Photoshop Express may have taken a while to arrive, and even then it’s still only in beta, but it’s looking pretty good.

The editing features are beautifully implemented. In addition to basic features like cropping, rotating and changing the exposure there are a number of other options ranging from the genuinely useful to what can best be described as novelty. Among the novelty group are PopColor which allows you to isolate a colour in an image and convert the rest of the image to monochrome, and Sketch which converts a photograph into, you guessed it, a sketch. Results from both tools are very good, however. Exposure correction and black and white conversion are also very good.

In all the tools, you click the tool to select it and are presented with a number of options, represented as thumbnails of the image, which have the effect or adjustment applied to varying degrees. Hover over a thumbnail to view the effect in the main image and then click the one you want. You can then apply other effects and adjustments. To remove an effect, you just untick the checkbox next to its name.

Effects and adjusments can be undone, even after saving the image by clicking on the drop down menu in album view and selecting Revert.

Here are a few more of my first impressions:

As you would expect from Adobe, the flash-based interface looks very slick. It is a little sluggish however.

The Upload feature which allows you to to upload JPEG images to your Photoshop Express account is well-implemented. It’s reasonably speedy - it took me a little over ten minutes to upload a 25MB folder of images over a cable modem connection and the progress indicators show how much of each file has uploaded.

There are links on the main interface to Photobucket, FaceBook, and Picasa to allow you to log into your accounts on those sites from Express, but no support for Flickr.

Albums are private by default but can be shared publicly at the press of a button.

All in all, it’s looking very promising.

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