Review of Fauxto, the web based Photoshop Clone

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Fauxto … like photo is a fully featured, free range, web-based image and photo editor. It joins other online photo and image editors like WebImageFX in the crowded image editing web based applications. According to Fauxto’s developers, their aim is to develop a free range editing capability and a YouTube like usage model of create/share anytime/anywhere.

Unlike these other online image editors, the one significant difference is that you can create brand new images from scratch instead of having to manipulate or having to edit existing images. It is also the first online image editor that includes Photoshop-style layers and filter support. Fauxto is your scaled down Photoshop in a browser and it’s pretty well done and above all, it is FREE.

Fauxto was written in Flex and is completely Flash based and the application loads inside your web browser. Another plus is that you can launch multiple images as tabs allowing you to easily switch between one image to another. Here is a sample image edited using Fauxto

Upside:

1. The smudge tool is pretty awesome. The overall Effects menu includes Bevel, Blur, Drop Shadow, Glow, Gradient Bevel, Gradient Glow.

2. Since Fauxto incorporates Flash’s lightweight vector engine, it is a lot faster at real time image compositing.

3. While uploading your existing pictures, there is no limit on the image size. This is an enhancement from their previous limitation of any picture greater than 1000 pixels. Now, any image larger than 1000 pixels is scaled proportionally.

Negatives:

1. Images can only be 1000 x 1000 at most

2. The Undo feature is only supported to 5 steps.

3. No right click actions

4. No selection tool. Hence, you cannot move what you created. However, you can use the Free Transform tool to move, Rotate, Skew and Scale your layer around

5. Lack of ability to save as options such as JPEG etc.

6. There is no preview option before you save. I guess this will come with the undo feature.

According to their Blog, some upcoming features include a Help option, Zoom, Selection and Size Constraints and integration with other Photo Management sites possibly Flickr, Photobucket and Google’s Picassa. Other upcoming upgrades include ability to save as JPEG and ability to see preview before you save.

Overall, a very interesting application and with a huge potential to be the frontrunner for image editing 2.0. It would also make a good acquisition target for either Google, Microsoft or any other company which is looking to have its own web based avatar of Photoshop. Abobe for its part is currently working on something like Fauxto. The code name is Apollo which is Adobe’s cross-operating system runtime app allowing developers to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications to the desktop leveraging web technologies such as Flash, Flex, HTML, JS and AJAX. For pictures of Apollo, check out Ryan Stewart’s blog here

Links:

1. Link to Fauxto, the fully featured image editor on the web

2. Link to WebImageFx , an online image editing application similar to Fauxto

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