Tag Archive for 'Adobe'

The definition of free

Adobe’s Photoshop Express is a great online photo editor, no doubt about that, but it’s not free (as in free beer). In exchange for using Photoshop Express, Adobe wants your photos.

If you read the General Terms, you’ll find under point 8. Use of Your Content. letter a. the following paragraph [via SPON]:

Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.

As I understand it, Adobe, for instance, reserves the rights to sublicense your photos in Adobe Stock Photos to third parties. Without sharing the revenue with you of course. After all, Adobe already offered you its service Adobe Photoshop Express for “free”.

To me, that’s a show stopper for using Adobe Photoshop Express. Luckily there are other excellent online photo editors around who don’t claim such farreaching rights on your content like Adobe does: picnik, pixer.us or flauntR to name only a few of them.

Photos and usability

remotesUsually, when it comes to usability and interface design, Apple enjoys a quite good reputation. Especially the smart and simple iPod design is just brilliant, close to the legendary one-button-system.

This week Apple updated Aperture, added, finally, support for my new camera and made a trial version available. So I got a copy and tried Aperture. Mainly because I wanted to compare it to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, which is available as public beta.

First off, I’m no professional photographer, just an amateur who is looking for a tool to manage his RAW images in the way iPhoto handles snapshots. I’m not going with iPhoto because it doesn’t take advantage of the RAW format, it converts and copies every RAW picture to another compressed image format. What I’m looking for is probably somewhere in between iPhoto and Lightroom/Aperture.

However, I tried Aperture, imported most of my RAW images and began adjusting, ordering, etc. Without the intention to slug anyone here, but Aperture gave me one of the worst user experiences I’ve ever had. We just didn’t like each other. I wasn’t able to find the most simple things like editing metadata or copy color adjustments from one picture to another (can I?) and Aperture gave me no hint where to look for it either.

Maybe Aperture is just not built for me and my MacBook in matters of usability, screen size and speed.

On the other hand, I had no trouble understanding the interface and concept of Lightroom. In my opinion it’s very clear, more intuitive, a lot snappier and runs overall with a better performance on my MacBook than Aperture.

Both applications seem to do their job well, just in different ways. For amateur photographers like me both products probably mean a feature overkill. If iPhoto would’ve a better RAW handling and slightly better color adjustment features, I would just stick with it.