Adobe gives peek at online Photoshop

With a new product called Photoshop Express, Adobe Systems is coming through on its promise to deliver a lightweight online version of Photoshop.

At the Photoshop World conference on Thursday in Las Vegas, John Loiacono, senior vice president of Adobe's Creative Solutions Business Unit, briefly demonstrated Photoshop Express and gave some details on how it is intended to work.

In February, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen told CNET News.com that the company was planning an online version of Photoshop for release within three to six months. Chizen said the product was meant to appeal to consumers and to compete with free and other low-end image-editing tools, such as Google's Picasa.

The product is aimed at consumers rather than professional photographers and is designed to complement existing products Photoshop Creative Suite 3 and Photoshop Elements, according to company executives.

"It's a new member of the Photoshop family that's meant to make Adobe imaging technology immediately accessible...to large numbers of people," Photoshop product manager John Nack wrote in a blog posting Thursday.

Nack said that Adobe Photoshop Express is a Flash application that runs in a browser and that it is still in development.

"Loiacono showed that it was possible to adjust an image just by rolling over the different versions shown at the top, previewing the results & then clicking the desired degree of modification," Nack wrote.

In a press release issued Thursday, Adobe said that the product is in development, but gave no indication when it would be available. A company representative on Friday said Adobe won't be releasing any additional details at this time.

Earlier this year, Adobe released Premiere Express, a Flash-based online image editor that it offers through third-party sites, including Photobucket. In February, Chizen said that Adobe could offer its online version of Photoshop directly to consumers or through photo-sharing sites.