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Have you always wanted to harness the power of Photoshop, but couldn’t justify parting with hundreds of dollars just for an image editing program? Or maybe you considered purchasing Photoshop Elements, but still felt the price wasn’t quite right. Well, Adobe has helped to alleviate some of your Photoshop pain with the release of Photoshop Express, an online, and free, image editing program. Although Express may not pack the same punch as Photoshop CS3, or even Elements, it has more than enough tools for everyday photo editing.

You can start exploring Photoshop Express by heading over to its website, but make sure you have Adobe Flash Player 9 installed if you want the site to work.  The first thing you’ll notice on the website is its incredible presentation. The front-page consists of a variety of photos that have been edited with Express. By clicking on a photo, you will be shown three different versions, the original and two that have been modified by Express. By hovering over each photo, you can see what effect has been applied. This is a nice taste of the program for users, allowing them to see what Express is capable of, before even touching the program itself.

You do have to create an account in order to use Photoshop Express, however, Adobe offers a nice “Test Drive” feature that allows you to try out the program without having to provide any information. While you can’t upload your own photos during this Test Drive, you can play around with a wide variety of sample photos which Adobe provides. After experimenting with the Test Drive feature, click on “Join Now”, provide some information, and in about four minutes you’ll be up and running. Before you can start using Express, you’ll have to check your email to verify your account. Adobe states that, due to the incredible interest in the program, this email could take up to 60 minutes to arrive. Mine came in about six seconds.

Once you’ve verified your account, you’re ready to go. Adobe provides a generous 2GB of storage for every user. In addition, it also features a variety of collaborative tools. You can share you photos with other sites, such as Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa. You also have the option of making your albums public, sharing them only with friends in the form of email, or both. You can also download your photos and, before downloading, are provided with three choices for what size you would like your photo to be. All of this may sound great, but how does the editing hold up? Thankfully, extremely well.

Express is an incredibly deep Internet application and even trumps many offline applications in terms of usability and presentation. You can start editing you photos either inside your browser window, or you can switch to full-screen mode, both of which work very well. When editing, you have three main categories: Basics, Tuning and Effects. Basics contains tools such as crop/rotate, red-eye removal and touch up. Tuning includes such tools as white balance, sharpen and highlight. Finally, Effects provides you with a variety of filters and tools, such as pop color, black and white and distort. I found pop color to be especially interesting. What pop color does is isolate different colors in the picture and turn the rest of the picture black and white, similar to the style seen in Sin City. You can also do the opposite and make just a certain portion of the picture black and white and leave the rest with color.

Every time you make a change to a photo, whether it be applying a distortion or simply changing the sharpness, a check mark appears next to the change. This makes it very convenient to undo your changes, since all you have to do is uncheck the box next to the change. You can also click on “View Original”, which will show you what the original photo looked like compared to what it looks like after you’ve started editing it.

Express makes it very easy to edit your photos, since virtually every effect and tool gives you about half a dozen thumbnail preview images. For example, if you wanted to adjust the white balance of a photo, Express would provide you with a row of thumbnail images, each with different white levels. Hovering over each thumbnail photo will change the appearance of the main photo and clicking on the thumbnail you want and then clicking on a green check mark will make the change permanent.

As I stated earlier, you can create albums in Photoshop Express. In order to move photos into an album, you simply drag and drop those that you want from your library into the desired album. Whether in your library or an album, you are presented with row after row of thumbnail images of your photos. You can adjust the size of these thumbnails however you’d like and can also sort them in a variety of ways. Hovering over a thumbnail will cause a button called “Photo Options” to appear at the bottom of the image. Clicking on this button will provide you with a variety of options such as email, download or remove. You can also easily rotate photos within this simple menu. To start editing a photo, you can either choose “Edit Photo” from the “Photo Options” menu, or simply double-click the thumbnail image.

Express also has a nice slideshow feature that has four different layouts: single, strip, grid and ring. For strip, grid and ring, you can choose between 2D and 3D animation for the show. You can also change the size of the photos, the duration of each photo and whether to have captions displayed during the show.

Photoshop Express is actually still in beta, but using the program, you’d be hard pressed to tell (most of the time). Everything about Express screams quality. The animations are slick and fluid, there are tooltips for virtually every option (so you should never feel lost) and there are a wide variety of tools and options available, ranging from collaborative tools to fun and useful effects. The only gripe I currently have is that Express can at times be quite slow. It took almost 30 seconds to upload just one image and about 10 seconds to save changes to a photo. Furthermore, when applying a filter such as distort, Express will sometimes start to chug as it works in real time to apply your changes to the photo; although this could vary considerably depending on what type of Internet connection you are using. Photoshop Express is a great product for someone looking for an easy, yet powerful tool to edit their photos with. Since Express is web-based, you can access and edit your photos anywhere, as well as easily share your photos with others. Despite a few blemishes, Adobe Photoshop Express delivers a rich photo-editing experience that should not be missed.

Filed under: Apple, Computers, Mac OS X, Microsoft, Reviews, Technology Tagged: | Adobe, Adobe Flash Player, Facebook, Photobucket, Photoshop, Photoshop CS3, Photoshop Element, Photoshop Express, Picasa