Need a Quick Photo Fix? Photoshop Express to the Rescue!

Photoshop Express Brings Photo Editing as Close as Your Browser

If you need quick fixes for some photos and don't have a photo editor installed on the system du jour, what can you do? Adobe has the solution: Photoshop Express. Photoshop Express is a free web-based photo editing, uploading, and sharing solution. Get started here.

Register or Test Drive - Your Choice!

You don't need to register to give Photoshop Express a try. After you enter the site, click the Test Drive button to work with a wide variety of existing photos already on the site. You can't save your changes, but you can see for yourself what it can do. When you register, you can upload your own photos (you get 2GB of space), browse galleries, and use Photoshop Express's wide variety of photo repair tools to fix common problems.

Picture Tools

To rotate, e-mail, link, embed, download, or use a picture in other ways, just click it and select the option desired.

Basic Picture Editing

To edit a photo with problems (or just to change it for fun), select Edit Photo. Basic changes include:

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  • Crop & Rotate supports traditional photo sizes, and features an adjustable grid for straightening crooked photos.
  • Other adjustments, such as Auto Correct, Exposure, and Saturation, offer a variety of previews of different adjustment levels. As you move your mouse across the previews, the main photo changes accordingly.
  • Touchup offers a low-end version of Adobe's healing brush.
  • Red-Eye Removal provides one-click removal of you-know-what.

Beyond the Basics

The Tuning menu provides a variety of preset adjustments for:

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  • White balance
  • Highlights
  • Fill light
  • Sharpening
  • Soft focus.

The Effects menu adjusts:

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  • Color
  • Hue
  • Tint
  • Sketch effects
  • Distortions
  • Black and white conversions

Sharing Your Photos

You can specify which of your albums to share using the My Gallery menu. You can also use Photoshop Express to edit photos you have displayed on other popular sites including Facebook, Photobucket, or Picasa.

Photoshop Express, a Photoshop Elements Killer?

That's like asking if apple eaters never try oranges.

Photoshop Express puts a nice combination of features and ease of use at your fingertips - but if you need to really fix up a bad photo, you'll miss familiar tools like Levels, white balance by skin tone, and others.

Photoshop Express can't use TIFF or RAW files, either: it's only for JPEG photos. You can't upload anything larger than 10MP or 4000 pixels in height and width: anything larger than 2880x2880 is resized, and don't try to feed it more than 100 photos at a time.

It's designed for Windows XP, Vista, MacOS 10.4 or later, 1024x768 or larger screen, IE 6 or 7, Firefox 2 or later, or Safari 3.0.4 on Macs (if you're trying Safari 3.1 for Windows, tell us - and Adobe - if Photoshop Express works for you).

It's no application killer, but it's a handy extension to whatever you're using now that can bail you out of a tight spot, give you another place to stash some photos, and provides a generally responsive way to have some fun with your pictures. It's a beta, so it can only get better. And best of all, it's web-based, so it's always ready.