Picnik is a great, free online software for image editing.
Some of the features are:
- re-sizing files
- cropping and rotating
- exposure tweaking
- histogram view – remember, the histogram is your friend
- fixing colour – finding neutral target colours, so you can use a gray card
- sharpening
- red-eye removal
- adding text
- distortion and artsy filters like: film grain, puzzle pieces, warping, holga-style
- frames and borders – postage stamp, Polaroid (seen above) and tons more
- cloning
- curves and levels
- saving and sharing – you can re-size at this point too
- you can grab photos from sharing sites like Flickr and Picassa, Facebook, Photobucket, Webshots or your own hard drive
- plus seasonal decorations for your photos, holly for Christmas, hearts for Valentine’s Day and many more
I can’t say enough good things about this simple online software.
Go to the Picnik web site. You don’t even have to log on to start using the features. Use one of their sample images and start experimenting. Picnik has all the basics and more. If you do create an account, it will remember your last 10 images. Creating an account is free.
If you want more features, Picnik premium is only USD$24.95 per year!
That’s a whole lot cheaper than Photoshop, but comparable to Adobe Photoshop Elements, which is about $100 and will last 2-3 years before the next big upgrade. Photoshop Elements though, will open raw files using Adobe Camera Raw. Picnik won’t. It is probably comparable to Apple’s iPhoto, but much more intuitive, though even iPhoto will open raw files. Much better than Windows Irfanview or Picture Editor though. Hey it’s free and you get a lot for free with this online software.
If you do presentations, blogs, web sites, newsletters, or are working away from your main Photoshop machine, or away from home and in a panic to get some images ready, Picnik is the way to go!
**For the image above, I used the following Picnik effects:
- Edit>Crop
- Effects>Holga-ish
- Frames>Polaroid
- Text>using one of their highly stylized fonts
To see the original image click here.
Bonus!
Check out my video demo about How-to-re-size your images using Picnik here!
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