Having access to the Photoshop Suite has become something of a necessity these days, whether for the creation of lolcat-esque image macros or just retouching personal photos before posting them on Facebook. Image editing is a task one traditionally associates with a desktop, but thanks to the release of Photoshop Express for the iPad, a free, scaled-down version of the Photoshop toolset is now available from the couch as well.

Those looking for the full slate of tools that make Photoshop the desktop standard might find themselves a little disappointed. You won’t be creating masterpieces in Photoshop Express – it allows you to crop and rotate photos and apply some basic correction sliders like saturation, exposure, and tint. There are also a handful of focus functions and special effects, but again, this is for very casual use.

Limited though the tools may be, there is a lot to like about a touch-based photo-editing interface. While it lacks the precision control and nuance that Photoshop aficionados prefer, the ability to move one’s finger across the screen in lieu of a slider and see immediate results is likely to win over many casual users who are less interested in pixel ratios and brush pallets than they are cropping and touching up personal photos.

Of course, it’s not without flaws. What’s odd is that features that go along hand and hand with casual use, such as white balance and red eye correction, are inexplicably absent. The app has also been mired with bugs since its launch. Many, such as frequent crashes when the app was launched in landscape mode, have since been fixed with patches on the app store. Adobe’s persistence in this regard is appreciated, but one would hope they would exercise such diligence before releasing the app to the public.

In spite of the flaws, Photoshop Express still comes highly recommended. The iPhone version is still the preferred venue for this sort of mobile photo editing, mostly because it’s more natural to edit photos on the same device that takes them, but having the big screen available does lend a certain degree of elegance to the whole proceeding. The integration with Adobe’s photo-sharing service and Facebook also rounds out a package that isn’t likely to disappoint, especially when it’s available for free.