Photoshop® Express Beta release

Last week, Adobe released a Beta for Photoshop Express. It’s a free service for users to upload and share their photos. It’s very well programmed and it looks really easy to use. Plus, you know, it’s got to be solid for Adobe to put their name on it.

I played around with it for a few minutes, and frankly, I don’t think it’s for me. By saying that it means one or all of these things: 1) I have a Mac, therefore iPhoto. 2) I have Creative Suite 3 and Lightroom - and I know how to use their web features. 3) I have a MySpace Page. 4) I have a Facebook page. 5) if I had a PC for the last several years, I’d be using Google’s Picasa.

If you don’t have any of those 5 things, go ahead and check out Photoshop Express. I wonder if it’s too little too late, or if Adobe’s somewhat late-to-the-party timing is a calculated move to minimize use by teenagers who just want to share their senior pictures (Tom over at MySpace cornered that market years ago) and Adobe may rather be targeting adults who don’t want to pony up the scratch for a store-bought copy of Photoshop or Elements. Or, one could argue that the determined photoshopper seems to get a hacked version anyway, so maybe try to get at least an email address out of these users.