Adobe's Free Photo Editor

Wednesday, Mar. 26, 2008
Adobe's Free Photo Editor
By Anita Hamilton

A new website for editing, organizing and sharing your digital photos hails from a most unlikely creator — Adobe Systems, which is to digital imaging software what Microsoft is to word processors. And while Photoshop Express is arguably the most full-featured free photo program on the Web, the real surprise is that Adobe is willing to risk cannibalizing its own paid image-management products, which include the $100 Photoshop Elements and the $649 Photoshop CS3, in order to win over new users. "Express is for the casual user," says Adobe vice president Doug Mack. "It's an incremental market for us."

That's quite an understatement for an already hyper-competitive market with tens of millions of users. Rivals Flickr, Slide, Picasa and Photobucket all offer some of the same features as the new Photoshop Express. Still, Adobe is wise to tap into Web users' growing appetite for simple programs they don't have to buy — unlike Microsoft, which is so far missing out on the free software wave by failing to offer webware similar to Google Docs or Zoho.

Complete article.