Online-only Photoshop Express Beta Coming Soon

An open beta of Adobe's Web-based Photoshop Express is slated to be available before the end of 2007, the company said today.

First publicly mentioned in the beginning of this year, and then officially unveiled two months ago, Adobe's Photoshop Express is a streamlined, Web-based photo editing suite likely to be used in conjunction with other online brands. At the recent 6sight Digital Imaging conference, John Loiacono, senior vice president for Adobe Creative Solutions, mentioned collaborations with Shutterfly and Photobucket as a couple of the common ways consumers will use the product. Photobucket already has a Web-based Adobe video editing tool available called Remix.

HP's Snapfish has its own photo editing application, and Yahoo's Flickr recently said it would use PicNik to serve its needs.

While Express is tremendously stripped down from any software version of Photoshop, it will have the more commonly used photo editing features, such as rotation/cropping, color adjustment, red eye removal, sharpen/blur, exposure, highlight, fill light, and saturation, as well as several "fun" features like distort, sketch, and "huge."