My 10 minutes of playing with it review:

For those of you using Flickr and Picnik, don’t bother. It’s essentially the same thing, but slower and with a prettier GUI that makes you think you have voonderbar new functionality. Sure, it’s slick. Sure, the interface is friendly and dark, and gives you a better preview image (sans futzing with the little slider bars) but still.

Hot:
- High light and fill light options.
- Free.
- Browse others pictures.
- “Pop color” quickly changes a pick to b&w, then refills whatever color you select. Think little girl in b&w with big red balloon.
- “Soft focus” knew to zoom in on the face of the person in my test image for the preview, which was easily 1/60th of the whole picture.
- Distort & sketch bits are free (unlike Picnik)

Not:
- 17 ways to alter your image (avg x7 previews per option)
- No privacy filters/flags for your pictures (private albums)
- Email photo (not album, boo) functionality sounds like a good idea, but is really a maggot infested lump of giaffee dookie (see image below)
- No obvious stand-alone social networking bits, but links to login to Facebook, PhotoBucket and Picasa
- You can add a caption once you upload, but you can’t rename the file
- 2gb “free rent” is what…two RAW images? I kid. But seriously, that won’t get me too far.

Was I excited that I might get something *just shy* of PS that’s not Lightroom and doesn’t cause me to take out a personal line of credit to pay for? Yes. Am I surprised it’s just a tease? No.