laptop computers.