Adobe Releases Free Online Version of Photoshop: Photoshop Express

Photoshop has been the gold standard of professional photography software. Several years back, they expanded their brand’s reach by releasing a scaled down version (for a much cheaper price tag) called Photoshop Elements.

Now Adobe is gunning for even more by releasing Photoshop Express, a free online version of Photoshop.

Aimed squarely at the core audience for already-established free photo-editing software like Google’s Picasa, Photoshop Express is a web-based application that uses Flash as a platform.

You create an account and upload your photos. From there, you have some basic editing tools at your fingertips such as cropping, color adjustment, red-eye reduction, and much more.

You can also then create a gallery and export your edited pictures to that gallery for all the world to see. In this way, Express is a lot like Flickr or PhotoBucket or any other photo-sharing website.

It’s a crowded marketplace, so Adobe has their work cut out for them. After all, any Windows user can already perform most of the same kinds of basic picture edits using Microsoft Office Picture Manager, which comes with the Microsoft Office suite of programs.

But Adobe has their brand name going for them. Everyone knows of Photoshop. And now, what was once an expensive and complicated software for the elite has a new younger brother that is trim and simple and, best of all, free.

So I tested it out for you. I created my account, and uploaded a few photos. The main photo on this post is one of the results of my edits. I tried to use as many Photoshop Express features as I could on that picture, but if I’m honest… a lot of them weren’t terribly useful. The main feature to rave about is the “color pop” control. You can see that I’ve made everything in the photo black and white except for the jellyfish. That’s a nice touch, I think, and not something I can do easily with some of the other basic photo-editing suites.

I did feel like the Flash interface really slowed things down for me. There’s a lot of wasted time spent waiting around for sections of the site to load, and that was aggravating. Maybe I just have a slow connection today… but I doubt it. Flash elements are notorious for slowing down a site’s performance.

Overall, though… for something that’s free, you can’t beat it. And since the project is still in beta (testing mode), you can be sure that customer feedback will help fine-tune things quite a bit. So the end product will likely be even better.

Check it out yourself here.

Oh, and here’s the original photo for my example above… almost a shame I chose this picture, because the original is pretty darn good to begin with.