Photoshop Express does the basics well

Anyone who is serious about editing photos and manipulating graphics will know Adobe's Photoshop software suite inside out. It's still the gold standard when it comes to editing images and is used in design studios and publishing houses across the world. The Herald design crew live in Photoshop.
But I was initially sceptical when Adobe announced its intention to give Photoshop the Web 2.0 treatment and create an online "express" version. After all, uploading photos over the average New Zealand broadband connection to Flickr or Photobucket or a webmail service can be a tedious process.
So if you're working with a large bitmap, JPG or RAW image, uploading a memory card's worth of photos to Photoshop Express isn't going to be very practical.
My use of Photoshop Express so far has largely confirmed that, but the service still has plenty going for it, particularly for the average owner of a point-and-shoot digital camera who just wants to remove some red eye from a shot, change the colour scheme or add simple effects.
I took the photo on the left above at the pirates museum in the Bahamas and simply wanted a more dramatic sunset over the castaway pirate sitting on the beach. In Photoshop Express it was simly a matter of playing with the exposure and saturation.
Photoshop Express does all of that and the user interface is pretty slick and responsive. It's based on Flash version 9. There's a slight delay switching between functions, but new edits are populated quickly - no different to using the desktop version.
Creating an account was easy - it says it is only available in the US, but I was still able to sign up swiftly. The first thing I did was authorise Google to share my Picasa photo album with Photoshop Express, so from the beginning I had hundreds of familiar images inside Photoshop.
Unfortunately, the service doesn't work with Flickr at this stage, though Facebook and Photobucket are supported.
The Photoshop Express photo album itself comes with 2GB of free storage. The service has a public gallery you can populate with your images, but I'd stick to Picasa or Flickr which offer better photo album viewing features.
Let's be realistic here, you've only probably a tenth of the functionality in Photoshop Express that the desktop version of Photoshop will provide but if you just want to crop someone out of a photo before you post it to Facebook, sharpen a blurry pic or fill out a background with light, the process is quick and easy with Photoshop Express. Plus the software is free.
A decent feature is the preview window which allows you to test out a range of effects before settling on one. There are undo and redo buttons to flick backwards and forwards between edits and the original photo will be kept in its unaltered form.
All up, worth looking at, especially now that Adobe is reviewing its terms of service, which originally stated you would sign away the right for Adobe make money from your photos.
I'd recommend it for people like myself, who are constantly working on different computers but need access to the same photo editing tools and digital camera owners who want basic photo-editing and can't be bothered with the editing software that came with the camera.
Anyone else tried out Photoshop Express? Any other good web-based photo editing suites out there?