Peer Review

Adobe Photoshop Express App for iOS

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Reviewed:: Feb 2, 2015 by Teacher Education

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Ratings

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Content Quality:

Effectiveness:

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Overview:: Photoshop Express is a free app for editing photos from Adobe. The app runs on iPad, iPhone, and iPod Touch. Photoshop Express provides basic photo editing tools and useful enhancement tools. Photoshop Express is available Android devices as well.
Type of Material:: developmental tool
Recommended Uses:: The app offers photo editing for cropping, red-eye, pet-eye, blemishes, exposure, contrast, saturation, rotating, flipping, and adding selected borders to images. Furthermore, there are an array of color enhancements choices that can be selected, if desired. This app could be useful for pre-service and in-service teachers and teacher educators for photos used within instruction.
Technical Requirements:: Requires iOS 7.0 or later. Compatible with iPad 2 or later, and iPad Mini or Windows 8 tablet with 2GB RAM (recommended). Also compatible with iPhone 4 or later; Windows Phone 8; or Android phone running 4.0 or later. This app is optimized for iPhone 5.
Identify Major Learning Goals:: To create pictures of desktop published quality. To make photo editing on iPhone, iPad or Android fun, fast and easy.
Target Student Population:: upper elementary through adults
Prerequisite Knowledge or Skills:: None. You can work from photos on your devices or actually take photos within the app and edit directly.

Content Quality

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Strengths:: PS Express makes touch-up work on photos easy. Fix photos fast—crop, straighten, rotate, flip, adjust color, and remove red eye and pet eye. Adjust hue, brightness, white balance, and more with easy slider controls. Enhance in fun artistic ways with Looks like Vibrant, Superpunch, and Glow. Add a finishing touch with borders and frames. Sharing can be done by posting to favorite social sites like Instagram, Facebook, Tumblr, and Twitter. Images can also be emailed or sent by text to family and friends. Users can easily edit pictures by recording narration of the story, one line at a time.
Concerns:: None.

Potential Effectiveness as a Teaching Tool

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Strengths:: The app is free with many tools that elementary through university students and educators can use immediately to enhance research, presentations, blogs, and other forms of digital work and assignments. One of the best things about this app is that you can edit and enhance your photos in a non-destructive manner. You can see what the edits or changes will look like and if you do not like them, you simply go back to where you were. Educators could utilize this as supplements to learning content and/or use pictures to aid dual coding for lesson materials and this would easily fit into all content areas. Students could use the app to create desktop published projects to demonstrate content learning -- for example, create a brochure explaining a concept in any subject. Users can share and collaborate on tasks. The app also offers some In-App purchases for further photo enhancement. The Adobve Looks Pack has more than 20 unique photo looks. The Adobe Advance Pack ($4.99) addresses noise reduction and speckling in night photos. There is an Effect Pack ($2.99), a Border Pack (99 cents) and for those really serious about using their devices for photography editing there are two Adobe Revel Packs ($5.99 and $59.99). This app can easily be integrated into whatever curriculum area is being addressed if there is a digital assignment or presentation included. Photography basics and composition concepts can be introduced via this app. The app can help both students and instructors become more aware of the quality of the photos they use in their educational pursuits.
Concerns:: None.

Ease of Use for Both Students and Faculty

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Strengths:: The design of this app is intuitive. With a simple tap or slide, icons and sliders are used to adjust selected edits. Users can actually see the changes to determine appropriateness. Or users have the "auto" selection for each effect or edit. This is good for novice users or those that are unsure of how much to edit. The app has an online community-powered support system for the app at http://feedback.photoshop.com/photoshop_family Tutorials are available online, which makes it easy to learn how to use the various tools/options if a user needs further insight. Pictures can be saved to device or emailed as well as shared via Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr, Revel, and Flickr.
Concerns:: None.

Other Issues and Comments:: Extremely easy to use for mobile devices. There are added features with a paid version but most users will find the free version sufficient. User needs to set permissions on device for app to access pictures.
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