Photo Editing Today: What We Can Do Now

Huge camera and tiny people taking pictures. Photographer with camera, photos of landscapes flat vector illustration. Photography, occupation concept for banner, website design or landing web page
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Technology and the Internet: What They've Done For Photo Editing

Before the advent of  software like Adobe Photoshop in the 1990s, photo editing meant magnifying glasses and art supplies. You needed skilled artists and a whole lot of patience to change a photo. Software like Photoshop turned that paradigm on its head. Now, you just need people skilled in using these applications to edit photos. The bar is lower in other words. 

The Internet has taken the requirements for digital photo editing: in-application skill and money, and lowered them dramatically. Now we have hundreds of photo editing applications on the web, accessible from anywhere, with many offering freemium plans (free software features for anyone to use but withholding the advanced features for the paying users), accessible and simple user interfaces (UI, the part of the application users interact with), to draw in thousands of users of all skill levels. I myself have been requested to edit photos for classes in high school and college, an easy task nowadays. I simply search for "free photo editing tool" in my browser to be rewarded with dozens of options including Canva, Adobe software, Pixlr, and several other smaller photo editing applications. Professional photo editors still exist, but anyone who is slightly tech savvy can make most of the photo edits they want like removing objects, cropping, coloring, removing, or blurring the background, flipping the orientation, zooming in or out, or adding filters. All that? For free, and likely takes less than thirty minutes if you know what you're doing.

These advancements in the dissemination of photo editing tools has made anyone who wants or needs to be a photo editor a photo editing master, depending on how much money and research they want to devote to learning their application of choice. Now let's take a look at this application I tried out recently.

Adobe Express

Adobe is a major tech company that creates software applications with a focus on digital design. They are behind Photoshop and several other big design applications offered on the web. Adobe Express is one of these, a slideshow/presentation maker that also happens to offer several of the photo edits I mentioned above, for free for the most part as they are a freemium application.

In testing this application, I made a slideshow on some simple photo composition techniques, which I hosted online thanks to the Adobe Express "create a link" feature. You can take a look at it here: Photo Editing Techniques Slideshow. Now, I was personally both annoyed and impressed by Adobe Express when working on this slideshow. 

They have so many features for slideshow creation, so many elements and media, audio snippets, animations, images, that I was happy to create my slideshow with so many options for extra media right there in a sidebar. I was also frustrated because of how laggy and slow the application was by the time my number of slides reached sixteen. Adobe Express is completely cloud-based, which means that it runs entirely through the Internet and not as an app. Performance is dependent on how many computing resources have been devoted to a browser and its tabs. That is not much by default, and changing that can be difficult depending on your browser and device. I was left with the default, which in the case of Adobe Express, meant that I was wondering if my browser was going to crash every time I changed slides. To compare, Canva, a digital application that has a completely cloud based option. It has a vast number of features and resources to. And yet, I have used this option on the same browser and device to great effect, on large projects no less, without excessive lag. 

Lag aside, Adobe Express has some on the best freemium photo editing features I have seen for an application not even devoted to those features. They allow you to remove objects from image backgrounds, very well to, and offer a wide variety of customizable filters, in addition to the basic photo editing tools I mentioned above. 

Adobe Express could use some significant improvements in terms of usability and accessibility. You need a wide screen to effectively work with this application. They just have too many features to fit on a mobile phone, not to mention their touch screen navigation leaves something to be desired. A constant Internet connection, preferably a high-speed one to, is needed to use the application. These restrictions mean that Adobe Express is best used in environments like offices, not on the go. Alt tagging and labeling is inconsistent. Keyboard navigation is can be frustrating and appears to lack any customization. Text for important icons is too small to be read by anyone with visual impairments.

I would personally recommend Adobe Express to people in office or home environments who do not need any accessibility features. They should also not need any real professional grade slideshow control, audio or video editing features, but middle-level works fine. Adobe Express I could see being used by businesses who need presentations in-house, or otherwise simple slideshows. Overall though, Adobe Express is something I will go back to for slideshows in the future, just maybe with a better browser.

Photo Composition

In addition to photo editing tools, photo composition techniques have become more and more accessible to the wider public thanks to the Internet. To clarify, photo composition simply refers to the arrangement of elements in an image. Different arrangements evoke different feelings among viewers. This can be achieved by not only rearranging objects in an image, but also by changing the angle the image is taken. A photo composition technique called Point-of-View refers to the changing of angle to things like bird's-eye view (looking down to evoke a detached perspective), worm's-eye-view (looking up, evokes feelings of grandeur), and eye-level (what someone else is seeing, puts viewers in their shoes), as some examples. 

Changing the point of view is a great way to alter the way viewers interact with a scene and how they feel about it during. Point-of-View is very popular in cinematography for this exact reason (Masoner, 2019). Below is an example of bird's-eye-view.

Overhead View of Central Park in Manhattan, New York, a huge beautiful park surrounded by skyscraper with a pond.
wirestock on Freepik

Conclusion

The way we change our photos has evolved dramatically over the past thirty years. Technology has put photo editing in the realm of the standard consumer, not just the professional. The Internet is a hub for anyone who wants to so much as blur a background, heck, Microsoft's Windows has a photo editing app included. There are no shortage of ways to edit a photo nowadays. You just have to find them.

References

Masoner, L. (2019, October 20). How to Use Point of View to Improve Your Photos. The Spruce Crafts. https://www.thesprucecrafts.com/explanation-of-point-of-view-photography-4072926

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