Adobe opens online Photoshop

Photoshop Express, Adobe's new online tool for organising, sharing and editing images, has gone live in beta version.

The site lets registered users store up to 2GB of photos free of charge and offers a wealth of instant editing tools, from simple rotation and crop to red-eye reduction, exposure correction, tuning filters, white balance, colour correction and special effects like Pop Color, Distort and Sketch.

The tool also ties in with Facebook, MySpace and Picasa so that users can display their images on their favourite social networking site.

Images are edited in full preview mode, with Photoshop Express displaying a row of thumbnail options for each filter which you simply click to apply. You can apply as many filters and effects as you like to an image, and checkboxes next to applied filters can be deselected and reselected, just like in the full version of Photoshop.

Edited images can be downloaded or sent by email, or shared with other Photoshop Express users using your own public gallery. Adobe promises that the tool will remain free to use, with a paid-for service adding more functionality at a later date.

Register for Photoshop Express for free or test drive the tool's image editing features at www.photoshop.com/express