Hey all! Today I am taking a look at something I’ve wanted to look at for a bit now, that is the new web app: Poster Artist. It was released on April 1st but I am somewhat happy to report that it was not an April fools joke, it is an actual product. So, let’s open it up and see if they did better than Adobes horrible Creative Cloud Express app.
UI:
To begin, Canon did make the design very similar to Canva. My hope is that it has a similar feature set to Canva. You may know that Canva now has a pretty decent video editor with masking as well as quite a lot of new editor features so Canon has a lot to live up to.
Import & Edit:
First I want to import a photo, I am happy to see some integration with cloud services (interesting to see no Adobe cloud). You don’t seem to have a photo import setting like Canon does… hopefully I can import photos though.
So, I opened up the collage editor and am delighted to see Pixabay integration. That is cool since I do have some Pixabay photography. I imported a random photo and do notice that there is CR2 support which is interesting from Canon. Also, unlike Canva, your files aren’t stored forever but instead for just a week which could be frustrating.
The vignette/border settings are super useful. Could be convenient for quick edits.
There are two kinda cool features, the cut out and filling. The cut out feature could be useful but is just way too basic to do anything with.
The fill color feature is somewhat cool but what would I ever use this for in photography. The app is designed for poster designing and it does seem to have the right features for that but I really don’t see any photo manipulation features that are useful.
So far, it is pretty but mostly bug free. The only buggy thing is CTR Z doesn’t work which is pretty annoying and also changes the border of the image to a circle. I love the idea behind the editor but why so limited. The devs could have added feathering to the tools to actually make them a bit more useful but I don’t see a feathering option…
A plus I see is the selection of background is pretty good. I like a lot of the background options here.
The clip art section is somewhat okay. These preloaded ones are pretty lack luster but Pixabay does have a decent selection.
Then, text works great. I love the selection of options but I can’t find an opacity slider for the life of me. This seems like such a basic feature to not have! The font selection is pretty great though, I liked this Cabin Sketch font. Annoyingly, no font import which seems like a feature a lot of people would use 🙁
One more feature to point out, this QR code generator. Seems pretty useful and one thing that Canva doesn’t have.
The let down, since there seems to be one for every good feature, you can’t customize the qr code or even change the background color like you can with images.
So, I bypassed this dumb restriction by taking a screenshot, pasted it and changed the qr code to a green background with the photo edit feature and it still scans without issues.
I don’t understand why Canon has these features that are limited to your uploaded photos only. 😮💨
Finishing edit:
Now that I’ve shown you the features, I’ll finish up a collage to see how well this actually comes out.
Unfortunately, with the lack of quality settings for export you end up with a pretty compressed edit. Yikes.
Canon vs Adobe vs Canva:
So, I am having trouble deciding who this app was aimed at. My guess is Adobe and Canon is trying to make a better app than Adobes since Canva has a lot more actually photo manipulation features. I was actually thinking Canon could make a pretty good web app but it really lacks a ton of features. So, the big benefit to this is compared to Adobe’s web editor, Canon did create a very smooth and relatively bug free app. If I was designing a poster I’d still probably not use this app. I use opacity every 10 seconds normally and literally can’t live without an opacity slider. I see no benifit to ever open this app again with the extreme export compression ruining the somewhat good parts of this app.
What’s wrong with web apps?
So, now that we’ve discovered the lack luster app from Canon we have a question: what is wrong with web photo editing?? Apps like Photopea are decently good apart from bugs and lag slowing them down but smoother apps just are too basic. The technology is there but every time a new company enters the market I am left super disappointing. PWA’s are not the issue since we have enough proof of concept from Googles suite of apps as well as apps I use like WordPress that are pretty great apps. I honestly don’t know how to answer my own question apart from speculation that companies haven’t put enough resources into developing their apps. For now, stick with Canva… it truly is the best on the market at the moment, especially with the new video editor built in and other recent improvements.
That is all then, a disappointing look at an app I had hope for. Hope you enjoyed this post! Thanks for reading!
-Digital Wonders & Smiles
Digital Wonders and Smiles 