Photoshop on the iPhone and in the “cloud”

Adobe has released Photoshop.com Mobile (iTunes Link), an iPhone app. While I was checking out the new app, I also took a look at the Photoshop.com web-based, cloud-hosted service.

Photoshop.com Mobile: The iPhone App

Photoshop.com Mobile is a free app for your iPhone. You can use it to make some basic adjustments and apply preset filters. Some of the adjustments are useful (for example, exposure changes, cropping and black and white conversion). 

Photoshop.com iPhone App screenshots

While there are a few decent filters, there are also some terrifyingly bad filters (see “pop” and “rainbow.”) I’ve posted a gallery with some examples of these filters and effects. I would love to see some form of sharpening added and the ability to view a histogram.

Examples of selected filters in use. Top left, original image. Top right, vignette blur + black and white. Bottom left, vibrant + vignette blur. Bottom right, rainbow

When you are done, you can save the image to “Photos” on your iPhone. Or you can choose to upload them to Photoshop.com. More on that in a second…

In general, it works pretty well. And while I did have a few crashes, it is pretty stable and I’m sure it will get more stable as it’s updated. For a free app, it’s solid and worth a download.

Photoshop.com: The Photo-Hosting Service

But you can’t talk about the Photoshop.com iPhone app without talking about Photoshop.com, Adobe’s web-based application for hosting and editing photos. The service is free and includes 2 GB of storage. It can host both images and videos.

You can upload images, edit them and then share galleries and slide shows. The editing is relatively powerful, allowing you to make lots of alterations including modifying the white balance or performing sharpening. Photoshop.com even provides import opinions for Flickr and Facebook galleries.

The application is Flash-based and is relatively attractive. It mirrors the look and feel of an Adobe app, so if you are familiar with the Creative Suite (especially Bridge), you should be comfortable in the interface. Performance is generally very good, but I experienced some slow down with animations. I’m sure your mileage will vary depending on your computer, browser or internet connection.

But there are some oddities. Sometimes, the interface doesn’t behave consistently – requiring a single click for some functions and a double click for others without apparent pattern or cause.

One of the strangest things is that there is no real social networking features. Sure, you can share albums with friends, but there is no way to browse people who have Photoshop.com accounts. And you can’t search for tags or keywords like you can on Flickr. So if you, like me, don’t know anyone with a Photoshop.com account, this feature is useless.

I’m not really sure what the target market is for the service. Some of the features are powerful. But people who would use the powerful features aren’t going to want to edit images with a web-based service. Some features are useless or tacky (like the “Decorate” feature that lets you add thought bubbles, post-it-notes and clip art to your images).

In the end, I’m not sure why I would use this for sharing pictures over Flickr, Facebook or even .Mac’s Web Gallery. It’s not that it’s bad, but it just doesn’t offer me enough features to make the switch… I’m sure they will be continuously adding features, but for now, I don’t see a compelling reason to change services.

What’s next? Photoshop: The Flame Thrower

So I like the iPhone app, and I don’t love the Photoshop.com web-based service. The bigger issue for me, though, is what Adobe is doing to the Photoshop brand. To me, Photoshop is a professional image editing application. But now, you have Photoshop CS4, Photoshop Extended CS4, Photoshop Elements, Photoshop Lightroom, Photoshop.com and the Photoshop.com iPhone app. Photoshop even has it’s own logo.

This type of brand extension is problematic, because now, anything that Adobe offers that is used with photos – from beginner to professional – has “Photoshop” in the name. Is the ability to put a cheesy speech bubble on a picture using Photoshop.com really a “Photoshop” feature? Does tacky clip art belong in any app bearing the “Photoshop” name?

And while photographers and designers will continue to use Photoshop, the loss of brand equity is, in my opinion, an unwise brand management decision. 

Only at TypeCon...

I took this shot a few months ago and completely forgot about it. At TypeCon 2009 in Atlanta, there were two meetings happening in adjacent rooms. one meeting was the type critique that was open to attendees. The other meeting was a planning session for the web fonts panel the next day and was private. The rooms weren’t well marked so someone in the web fonts panel meeting grabbed a sheet of paper and wrote a quick sign…

Only at TypeCon does a quick handwritten sign look like this… If you haven’t heard the panel discussion, audio is posted online. It really was an interesting look at the challenges behind getting a workable web fonts model…

How GREP can save you time in InDesign

I received a file containing 100 pages of information in a table. The table needed to be placed into InDesign. No problem…

Well, of course there was one problem. Randomly, the lines began with spaces. Not every line, but most lines. So the left edge of the table looked ragged. So how do you take out random spaces at the beginning of text? In a table? Without doing it manually? (Because I have much better things to do than going through a 100+ page document line-by-line…)

What is GREP?

In InDesign CS3 and CS4, you can choose to do GREP find and change. GREP is a text search function originally written for UNIX. Basically, it lets you look for patterns and allows you to do find and replace based on those patterns.

So back to the random spaces…

What I had was a pattern. Find all spaces at the beginning of the paragraph and replace with nothing. GREP was the perfect solution. 

Next to the find and change fields are flyout menus (marked with “@”) that give you shortcuts to all of the variables. For example, go to “Locations>Beginning of a Paragraph” and InDesign inserts a “^” into the field.

So I typed “^ ” (there is a space after the ^) in the “Find what” field – which tells InDesign to find one space at the beginning of any paragraph. I left the “Change to” field blank, clicked “Change All” and several thousand instances were changed instantly. Without having to go through line-by-line…

EDIT: Above, I set up the search with the ^ (to find the beginning of the paragraph) and a space after it. And while it works, a reader pointed out correctly that a better search would have been “^\s+” which would have found one or more spaces at the beginning of a line.

What else can GREP do?

I’ve used GREP to replace dashes or periods at the beginning of lines. And GREP is perfect for standardizing the formatting of a phone number across an entire document. GREP is amazingly powerful and you can build a GREP search for anything with a pattern. I’ve only scratched the surface…

You can save queries to be reused. (Several sample searches – including a phone number formatting query – are already saved as a sample searches in InDesign. It’s located at the top of the dialog box.)

InDesign also lets you apply GREP-based character styles – for example, telling it to find all prices in a document and apply a particular style.

It’s probably not for everyone.

You aren’t going to need GREP find/change unless you are doing some pretty heavy duty, long document work like magazines, catalogs and directories.

I’m pretty sure most InDesign users aren’t doing that kind of work. But if that type of project comes across your desk, keep in mind that GREP might be a great – and time-saving – solution for your project. 

More resources

Want to learn more about what GREP can do for you? If you do a search for GREP, there are lots of resources out there. Two that I have found helpful:

• A very helpful and well-written PDF from Michael Murphy at The InDesigner. It’s actually about CS3, but it’s very helpful in detailing how to build a GREP search.
• Search using GREP expressions from Adobe’s InDesign help documentation. Provides some great examples of what GREP is capable of doing.