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Adobe Photoshop Express launched at midnight.

About it: First Look: Adobe Launches Photoshop Express, Competition Beware has screenshots of the tools and interface. But you'll probably have to join and play with it to see whether it's useful to you.

Adobe is sensitive to criticism that its flagship image editor's learning curve is way too steep for average users:

Adobe realizes not everyone can figure out the tools of photo editing but many people can pick one image over another based on how it looks. In Photoshop Express, Adobe has included “generation variations” of images so you can see suggested thumbnails of how the image could be corrected. If you don’t want to take the time to fix an image, just click on the thumbnail of the suggested variation and the software does it all for you. You don’t need to know what saturation, contrast or colour correction means.

It also integrates with Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa.

A bit later, 1:20 a.m.: I've just tried it, and the interface is an amateur's playground.

I uploaded a tough photo -- shady, contrasty, and I really want you to see the black cat:

After a few minutes of playing with Photoshop Express, I had this:

Image the photo in the hole below the thumbnails -- they're larger than this, but to show them all I had to reduce them. Below that, at full size, the tool choices. Click on any of the choices (each is explained in a tooltip when you mouse over it) and you see a selection of thumbnails that apply different values. Pick the one you like, and tweak that with a different tool. Along the way, you'll get a better sense of what the same tools do in the real Photoshop, without having to pick values at random.

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