Sunday, March 25, 2007
Picnik Lets You Edit Photos From A Browser
Sometimes you don’t need the Photoshop powerhouse for basic brightness or contrast editing.
I discovered this very useful tool for editing your pictures online from a browser. The web 2.0 site is called Picnik and like most web 2 stuff it’s in beta. What makes this application interesting is the tie in to your Flickr account. You can allow Picnik access to your Flickr account and do all your editing online.
The program is like a scooter to Photoshop’s Cadillac features wise but all the basics like contrast, brightness, histogram editing, crop, sharpen and red eye removal are there. There’s also about 14 filters and several special effects. It seems Picnik can add more as the product developes further.
Picnik certainly seems like an ideal setup with Flickr for travellers. Many photos end up being viewed online anyways so why bother with a desktop program for basic editng only to transfer the images again?
No doubt Adobe sees photo editing evolving to an online service. There are rumors of a partial online component in a future Photoshop version. That would get rid of pirated software and allow Adobe to continue charging money for application use. They would no longer need to convince people to upgrade. As long as people keep using the software they will be billed although updates are automatic.
Still, this may not be the best for all consumers, even Photoshop 4 gives some of us all we need. The older programs take up much less memory and resources too. I find they run faster too; probably because the programs don’t suffer from code bloat.
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