Today the crowd at Photoshop World got a quick preview of Photoshop Express, a new application currently in development at Adobe. First hinted at by Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen some six months ago, Photoshop Express isn’t meant to duplicate/replace Photoshop CS3 or Photoshop Elements. Rather, it’s a new member of the Photoshop family that’s meant to make Adobe imaging technology immediately accessible to large numbers of people.

Earlier this year, Adobe introduced Premiere Express, a free, Flash-based online video editor for creating mash-ups and remixes. Anyone using Photobucket, MTV.com and YouTube’s TestTube site can take Premiere Express for a spin. Photoshop Express, though not yet publicly available, aims to offer a similarly easy, approachable experience for image editing.

Adobe Sr. VP John Loiacono showed that it was possible to adjust an image just by rolling over the different versions shown at the top, previewing the results & then clicking the desired degree of modification. I’ll post more info as it becomes available.

The public beta can be used free of charge using nothing more than your browser with the latest Flash 9 player and a broadband connection to the Internet. Even better, there’s no manual to read (or even a Read Me), nothing to install and nothing to update.

Free, lots of storage, lots of cool Photoshop-inspired effects and tools, share your photos with your friends. It’s what Flickr would be if it was created by a multimedia company instead of your regular Web 2.0 crowd.

Kudos to Adobe for getting out there in the Software-as-a-Service market with another cool Flex-based offering, showing what the technology can really do.

Update: You can see the quick onstage demo of Photoshop Express in Terry White’s latest Creative Suite Podcast (direct link to video). The demo starts around 16:10 mark.

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Read the full review of the Adobe Photoshop Express.

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Digital cameras typically produce one of two types of files — JPGs or so-called RAW files. Most amateurs work with JPGs and professionals frequently work with RAW files. Here’s why.

The advantage of JPG files is that they are small and can be read by just about any program. The reason that they are small is because they are created by what is called “lossy” compression. That is, some data is lost when the file is created. Not a huge amount, but if the compression is set too high it can be noticeable. Therefore Canon Raw Photoshop is used. The reason that just about any program can read and load them is that JPG is an industry standard format. (JPG is also the standard file format of the Web). JPG files are therefore convenient, which is why they have appeal to amateurs.

But having your digital camera save in JPG format means that all of the in-camera settings for colour balance, colour temperature, sharpening and so forth are processed by the camera and imbedded in the file. Changing these somewhat after the fact in Photoshop is possible, but the image will deteriorate in quality.

RAW files are in a proprietary format that is unique to each manufacturer, and often unique to each specific camera model. These files are compressed “losslessly”. That is, they are smaller than when expanded to a standard TIFF file in Photoshop (usually by a factor of 3:1), but no information is lost in this compression. The real advantage of using a RAW format file is that it has received almost no processing by the camera. No sharpening or White Balance will have been applied. What you have with a Canon RAW Photoshop file is essentially a digital camera’s “negative” or original.

You also can work with the file in 16 bit mode, whereas JPG files are always 8 bit. All of this means that when you work on the file in Photoshop you are starting with a much higher quality original than with a JPG file and also have much greater flex ability in applying corrections and adjustments without significantly degrading the final image quality.

Learn more about digital software Photoshop.

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Bibble Labs announces the first RAW Workflow update of 2007, adding support for the latest RAW enabled camera formats, and including - for the first time - several of the most popular 3rd Party Plug-ins for Bibble. Like all Version 4 Upgrades, 4.9.5 is free for all existing Bibble 4 customers.

Among the free plugins included in this update are:

• Andy, a Black & White Film Simulation tool that instantly creates stunning black and white conversions by simulating the look of many traditional film and paper combinations
• Gina for Skin Tone Correction that can quickly and beautifully reveal more natural skin tones
• Roy for Color Adjustment to deepen the blue in skies or to make other color-based adjustments.

Bibble is available in both Pro for $129.95 and Lite for $69.95  versions for Windows.

For further information visit http://www.bibblelabs.com

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