Free and easy

There's a glut of photo-editing software for the iPhone, and some of it is pretty good. Adobe's Photoshop.com iPhone app not only does a decent job editing photos from your phone and from your Photoshop.com account online, it does so for free.

The tools aren't numerous, but the app includes essentials like a cropper and rotater, color adjusters, and a handful of effects to change tone and tint, or apply thematic edits to give images a border or vintage feel. A pop-up alert instructs you the first time to adjust things like tint color and saturation with a sliding gesture from your fingertip. We're divided over whether the use of gestures over a slider button is intuitive or confusing. Undo and redo controls in the interface give you license to experiment without committing.

Apart from its no-cost price tag, the other major draw to Adobe's Photoshop iPhone app is the one-button uploading of photos to a Photoshop.com account, as an alternative to saving edited photos on the phone. We also like being able to snap a photo using the tool and uploading it to Photoshop.com right away. Just keep in mind that at the time of review, Adobe's free Photoshop.com service caps your storage at 2GB, unless you subscribe for an upgraded plan.