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Photoshop Express makes it easy to crop and manipulate your photos to make a better impression.

The digital photo revolution presents picture-takers with a real dilemma. Snapshots that once occupied albums and shoeboxes are now just digital bits somewhere on a hard drive, a CD or even a memory chip.

Adobe Photoshop Express is a new online service that brings almost everything into focus for today's amateur digital photographers.

You may have heard of its big brother. Photoshop, a professional-grade picture editing tool, has way too many features and functions for the average snapshot-maker.

It also costs about $650.

Photoshop Express, on the other hand, is totally free. All you need is a Web browser, an Internet connection, and a quick download of Flash Player 9 (which you may already have loaded on your Mac or Windows computer).

The first step is to upload your images to Photoshop Express; you get two gigabytes of free online storage, about 1,200 photos from a typical six-megapixel camera.

There are already other good, free places online to store and organize your photos, like Picasa and Photobucket . The people who designed Photoshop Express are aware of that, so the software lets you easily import any picture you may already have at those services.

So who needs Photoshop Express? Anyone who wants to take existing photos and make them look better. Adobe has taken their time-tested editing tools and transferred them to this Web-based application.

In my testing, I selected a picture of an elephant I took a couple of years ago at a zoo in Las Vegas. I didn't have a zoom lens on my camera at the time, so the mighty pachyderm is a bit small in the frame.

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Go wild with the "pop color" tool.

Can I get less background and more elephant? Sure; just use the "crop" tool to eliminate the unwanted parts of the picture.

This photo has a little too much contrast for my taste. I used the "fill light" tool to brighten the dark spots to even out the tone (it's like being able to use a flash on a picture you didn't use a flash for originally).

Feeling creative? Try the "pop color" function to experiment with highlighting a single color in the image. For instance, if a gray elephant is too drab, make it purple... or pink. Everything else will be black-and-white.

And if you aren't feeling creative, click the "auto correct" tool. It offers five different thumbnail images suggesting ways to improve the look of your photo. Just click on the sample you like best to apply the changes.

You can view your edited photos on screen as a slideshow anywhere you can log in to the Internet.

Photoshop Express also lets you share "albums" and "galleries" from your personal library with the world (but only if you choose to do that).

The one glaring omission in Photoshop Express is printing: There is no option to print out any pictures you've fixed up.

But this is still a "beta" product that hasn't reached its final form. Adobe says print functions will appear in the months to come, likely giving users an option to send their snapshots to a third-party professional printer.

That may be a clue as to how Adobe will make money on Photoshop Express; it could get a cut of any photo printing services its users purchase. It could also charge a fee for additional storage or for extra features.

And, of course, Adobe might just entice you to step up to its boxed software that includes the full-featured Photoshop or Photoshop Elements (about $100), which is powerful enough that we use it at WFAA.com to create images for our Web site.

Some Photoshop Express users have posted complaints online about Adobe's "terms of service" — you know, all that legal mumbo-jumbo you have to click on before using a software product. If you do read it, the wording seems to strongly imply that Adobe has the right to do pretty much anything it wants with any "content" you upload to share in a public album:

"... you grant Adobe a worldwide, royalty-free, nonexclusive, perpetual, irrevocable, and fully sublicensable license to use, distribute, derive revenue or other remuneration from, reproduce, modify, adapt, publish, translate, publicly perform and publicly display such Content (in whole or in part) and to incorporate such Content into other Materials or works in any format or medium now known or later developed."

Adobe has heard those complaints and says that it does not intend this to mean it plans to profit from your creative efforts. The company's legal team is working to change the wording to make it more acceptable.

If you have any concerns about the terms, simply don't share any uploaded images.

But there's one other thing to consider when using Photoshop Express (or any other Web-based application, for that matter): You are at the mercy of your Internet connection.

I was about to make some screenshots to illustrate this article, but when I logged in to the Express site, it presented me with this message:

"Failed to load the organizer module."

I'm not exactly sure what that means (there's no explanation in the help files), other than to tell you that I was unable to run the software on the notebook computer that I used to create the content for the video version of Computer Corner.

I was able to log in to my desktop computer back in the Dallas office and run Phtoshop Express by remote control, but not everybody has that as an option.

Maybe it's one of those beta bugs.

Watch Computer Corner every week on News 8 Midday at noon (usually seen on Wednesdays), or online any time.

E-mail askwalt@wfaa.com