Digital Home Thoughts: Photoshop Express: Runs In Your Browser

"We all knew this day would come sooner or later, but that doesn’t make it any less exciting, does it? Today, Adobe releases Photoshop Express for the web. Now before you go berserk, let us exercise some journalistic caution — it’s not everything you can do in Photoshop fit into a web browser. Not nearly. No layers here, no fancy pants masking. But for 95% of your photos, it offers pretty much all you need to fix ‘em up, and it does it with style. Whether adjusting exposure, white balance, or hue, touching up blemishes, or distorting your image, Photoshop Express provides an easy slider and thumbnails to give you an instant preview of your image at various settings. Even undo is better than you’d expect. Being on the web, this Photoshop’s made for sharing. Everyone gets their own URL at photoshop.com, and the slideshows are top-notch — big, beautiful images with classy transitions. Want to load in and edit photos from Picasa, Photobucket, or Facebook? No problemo."

I just gave it a whirl and I am not entirely sure I am a huge fan. Maybe I went in with really high expectations. First off, you need Flash Player 9 which requires a browser restart. The interface is a little heavy, I found that it slowed my browser down quite a bit. The options for image editing are understandably quite limited but perhaps too limiting for my taste (although it may just be the UI that I didn't like). While I can see how this will be a useful app, I am not sure whether it makes things easier to edit images in-browser then to save the image on your desktop and open it up with Photoshop or Paint .NET or some such. Try it out and let us know.