Adobe finally revealed its free, long-anticipated online Photoshop app, despite many competitors already has seized the market. Currently in public beta, Photoshop Express doesn’t have even 10 percent of options and tools of desktop-based Adobe Photoshop such as layers, channels or filters. Photoshop Express isn’t feature rich even as Picnik but it has damned slick interface. Without doubt Photoshop Express will be rather popular, as its worldwide known name means much more for beginners than any critical reviews or competitor’s advantages.

Photoshop Express seems like a good stage for some refining and sharing your digital photos as it has album storing feature with 2 GB of space. Photoshop Express also provides photo import from Picasa, Facebook or Photobucket but lack of Flickr support is a substantial drawback.

Sometimes slowly the Flash-based Photoshop Express has tree collapsing tabs (Basics, Tuning and Effects) with 17 buttons for photo editing. You can turn your photo, straiten, correct exposure with Auto correct; adjust lighting conditions, white balance, highlights and shadows; get rid of blemishes and scratches or wine stains with Touchup tool. There are also Red-Eye Removal, Hue, Saturation, Sharpen and Soft focus tools. But I don’t manage to find any resize tool or options which is critical for most image editing apps.

Among Photoshop Express effects there are Pop Color to make one color stand out, Tint, Distort (Twirl Stretch and Bulge) for comic effects and Sketch effect which make your photo look hand drawn. There is also Black and White effect which offer different approaches of converting color photo to black and white.

Photoshop Express provides you with up to 7 different thumbnail previews of each photo correction so you could see changes in real-time before applying them. There is also very handy visual history palette with thumbnail preview of every applied edit. Zoom up to 800% shows you the whole image thumbnail at the same time. You can work in full screen without distracting browser menus as well.

After launch of Photoshop Express, in the near future more premium services within the same Photoshop.com web environment will also be hosted.