James Skemp's StrivingLife

Recently the much anticipated Photoshop Express was released. However, crawling through the general terms of use there's a rather troublesome paragraph.

Using the terms that are effective 3/1/2008, at http://www.photoshop.com/express/terms.html, we have the following at 8.a.:

Adobe does not claim ownership of Your Content. However, with respect to Your Content that you submit or make available for inclusion on publicly accessible areas of the Services, you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed.

(Emphasis is my own.)

I'm lucky enough to have a copy of Photoshop CS2, but this paragraph has effectively removed it as an alternative while on someone else's machine, or as something I can recommend to others, professionally.

Now if the individual has their photo on some of the various 2.0 photo social networks, then I can recommend this, since their photos are effectively for anyone to do with as they will ('dump your friends').

But, as someone who wants to protect his work product ...

Duh.

Unfortunately, much like Google Video, you can get sucked into the program and end up spending hours (2 and a half in my case) goofing around, getting nothing of real value done. Of course, that begs the question of whether experience, as experience, is of any value. Do we, simply by experiencing, benefit? I suppose when it comes to use a technology, like Photoshop, any experience is a good experience. (But what if you're using the tools incorrectly?)

I had my photo taken back in June 2006. I finally downloaded them to my home computer and started goofing off. Here's a before and after image.

I don't know, I don't think it's too bad at all. Photoshop CS2, with special thanks to my Wacom Graphire4. I shudder to think how difficult this would have been with a simple mouse. Now if only I could afford a Cintiq ...

Closing note: thanks to Google for paying for a year's worth of hosting. Thanks to AdSense, I received my first $100+ check a couple of days ago (which covered through August 31). Normally, that would be almost $100 out of my own pocket, which I'd just have to put up (since I'm not leaving the Web for a long while), but G has successfully enabled me to keep writing, with only a cost of time.

Anywho, I'll have to take some of my own photos and see if I can play around with Photoshop a bit more ...