Adobe has really extended its Photoshop brand, from desktop to online, and now to mobile. There's the legendary Photoshop CS4 for advanced professional photo editing, now with an Extended edition expanding into 3D and motion. And there's the more accessible Photoshop Elements for consumer photo organizing, enhancing and sharing.
And the brand has moved online with Photoshop.com, a free service for uploading and organizing your photos and videos online, editing with fixes and enhancements, and sharing on social-networking sites or on Photoshop.com galleries. It's available in the Web browser from your computer, directly within Photoshop Elements or Premiere Elements 7, and from compatible mobile phones.
The ability to download applications to smartphones has allowed Adobe to extend Photoshop.com Mobile from Windows Mobile phones to the Apple iPhone last month, and now to Google Android phones.
With Photoshop.com Mobile for Android on the Verizon Droid (see previous post), you can flick through thumbnails of your photos on the touch screen, and view full-screen and in slide shows. Then use the left drop-down menu to tighten up the photo with Crop, Straighten, Rotate, and Flip, the center menu to adjust Exposure, Saturation, Tint, and Black & White, and the right menu to apply Soft Focus to add a subtle blur for artistic effect. The iPhone version also offers a Sketch tool to make photos look like drawings, plus effects including Warm Vintage, Vignette, and Pop.
Photoshop.com Mobile saves a new version of your changed photos. It also has Undo and Redo options so you can freely experiment with multiple operations. You then can upload your photos and edits to share online at Photoshop.com, which includes 2 GB of free storage (or sign up for a plan with more). And you can access and view your online photos from the phone.
On the Android platform, Photoshop.com Mobile can automatically upload pictures in the background, even while you are using other applications.
So far, so good, though I'd like to see more viewing functions, to browse the photos organized by folders (and camera vs. stored images, which should help with the visible delay in updating thumbnails), and with the ability to zoom in to see details. And it would be helpful to have some ability to see the photo attributes and rename saved images, so they could more easily be shared though alternate means such as messaging and email.
Even in this first version, Adobe has done a nice job with Photoshop.com Mobile to create a fun -- and free -- tool for cleaning up photos, especially before uploading to Photoshop.com.