Free Photoshop Express App

The desktop version of Photoshop is a pretty pricey program, so it is surprising that the Photoshop Express app is free (there is a $9.99 version as well, Photoshop Touch, which is more robust).  Admittedly, the online message boards are alight with dissatisfied users who preferred the previous version of Photoshop Express, but personally I found it easy and fun to use, with an intuitive interface and useful, if limited, set of tools. It is available for both Apple and Android devices, and both tablet and phone.

There are more tools available on the tablet version (screenshot at right) than there are the phone version (screenshot at left).  Both allow you to do basic cropping/rotating/straightening and color correction.  Both have a variety of special effects and borders from which to choose.  Available (and free!) at the iTunes Store and Google Play.

10 Quick Solutions to Photoshop Problems

The Photoshop learning curve can be steep, and fraught with frustration. What happened to my cursor? Where did the History panel go? My paintbrush isn't working!

How To Geek recently ran the article 10 Common Photoshop Frustrations (and How to Fix Them in Five Minutes), which shows quick solutions to common problems.

The problems they address:

• Your Cursor Disappears or Changes Shape
• Your Panels Keep Disappearing
• Your Brush Tool (Or Others) Have Stopped Working
• Clipboard Export Error When Switching Programs
• Documents and New Files Always Open In Tabs
• Important Image Files Aren’t Associated With Photoshop
• No Control Over Automatic “Smart Quotes”
• You Are Constantly Resizing Your Windows After Zoom
• The Scratch Disk Is Full
• Photoshop Runs Slow on Underpowered Machines

The article is succinct and the solutions are easy to understand and follow.

Reader Feedback

Several short tech tidbits today.

First, Qik (http://qik.com/), an odd and very interesting little application sent to me by Steve Newman, where you can send a live feed through your cellphone, and then post on the Qik site. Looking through the posted videos, there are lots of family videos (babies, cute kids, sports, etc.) and quite a few folks just talking into their cell phone cameras. But there clearly are useful purposes for this, documenting events as they happen, like speeches, natural disasters, breaking news, auto accidents.

Videos can be easily emailed from the site. It plays well with MySpace, Orkut, and other social networking sites.

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From a NY Times article sent to me by Diana Laughlin, three cool features I didn't know about the Google Search box.

One, it functions as a calculator. Type in 2+2, 2*5, 1021/21, etc, and it will spit out the answer. * performs multiplication, / performs division, "sqrt" calculates square roots, etc.

Two, it functions as a dictionary. Type in "define:" and the word you want to define after the colon, and it will deliver definitions from multiple sources.

Three, it does metric conversion. Type in, say, "13 gallons," and it will return a value of "11.3562354 liters"

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Finally, from Loretta Lohman, a cautionary website called Photoshop Disasters (http://photoshopdisasters.blogspot.com/), an amusing website with a serious mission: documenting obvious Photoshop errors in real life advertisements and photos. Lots of missing limbs and misplaced shadows. My favorite is of Kate Winslet and her husband, where his arm is wearing a sportscoat but the rest of him is not. The educational value here is to increase your awareness of easy mistakes you can make in photo manipulation.