I’ve spent a few minutes playing with Splashup, an online photo editor, and like it. You can open, manipulate and save photos from your computer or online services such as Flickr. Image quality controls are limited to brightness and contrast and hue and saturation, but there are a full range of tools and filters for more creative work.
There are limitations. File format is limited to web-standard PNGs and JPEGs and files are saved at 72 dpi regardless of original resolution. It’s fine for web work, with images that need only a little touch-up, but not so good for sending images back to the print folk. And there are few of the fine-tuning features that make Photoshop the standard.
This is no replacement for a full-fledged editor, but it seems to have some promise for laptop-bearing journalists: with access to a basic image editor wherever there is internet access, there’s may be no need to take up disk space with a heavyweight like Photoshop (my version of Photoshop CS is 178MB). The more we can clear off the hard drive, the more space there is for all those images and all that audio and video we now need to capture.
I’m not sure how often I’ll use Splashup, but it’s bookmarked.
TAGS: PHOTOJOURNALISM, TOOLS
