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The people dreaming up all these new Web 2.0 online apps are geniuses. The latest and greatest new thing I've found is picnik.com. It's a free online image editing tool. It boasts all sorts of services, including:
- One-click photo fixing or in-depth tweaking
- Crop, rotate, and resize
- Special effects, from artsy to fun
- Work directly with many photo sharing sites (like Flickr!)
- Nothing to download, nothing to install
- Works on Mac, Windows, even Linux
That's a pretty wonderful sounding set of free image editing ability. I decided to give it a try and see if picnik.com lived up to its promises. I tried to register using Safari and could not get any text to enter in the registration form. (This is something to do with Safari, I've noticed it before with this type of form interface.) I got registered with Firefox with no problems.
That's all it took to be able to start editing photos. I could choose to upload an image from my computer to edit or I could edit a photo from Flickr and several other online photo sharing sites.
I clicked the flickr button. As soon as I clicked the flickr button, I went straight to a screen at flickr that said "Picnik wants access to your photos. Is that ok with you?" and when I approved the connection. I could pick any of my photos I wanted. Since I went to a book signing and reading with author Alice Walker this week, I picked a photo I'd snapped of her answering a question from the audience.
Here's the unedited photo in picnik's editing window. The small buttons right above the photo contain the editing options.
Just push a button above the photo to crop, change the exposure, fix redeye, sharpen, or adjust the colors. When you select one of the buttons, an information window appears to help you understand the options for that tool. But it's pretty intuitive for anyone who has edited photos before and I didn't bother to read them. For this photo, I reduced the exposure a bit to compensate for the spotlight shining on her, I cropped it a bit. I clicked the button "AutoFix" but saw no change from that one. Here's the after photo.
The final step is to click Save & Share. Picnik offered to save it to Flickr as a replacement for the original, or as a new photo. I chose to replace the original. A tag saying "picnik" was automatically added to the tags I already had for the photo on Flickr, and the save was done.
I could continue editing photos from my Flickr account by clicking the Photos menu item. Or I could get out of editing mode by clicking the Home button.
My conclusions are that picnik is easy and powerful. It's fast and it's simple. If personal photo editing software such as Fireworks or Photoshop is not on your horizon, picnik.com a wonderful alternative. It's free, but there is mention of a paid option to come. It will presumably have even more features.
