Web-Based Photo Editor Roundup

mikemuch writes "ExtremeTech has a roundup of 5 web-based image editing programs. The mostly Flash and AJAX-based webware ranges from simple touch-up services like Snipshot to the Photoshop wannabe Fauxto. They vary greatly in interface and extra goodies; some offer bookmarklets for getting images from a web page you're browsing, some offer artistic or goofy effects for you pix, but all fear the specter of Adobe's online version of Photoshop on the horizon."

Online with my CPU?

Okay so while its nice to have some basic stuff on a website I'm really not sure how this makes sense given the rise and rise of multi-core CPUs (which are fantastic at image processing). Models like Picassa and others which have a download to the machine make more sense as they don't require you to buy a massive amount of server hardware to support your business model.

Sorry I've just realised... its Web 2.0 bubble isn't it, it has to be in the browser because otherwise its not cool.

Re:Online with my CPU?

Okay so while its nice to have some basic stuff on a website

Mosesjones, I'd like you to meet the vast-majority-of-the-world (tm) who only ever use the basic stuff. They're not going to buy photoshop, they're not going to download the picassa. Hell, they're not even going to ever launch the photo editing software that came with their camera.

Re:Online with my CPU?

Your statement doesn't apply to a single person that would use this website, then. So how does it have anything to do with this at all? If they aren't going to use the software that comes with their camera, they surely aren't going to sign up for a web-based service that does the same but is a lot more hassle.

Re:Online with my CPU?

Just because you dont see a market for these types of products doesn't mean there isn't one. as an AC pointed out, though a bit harshly, there are people who want just a few features and would love a quick web editor to fix up some of their pics. In the article it mentioned how a lot of the programs offered easy integration with sites like flickr or some type of browser integration. Certainly there are people who would like this kind of feature -- although for me I prefer photoshop.

Users have a funny way of deciding for themselves how they like to use technology, and that doesnt always mean the best utilization of multi-core processors. Sometimes it just means a few less clicks to get out the red eye from photos of your dog Floofly.

/have to say too the incessant AJAX and Flash bashing is tiresome on /. sometimes. And no I dont have a dog named Floofly.

Data intensive

This seems like a silly place to use a web application, since your photos normally reside on your computer. Uploading a two-to-three megabyte file just to run some simple corrections that are handled by dozens of already available tools (including many free or preloaded ones like iPhoto and Picasa), then downloading it again...

For gods sake why aren't photo editting in java

Java would be the ideal solution if Sun would get off their asses and A)Make cut/paste work (even if it necessitates putting up a huge "warning this is a security risk" window before letting you do it the first time) , B)Make the allowable heap size MUCH larger for applets , and C)streamline the process of letting users save and load files to their computer (again with the whopping huge security warning windows)

All of this WITHOUT forcing users to accept certificates to give applets carte blanche, which I never trust on websites.

The next Google App?

The idea seems to fit with Google Apps. How long before they buyout one of the companies or try something similar from scratch. If not raster images, I still think they'll get a vector editor going or at least a Dia clone.

Next: The Pedal-Driven Formula 1 Racer Roundup

itentionally left blank - see comment title

A line from Fauxto index.html

"
Ads by Google

Photo Tools
Fix Image
Image Repair
Fix Photos
Adult Photo
"

Adult Photo as an Ad accepted? Have fun with families who wants to edit their photos online.

Be afraid of Photoshop if Adobe doesn't act stupid

I am testing the "Photoshop Elements 3" trial, yes the older version on my OS X. I am definately impressed by the coding quality and the ease of tools.

If Adobe "ships" Photoshop Elements 3 kind of stuff to Web and asks for $$$ , count me in.

Notice Photoshop Elements 4 for Mac didn't ship yet so I won't tell about 48bit TIFF editing offered with it etc.

What can Adobe do to kill project from beginning? One small font sentence at bottom: "IE Required".

As...

...the head of an image processing and fx software company, I can tell you one thing with certainty: Online apps that transfer photos back and forth and process them online are the very last thing on our list of technologies to be concerned about.

Why? Because nothing on the net will ever compare to an in-system, RAM-based, N-layer handling, real-time nondestructive effects engine written close to the metal with live geometric warp layers, masking and animation. That's on the application end.

One the user end, these web based apps are meant for your grandmother. And at that, only on days when someone else in her apartment building or upstream on her cable connection isn't downloading "300" on bit-torrent, and there aren't 200 other people on the same server trying to process an image. The entire idea of "thin clients" for image manipulation is one that presumes bandwidth and server power that are not available at this point in time - it's silly, is what it is.

