My Mini Photoshop Express (Beta) Review

Now they've done it. Adobe released an on-line version of PhotoShop. Here is my take on it.

First off, PhotoShop Express is not at all like PhotoShop. The full version of PhotoShop is a pixel editor. PhotoShop Express it is an image editor, so don't expect the to be able to make changes as fine as you could with PhotoShop CS3. Now that I have cleared that up... PhotoShop Express is for people looking to edit and share their photographs. It is all done on-line, no software to install (well, you need Flash installed with a Web Browser such as Firefox). And its FREE! So, how does it all work? Let me tell ya!

First, open an account here. Registration is fast and simple. Then upload some photos. PhotoShop Express is giving people 2 GB of storage on the web, a nice amount to play with for sure! You can also use it to edit your photos on Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa.

What can you do with your images? Check out this list!

• Crop and Rotate
• Auto Correct
• Exposure
• Red Eye Removal
• Touchup
  
• Saturation
• White Balance
• Highlight
• Fill Light
• Sharpen
• Soft Focus
• Pop Color
• Hue
• Black and White
• Tint
• Sketch
• Distort

Some list, huh?

Now that you have edited your images you can also organize them into online albums and choose what to share or not to. You can also download the edited image onto your computer. There are a couple of restrictions. You can't upload images larger then 4000 pixels per side (not a problem for most cameras). You can also upload .jpg images only, no .tiff, .png, raw, etc.

I uploaded three images and played around with the features a bit. (The upload speed depends on how fast your connection is to the web and how large the image is.) I cropped a family portrait and converted it to Black and White in less then a minute. I then downloaded it to my PC and found the quality to be quite nice! The other affects were fun to use and produced some good images.

Die hard PhotoShop mavens need not look here, but for the average person who does not want to learn a program as daunting as PhotoShop its a great place to start! More and more applications are moving onto the web, its only natural that Adobe released a site as great as this. I give it 5 stars!