Adobe Photoshop Express Overall Rating:

Free Sign-up for Adobe PSE: Adobe PSE

Adobe PSE Quick Review:

Adobe Photoshop Express (PSE) is an exciting addition to the online photo sharing world. The photo editing tools are unbelievable. They compare to some of the editing and adjusting tools available in Photoshop. PSE provides printing through Shutterfly. The sharing feature provides you with your own web page and URL. PSE is in beta at the present time. I can’t wait to see the finished product! 

Adobe Photoshop Express Ratings: 

Ease of Use:
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Overall Rating:

Adobe PSE Full Reivew:

Signing up with Adobe Photoshop Express was easy requiring only a name, e-mail address, password and a personal web page name that you choose. They’ll send you a confirmation email. You have to click the e-mail link and sign in within 24 hours. Adobe provides tutorials on the sign up page. So if you want to see what it looks like and some of the features, click on the Test Drive button. The tutorials are nicely done. You’ll be impressed with the editing and adjustment features.

Adobe Photoshop Express (PSE) starts out with a simple screen. It provides four options – My Photos, My Galleries, Browse and Upload Photos. There are also several menu options at the upper right. I like to start out with the help menu to determine how good the support is for the service.

PSE is in beta testing as I review it. They’re testing it for U.S. users before releasing it to the whole world. The online help is limited to the forum. Adobe will probably produce help topics at the time PSE is released to the rest of the world. The how-to videos are available under the Help menu. These are the same videos provided with the Test Drive and are very good.

Uploading images is of course the first step. The upload process is quite easy using a standard Windows file locator window. PSE identified one of my images as being too large. They have limited file size to 10MB. PSE also limits you to 2GB of storage. After adjusting the compression on my oversized image, I uploaded. The process was a bit slow, but I had mostly large MP photos to upload. I use the highest speed DSL line available in my area.

Images can be uploaded into your library, an existing album or you can create a new album. To edit an image just double-click it. Or if you move your mouse over the bottom of an image an options bar appears. Click on the options bar to edit, rotate, revert to the original, email the photo, get a link to it, embed it in another site, download, print, use it as an album cover, use it as a profile image, use it as a gallery background or remove it. Is that enough options? Who thought of all this craziness! Wow!

The organization of images is straight forward on PSE. You have a library with photos not stored in an album and your albums. Creating an album is easy, fun and lets you be creative. Just click on the word Albums, then click on the New Album button in the middle of the page. Give your album a name, go back to your library and drag and drop images into the album. Don’t be a dork and mistakenly delete an album as there’s no way to get it back! Yes, I’m a dork!

Using the link option copies a link into your clipboard. You can paste it into an email and send it to a friend. The embed option creates HTML code so you can put the image on your site. After adjusting and editing you can download the image for safekeeping. Clicking on the print option takes you to Shutterfly, a partner of Adobe, where you can request prints. Of course there’s a charge for printing through Shutterfly. Before you print photos at Shutterfly, search www.highfxphoto.net for the 50 free photo prints offer from Shutterfly (just search for Shutterfly). I’m not sure why there’s no tie-in between Adobe and the Shutterfly offer. There should be!

You can view a single large image with thumbnails at the top. This is a nice feature because you can have the current image maximized yet still have access to your other images. Or you can view your photos in a grid. With the grid option there’s a slider so you select the size of the image view. How cool is that? The last option is a table view that displays thumbnails and information about the image. Information includes the date taken, date posted, your rating, album, tags, caption and file name. Oh, yeah, you can sort by clicking on the column headers. PSE is very well thought out!

The adjusting and effects options are the best I’ve seen. Adobe is well known for Photoshop, the best in class photo editing software used by professionals and enthusiasts. They have applied the same quality of adjustments and effects on PSE. If you don’t want to purchase editing software and don’t need sophisticated editing tools, PSE is the best.

The tools include crop, resize, auto correct, exposure, red-eye, touch-up and color saturation. Under the tuning category there is white balance, highlight, fill light, sharpen and soft focus. The effects include pop color, hue, black & white, tint, sketch and distort. All of the adjustments and effects were of a quality nature. Wow! Basic Photoshop without buying the software! Excellent!

PSE provides sample adjustment images and a slider to get the exact adjustment. Just move your mouse pointer over the samples and the image view changes to that adjustment. Click on the sample to use that adjustment. If the samples don’t quite meet your needs, use the slider to get it exact. How easy is that?

My Gallery allows you to share your albums with friends or the whole world. The tutorial for album creation hasn’t caught up with modifications. I had to make my album available to the public. The option to make it available to friends wasn’t mentioned in the tutorial. When you create a gallery a URL is created for it. You can select a background photo, a profile image and write a description for your viewers. It was very easy to do. Very nice!

PSE is a very exciting photo sharing service! It’s easy to use, provides simple, intuitive features and great image adjustment and editing tools. The online help needs a little beefing-up. Many users will probably want more features for framing pictures, creating collages and album design. If you’re looking for a cool image sharing service without the crafty features, PSE sets the standard!

Click the images below to see a larger image.

PSE main screen:

PSE library view:

PSE gallery browse:

PSE link to an image:

Here’s a link to my PSE album:

http://highfxmedia.photoshop.com