How do you use photoshop?

I love photoshop and have been using it for years - I have licences for home and for work and open it every day. In fact it’s one of the core apps I have open at all times.

But when I sit back and actually ask myself how much I really use photoshop and what I use it for - the answer, at least 80% of the time is ‘cropping images’.

Don’t get me wrong I do use it for me - I use to to create mashed images, I use it to create graphics and I use it to design web sites and apps - but MOST of the time I use it to crop images.

Which is really annoying whem I’m out and about because out and about I need the image cropping the most (taking a photo to publish on a blog story) but as my copy at home and at work is installed on my desktop machine I don’t have it on my laptop.

Also - when I’m at home and logging on to quickly put a blog post together I don’t always WANT to have Photoshop open - when I say I have it open all the time I’m really talking about at work.

So there lately I’ve taken to using a number of the online photo editing tools that have popped up recently - some are pretty good and some are REALLY good but none give me the cropping flexibility of Photoshop.

So imagine my delight when I read about Photoshop Express - a free online version of the image editing application that also acts as a sort of portfolio/image store.



So I signed up straight away for two reasons 1) the possibility of controlled cropping and 2) I’ve been thinking about putting my best pics somewhere else, in addition to Flickr for a while - that way I can use Flickr as a general image dump and send people to this other site to view my pics.

And Photoshop Express is a pretty impressive image library with everything you would expect - direct links to photos, embed code that lets you put a whole gallery on your own site, slideshows, favourite link and e-mail form.

As an image library its good enough - it has seperate albums which is pretty much all you need and under each album you can tag photos or add descriptions to them.



But this being Photoshop - you can also edit them - something Flickr doesn’t have yet. But don’t expect Photoshop full, it’s still pretty limited functionality but it’s better than nothing.

I can upload a photo to Photoshop Express and crop, rotate, tweak the colour, remove red-eye, fix exposure problems - all the stuff you really need to do to a photo.

But as a photo for blog editing tool it falls short in two key areas - you can’t 1) resize pictures and 2) set dimensions when cropping.

What I really want is to be able to upload a photo, crop it to the size I want for my blog post and then import it directly into Wordpress - is there a plugin that does that?

Anyway back to Photoshop Express or Photoshop for Freetards as El Reg call it. It’s a great app but is more like Photoshop Album than Photoshop proper - it has limited but still impressive photo editing facilities and a place to store your pics.

It requires Flash 9 and either IE, Firefox or Safari - I haven’t tested it with Opera so I’m not sure if it works or not but I bet it probably does.

Photoshop Express is intended for download only in the US to start with apparently but it does work in Europe - it can be a bit slow and unresponsive at times but it does work.

Will I use it is the big question though and I’m afraid the answer is that I’ll probably get bored of it within a week and go back to Flickr - at least I will until they implement the option to set a size when cropping.

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