When anything is deemed “free” it’s generally met with a bit of apprehension. But this feeling is almost as easily nullified by the fact that what you’re getting costs you nothing, except your time.

Today Adobe released a free version of Photoshop, called Photoshop Express. While it’s no retail version of Photoshop, this free version does have some things to offer. The editing mode of Photoshop Express is nothing to laugh at. It offers alot of the tools that you need to enhance your personal photos. Just don’t expect to be able to create crazy forum signatures, or to be able to actually illustrate anything.

Photoshop Express Editing Capabilities-
-Crop & Rotate
-Red-Eye Removal
-Saturation
-White Balance
-Sharpen
-Soft Focus
-Tint

There’s quite a few more different editing options, but those are the big ones, and ones you’ll most likely be using. Photoshop Express also allows you to keep a gallery of photos on their site. As of now they are offering 2GB of storage space, which is a pretty decent amount for free photo storage. Your album will the added to then Photoshop Express community. Within this community you can browse other people’s galleries, add them to your favorites and keep up with what they are adding. It kind of seems like a creepy premise, but like any social networking format you have to be careful of what you’re putting out there.

As a final judgement of Photoshop Express, it’s definitely something that is worth your time if you dont have a retail copy of Photoshop. The addition of the gallery and community aspect adds to the experience as well. So far I haven’t run into any technical issues, and it all seems to be running very well.

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A cool Photoshop Plug-in for enhancing enhancing color and tone in your photos has been released by Fred Miranda: Velvia Vision. The plug-in lets you perform simple color correction, as well as adjust contrast, warmth and dynamic range at varying levels of intensity.I recommend this tool to be added to your collection, it is possible for you to build the effects yourself by tweaking Photoshop.

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