Adobe Photoshop Express

If big, expensive apps like Photoshop and Lightroom are overkill for you, but you still want to improve or enhance your pictures, Adobe Photoshop Express might be a good fit. This free photo editing app is available on mobile and desktop platforms and has some of Adobe’s renowned imaging smarts, with tools for correcting and embellishing your photos. What's the catch? You need to pay if you want to use many of its best features, and the capabilities vary excessively between platforms. Our Editors' Choice winners for photo workflow and editing software are Adobe Lightroom Classic and Adobe Photoshop, respectively, though neither is free.

How Much Does Photoshop Express Cost?

Photoshop Express is free to download, but you need an Adobe account to use it (it can be a free account). Some of the product’s more desirable features are locked behind a Premium subscription paywall, which costs $4.99 per month or $34.99 per year, with a first-year offer of $9.99. Although that's a low price, you can find competing free mobile or online photo apps that can do pretty much everything Photoshop Express can, such as Google Photos, Apple Photos, Picsart, and Snapseed.

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How Do You Get Photoshop Express?

The app is in the App Store (for iPhones and iPads), Google Play (for Android devices and Chromebooks), and the Windows store, but no app is available for macOS or Amazon Fire tablets. I tested on a Windows 11 PC, iPhone, Chromebook, and Samsung Galaxy S21 Ultra.

Exactly what you get from Photoshop Express differs depending on the platform you're using. For example, the Windows store version doesn’t bother with the Premium upgrade offer and includes only basic editing tool and filters. The iOS version lets you remove a foreground object or an image's background and do facial feature editing. The ChromeOS version is an Android app, and it comes with more functionality than the Windows version. Unfortunately, there's no longer a web interface like those Adobe offers for Photoshop and Lightroom.

After signing in to your account, you need to allow the app access to photos on your device. Some sections of the interface take you through a quick tour of the app’s capabilities.

Interface

Photoshop Express has a simple and intuitive interface that presents none of the complexity of Photoshop or even Photoshop Elements. The home screen of the iOS version looks completely different from the other versions. It resembles the Adobe Express app (a graphic design tool for editing images, videos, and PDFs) with all its social meme templates. But there are still some resemblances between the Photoshop Express iOS app and the Android and Windows versions once you get down to actual photo editing. Each has a Library view where you grab images to edit from the local device or from Adobe cloud storage. The app also lets you capture new shots with your device's camera.

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The in-app camera mode isn’t just for taking ordinary pictures, though; it includes nice pluses, letting you apply depth effects, face art, double exposures, and artistic filters. Photoshop Express works with raw camera files, but only in the paid Premium version on mobile.

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Adjusting Photos

Cropping is well done in Photoshop Express. You can choose from preset aspect ratios for common social network applications like Facebook profile and cover images, Instagram squares, and X (formerly Twitter) posts. You can also crop freely or just keep the picture’s original aspect ratio. You can straighten a photo to line up with the horizon. The mobile apps have an Automatic option for this.

As with any self-respecting photo editing app, Photoshop Express can adjust exposure, shadows, highlights, color temperature, tint, and saturation. To these it adds Lightroom specialties Vibrance (to punch up colors) and Clarity (to pump up contrast and sharpness). You don’t get Lightroom’s Texture and Enhance Details, but you do get dehaze and noise reduction of both the luminance and color varieties. It's a perfectly acceptable set of basic editing tools.

Filters and Looks

The app includes several instant fixes and effects, which can ease jazzing up your bland photo. These can add or subtract contrast and give images different warm or cold hues. The Basic Looks include Autumn as well as the other seasons and other Instagram-esque filters, including black-and-white options.

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Another instant-editing option in the iOS version of the app is to use Themes. Themes not only apply different treatments to the photo itself, but also add editable text overlays. Theme sets are grouped into Social, Travel, Life Events, Portraits, Landscapes, Food, Fashion, and a few other treatments. You get just a couple of free ones in each category, with the rest being only for Premium subscribers.

An Overlays option lets you add effects like light leaks, bokeh, and textures such as Grunge and Patterns to spice up your image. Sometimes adding a shaft of light coming down at an angle from one side of a photo really does add interest, and those looking for artistic, nonrealistic output will appreciate the textures.

Local Adjustments

All platform versions of Photoshop Express include Spot Heal and Red Eye correction. On the desktop, the Spot Heal tool is basic and doesn't let you select a source area. The iPhone version beefs up retouching, however, letting you set the source area, feathering, and opacity.

(Credit: Adobe/PCMag)

The iOS version also includes Skin Smoothing, Reshape, Touch Up, MakeUp (for lips and eyes), and Background, which erases the background. The Face tools can do magic like changing the face width, height, size, and the angle of your head—it's uncanny when you see someone's head moving up and down in a lifelike way, even though you started from a still photo. Caricature lets you compress or expand the whole face or just the forehead, jaw, mouth, chin, eyes, and nose. The tools work well, though you may not like how you look after applying some of them, as you can see in the image above.

Export, Share, and Output

When done editing, you can send finished images to local photo storage on your device, or you can share them to the app’s own PS Express Discover community, where other users of the app are able to edit your images, if you allow it.

If you’re a Creative Cloud subscriber and want to keep working on the picture, you can send it to Lightroom, Photoshop, or to your Creative Cloud storage. Though it’s not explicitly mentioned in the app, storing to the cloud allows you to continue work in Photoshop Elements, the often-forgotten relative in the Adobe photo software family.

The Express Lane to Photo Editing

You can do some fun and effective editing in Adobe Photoshop Express, though you may run into a paywall along the way, and the feature set varies widely depending on your platform, with the iOS version being the fullest. Because of this, Photoshop Express is really only appealing to iOS users. Desktop users and Creative Cloud subscribers should stick with the standard Photoshop or Lightroom apps.

Because of the inconsistencies among the different app versions and Adobe's history of issuing and revoking mobile apps, you might be better off with an alternative mobile photo editing app. On desktop, the free photo editing app that comes included with your operating system is a better bet. If you don't mind paying and want the best features, you should use our Editors' Choice winners among photo applications, Adobe Lightroom Classic and Adobe Photoshop.