Adobe’s Free Photoshop Great For Personal Use, Not So Much For Business

One issue many online physical product sellers face is finding an inexpensive photo editor to crop, correct and optimize their product images.

The main options include:

• GIMP, which is free software, but requires you to download and install on your own computer
• Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro, both acceptable options, but at around $80-90, may still be out of the price range for brand new work at home moms or new business owners that have just spend a ton of money on a website and inventory.

So, when I heard that Adobe had released its free online Photoshop Express today, I thought I’d give it a whirl to see if it would be an acceptable alternative to the cumbersome GIMP or the someone pricey other options.

My first impression was that the pages loaded a bit slow. Now, I’m using Firefox 2+ on a Windows system with high-speed, blazing fast internet. So I don’t think it was me that was slow. I also scanned through the Terms of Service and didn’t see any deal-breakers.

After I signed up and uploaded a 4 MB image quickly and without any hangups. Rotating my image to vertical was as easy as clicking the photo, selecting photo options from a menu that appeared and choosing to rotate right.

And that wasn’t it. Additional photo editing and enhancing options appear when you select a photo and click the edit link button at the bottom.

I was able to easily correct the white balance (by choosing the best balance from among several options), and revert a change by choosing it from a menu.

So far so good.

But then I ran into some problems.

One thing I noticed in Firefox was that my popup blocker kept activating, even though I told it to allow popups from the site. Couldn’t figure out why — didn’t spend a whole lot of time on it though.

From what I’ve read, you can’t upload images from a 12+ megapixel camera.

When I tried to crop a photo, I found that I couldn’t maintain the proportion. I checked their help documents, and so far, they don’t have a whole lot — and none of it covered cropping. I tried a Google search as well, to see if anyone else ran into this problem. So far, not a mention. This, of course, could change over time. But if there is no way to maintain proportion, that’s a big issue for me.

I found nowhere that I could optimize the photos. In other words, Photoshop has a way to save for web and Paint Shop Pro has a similar feature by another name. With these tools, you can reduce the file size of the image while still maintaining the image quality. Express does not appear to have that feature.

I then tried to download my edited image and found out I could only download or link to three sizes: 170×256, 682×1024 or the original. This doesn’t do me any good if I have a photo that is 2048×3072 from my camera and I need a 100×100 thumbnail and a large size of 500×750.

While Photoshop Express may work out wonderfully for your family galler, it just doesn’t give you the control and advanced tools you need for editing and optimizing your product photos.

My recommendation: Slurge on Photoshop Elements or Paint Shop Pro. Or ask your nearest teenaged Geek to install GIMP and teach you how to use it.

Update: During my quest for more information, I found a rather disturbing tidbit regarding the Express Terms of Service. Now, I didn’t see this language in the TOS I agreed to, so perhaps it’s been removed. But I thought it important to report what a CNET editor found:

But there’s a policy pothole on the ramp that almost broke my axle: Adobe’s claims on your publicly shared photos. From the Terms of Use:
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. (emphasis mine)

I certainly hope this has been removed. Read the TOS carefully if you want to try it out. And if it’s still there, don’t use it.

5 Common Mistakes People Make When Photographing Their Products

We’ve all seen these mistakes on other people’s websites — and sometimes on our own:

1. Using flash pointed directly at items. Flash tends to create harsh shadows behind the object (Known as flash monsters!) and washed out colors. Flash should be bounced off the ceiling, if used at all.
2. Photographing products spread out on a dirty-looking carpet or patterned bedspread. Your images look like you didn’t put much thought into them — and your customers will see that. Make sure your backgrounds don’t distract from your products.
3. Ill-fitting clothing or baby slings don’t showcase your product in a good light. Make sure your product fits the model, or that the model fits the product.
4. Photographing products worn or held by someone who looks like she is in a bad mood. I still remember a website in which a woman modeled the T-shirts she had designed. In every photograph, she had the exact same scowl on her fact. Come on — Smile!
5. Leaving a jagged edge when cutting the background out of a product image. Cutting an unpleasant background out of an image is a great idea. But leaving that jagged edge (even if you try to cover it up with a shadow), makes the image look very unprofessional. Potential customers will be turned away by unprofessional photos that make it look like you don’t care enough about your business to get a professional editing job done on your product displays.

Learn techniques for increasing your sales with great product photography! Head over to www.PresentingYourProducts.com…

WAHM Talk Radio Interview With Kelly McCaussey Is Live!

Kelly interviewed me last week about Presenting Your Products — and it’s live right now. I’m beyond excited!

You can listen to the interview at WAHM Talk Radio right now.
Kelly and I talked about how Presenting Your Products started, the problems it solves and I gave her a couple of tips that are included in the product.

PYP will feature audio interviews with three WAHM experts in product photography, labeling and shipping, transcripts from those interviews, study guides and video tutorials.

We are also holding a free teleseminar at 8 p.m. Central Time, Thursday, January 25. Not only will you get to hear questions from WAHMs and their answers, but you’ll also receive a special offer that will only be given to those who attend the teleseminar.

If you miss the teleseminar, you won’t be eligible for the prize — but you’ll still get to listen to the great information, as we’ll include a recording of the event in Presenting Your Products.