Although Adobe Photoshop has long been a household name in desktop photo editing, it’s been facing serious competition from free Web-based photo editors, namely the critically acclaimed Picnik. Photoshop Express is Adobe’s answer to such popular Web apps; the free editor offers casual photographers 2GB of storage, seamless integration with popular photo-sharing sites, and a clean, ad-free interface. We only wish Photoshop Express’ effects were as comprehensive and fun as its competitors’.

Photoshop Express Interface

One of the best reasons to choose Photoshop Express is its ad-free interface. Photos don’t take up the whole screen, but not having ads makes it easier to focus on the editing at hand. The black background and white font make for easy-to-navigate pages. Sprinkled throughout are small, labeled icons. The top nav has links for browsing your photos, and others’ in the public gallery; on the bottom of the screen below the photos are icons for creating albums and editing, e-mailing, and deleting pictures. When you select Editing, all your options appear in the left-hand pane.

Sharing and Storage

We love how smoothly Photoshop Express integrates with Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, and Photobucket. You can be logged into multiple sites at once, and each site’s albums appear as expandable trees in the left-hand pane. Photoshop Express is also a good choice for people in a hurry: Uploading a 1.81MB photo took only 27 seconds with Photoshop Express.

Photoshop Express also offers a huge amount of storage: Up to 2GB worth of pictures can live on the site. In this way, Photoshop Express offers a much-needed marriage between Flickr’s community-minded storage and Picnik’s beyond-basic editing. However, we’re disappointed that Photoshop Express supports only JPEG files.

Editing Tools

Given Photoshop’s reputation as a desktop editor, we had high expectations for its performance on the Web side. Alas, the editing options aren’t comprehensive enough. In addition to the basics—cropping, rotating, red-eye removal, and others—Photoshop Express offers six effects: Pop Color, Hue, Black & White, Tint, Sketch, and Distort.

In addition, Photoshop Express users can adjust white balance, highlights, fill lights, and sharpen or soften the focus. Photoshop Elements offers more depth, but the target user of this site is all about simplicity. That’s why Adobe offers how-to videos for each of these functions.