You can buy a great image manipulation system for about $30 if you simply look hard enough. You'll be able to level photos, retouch them, or process the living heck out of very high resolution images if that's your intent, set people on fire, morph them, all manner of sophisticated things. Or you can use a web app and move a slider and wait... and move... and wait... and save... and wait... and finally get back your pic. Which you had better hope is what you wanted. When I say you'll get it back, I mean after that "300" download finishes, of course. :-)

So here's what you should be asking yourselves: What is your time worth?

Re:As...

You can buy a great image manipulation system for about $30 if you simply look hard enough.

Or you can get GIMP for $0 without looking very hard at all, which is also perfectly capable of doing everything you mention and more.

Image Magick Studio

Hi there, Just wondering if anybody else remembers the venerable Image Magick Studio [net4tv.com]? Hours of fun to be had there and definately prior art to anything Web 2.0 :)

Javascript image manipulation?

I haven't tried out any of the products, but it's safe to assume they do most of the work client-side and therefore they must have some Javascript image manipulation functions. I wonder if any of those exist as a free/open resource. For a long time I've been looking for a Javascript JPEG library which would allow me to scale an image client-side before uploading it to a CMS. Sure, server side checks and manipulations are available, but there's really no point in uploading a three Megabyte digital camera picture to a community site which won't show the images larger than 800x600 anyway.

Has anyone ever accomplished something like this?

Others

That list is hardly complete. There are others, the biggest probably being lunapic.com [lunapic.com]. Some things are just easier to do, lunapic for example has a lot of animations and fonts that you wouldn't normally have. Obviously, for high quality photo editing, you'd want to stay local for now. But, with bandwidth ever increasing, the online editors slowly get better and better.

Who would want this, you ask?

Just for the folks in the "I wouldn't use it, and I'm an average guy, so nobody is going to want this..." crowd (never mind the obtuse "we're in the high-end image editing business and need our apps close to the metal" gathering), there are in fact a ton of uses for a strictly online photo editing app...especially something lightweight that could be imbedded into a form.

• embed into a CMS, or any other app. that has images as a content item
• embed in a personals/community site, so uploaders can crop/resize their uploaded photos themselves, or content admins. can do it on the fly (just FYI, I built one of these for a company and productivity increased about 600% vs. download/Photoshop/upload)
• any photo submission site, so you can access / edit them from any computer anywhere (like holiday photos from the hotel in Mexico on the 8-year old PC in their lobby)
• any online form that requires a photo upload

For the ones that are trying to replicate/steal market share from Photoshop, that probably's a long way off, but for now there a lot of uses for an online image utility.

A little imagination is all that is required...this list took about 30 seconds and I'm sure there are many $$$$ ideas that could grow out of this little segment.

--------------
I don't mind if you piss into the wind, just let me know before you do it...

To the folks saying "who would use this?" ...

My wife wants to resize a picture to put on her Yahoo group site. So she Googles "shrink picture", and one of the top sites that she finds doesn't just *tell* her how to do it with some software, it *offers* to resize the picture for her, for free.

We probably have five or more programs on our machine that could have done the job. But the above was *way* faster than it would have taken her to find one of them and figure out its interface.

And I have to confess, it may have been faster than it would have taken *me* to do it with a local program. I'm sure it took less clicks/keystrokes.

Is this the last nail...

...in the coffin of a slowly dying Photoshop Phriday [somethingawful.com]?

As Photoshop and other tools have gotten into the hands of folks who don't design for a living, the quality of this once-hilarious feature has gone down. The recent giant pets theme was just...well, something awful.

Color Me Blue

I'm sure these are all nice offerings, but at the moment will offer no serious competition to the gold standard, Photoshop.

In fact, even an online version of Photoshop will not be competition to its current incarnation.

The reason? Browser color management. Currently, only Safari, OmniWeb, & MacIE support it, and any serious Photoshop user soft proofs before printing.

Their only current solution would be to bypass the browser display engine, but if they do that, they're in effect back to having a stand-alone app.

Re:For the love of God!

in using a web browser like some super whizz-bang do-it-all application framework.

AJAX & Flash suck, but there's nothing wrong with the thin client idea. It's being held back by MS & bandwidth issues at the moment.

If Netscape had won back in the day, maybe we would have a better web based thin client framework now, but to suggest that the idea is unworkable is ludicrous.

Re:For the love of God!

I guess it could work if you could upload very high quality pictures in an instant without any quotas

But as you implicitely said, we are nowhere close to that level ...

Re:For the love of God!

It makes more sense when there's an actual reason for it to be on the web. For example, CleVR stitches photos into panoramas [clevr.com], then uses a flash thing to display them and embed them in other pages, youtube style. It's like Apple's old Quicktime VR, but without the $500 authoring environments and plugin and embedding nightmares.