Pixiq

I do love the imagery of the name Adobe’s given its latest photo editing and synching software, Carousel: your photo gets on at one point and gets off at another.

How does it work? There’s a set of apps for your iPad, iPhone, iPod touch, and your Mac OS (sorry Windows users, you’ll have to wait until sometime in the first half of 2012). You download them across all your devices (provided that they’re compatible, of course: iPhone 3GS and above, iPod Touch 4G, Mac OS X Lion). Then you import your photo library into Adobe Carousel and take new photos using Adobe Carousel on your iPad or iPhone.

Through the magic of the cloud, all those photos will be accessible automatically on any of your Carousel-carrying devices. From then, any edits, deletions or additions to the library that you make on one device will be automatically updated on all the devices linked with your account.

No Flash involved, no manual synching required, and version control for everyone. Oh, and you don’t have to worry about clogging up your iPad with photos, either.

As for the editing software in Carousel, it’s based on Lightroom. It uses multi-touch gestures, and allows you to adjust exposure, shadows, highlights, white balance, vibrance, clarity, and contrast. There are also over 12 ‘looks’, which are basically presets, that allow you to mess around with the look (now there’s a surprise) of your photos.

Unfortunately, none of this comes cheap. The introductory price for Carousel is £39.99 (US $59.99) for a year, or £3.99 (US $5.99) for a month’s subscription. You can renew at that price for two years. Miss the boat, which sails on 31 January 2012, and you’ll be paying £69.99 for a year or £6.99 for a month. Sure, you can install it on as many (Apple) devices as you own, but is synching across them worth that much? I’m not convinced it would be for me.

Have a poke around here and let me know what you think.