Posted by Devin de Gruyl on Mar 28th, 2008
Here’s a heads-up to those who covet Adobe’s industry-standard Photoshop program but are too poor to afford the $700 outlay for the full program (and have the same moral qualms about piracy that we do): Adobe has some software you can use, free of charge, that will do much of what you’d want image-manipulation software to do.
Dubbed Adobe Photoshop Express, this is not a stripped-bare, “crippleware” version of Photoshop, nor is it a downloadable program in the traditional sense. It will provide most of the most-common Photoshop tools in a new program that in terms of user interface most closely resembles Apple’s iLife, and will be entirely done in the web browser, making it platform-independent (as long as the browser you use supports Flash). You’ll have to register to use it, but they’re giving you 2GB of storage space to play with.
This is undeniably a Good Thing, as it puts Adobe power in the hands of any user regardless of income. It’s still not quite on the level of The GIMP, Paint.NET, or any number of other useful artistic tools in the low-to-no budget category, and the fact it’s a web-based program with remote file storage will undoubtedly cause some people to scream “Big Brother” at approximately 120 dB. (Come to think of it, and this only just now occurred to me as I was typing it up, doesn’t this sound eerily reminiscent of Microsoft’s original, scrapped plans for the .NET platform?) There are also those who will insist this is “a good start,” but the real goal should be for Adobe to A) lower the cost of Photoshop altogether, thus making it a less attractive target for pirates, B) release a *nix port of the program and thus remove the last major hurdles (which The GIMP doesn’t address) preventing Linux adoption in production houses, or C) both.
Still, this is a pretty neat little development, and as long as it stays free (beer) it should provide people with a solid program to add to their photo-manipulation toolbox.
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