Adobe Photoshop Express & more

One thing that I have stumbled upon lately was the Photoshop Express Beta website from Adobe. The link takes you to some of my uploads where I have just tried out things. I am including in this post a picture I took of a red truck carrying some huge big pipes or faucets/joints or whatever that is.

I grabbed this shot while driving to work. I was obviously driving on the freeway (70mph or higher) when I notice this nice machine driving in front of me, as I merge onto the freeway. I immediately slowed down to the posted speed limit and matched his speed. I grabbed my camera took it out, and looked through the viewfinder. [Do not try this at home! ... nor in the car.] The whole image will move along with your camera. I took about three shots from this angle and a few others from up closer while driving in parallel. I picked this one to be the best and I uploaded it on Photoshop Express and tweaked with it a little bit. What I liked the most was what Adobe calls "pop color". The result is what you see in the first image. Below is the original. Something to keep in mind is that in order to create a pretty cool effect you must already have a little bit of a "pop color" in your composition. Had there been any red in other parts of the picture (other cars, shining in the wheels, or traffic signs) they would have been "popped" out as well.

The only problem I have with this image is that it does not have a precise focus. There is no particular focused center. The reason is that when I shot something else the day before (I forgot what it was, it must have been some closer work - I can't say "close up" or macro, since I was using the same lens, Canon stock 18-55) and I focused manually. I had forgotten to set the lens back to auto focus so there it is, a rather unsharp image if taken into a closer look. My luck was that I had used somewhat of a narrower aperture (f13), which focused the light enough for me to be able to use this photograph.


Some other cool things that you can do with Adobe Photoshop Express beside the regular and expected saturation, crop, rotate is distort your images, create sketches, add a little soft focus (as much as digitally possible) and so on.


Here is what I did with this spontaneous shot.














A little hue.















A little stretch.















The possibilities are many. What would we do without these gadgets to tickle our sense of reality?