Picnik – A Cool Free Tool to Edit Your Online Pictures

Thanks to a tweet on twitter (unfortunately I can’t seem to go back and look at all older posts from everyone I follow so I can’t give them credit), I found out about a great new online tool for photo editing called Picnik. Picnik is a free online tool that allows you to edit your online pictures from Flickr, Picasso Web Albums, facebook or photobucket. Or you can upload a picture from your computer, edit it and save it to any of the above.

It has auto-fix, rotate, crop, resize, exposure (including advanced setting like shadows, contrast, highlights, histogram, brightness and more. Note: these may be premium settings). You can edit the color (saturation and temperature) and sharpen it or fix red-eye.

It displays all your pictures from the online photo album of your choice. I use Flickr so I could see all my pictures, or I could see all the pictures in each set. It also shows an “order by” dropdown and a search text but neither of these worked for me. Maybe it depends on the online photo place you are reading from.

You can select a picture and edit, delete, email, rename, save to or open the flickr page. When you rename, you can type the new name right there and it will rename it on flickr. You can also search for photos on Yahoo or flickr or grab a picture from your web cam.

They also have premium features that can be used for free this week (being the week of 9/25 I guess, although I checked today, 10/3 and they are still usable for free and at the bottom it says free for this week so I guess through fridayish). They will then cost $24.95 per year.

Update: As of Oct 16, the premium features are still free.

Some of their premium features are on the ‘Create’ tab, which includes free effects like black and white, sepia, boost, soften, vignette, matte, and the premium effects: nightvision, infrared film, lomo-ish, holga-ish, HDR-ish, cinemascope, focal b&w, soften or pixelate, pencil sketch, doodle (write/draw on it), gooify (drag bits arounds) and pixelate.

I really liked the focal effects, which focus on a certain area (you can change the size and move it around) and highlight that area. Here is a picture of my dog, Koshi that I messed around with. Nothing special but you can sort of get the idea.

Here is their release news from 9/25/2007:

Picnik Release 28 / v1.0! (September 25)

“Picnik has officially launched! Today is the day we take our beta banner down and throw it on the ceremonial bonfire. We’re also introducing our Premium Feature Stream which will be available for the super-affordable price of $24.95 for a whole year. This gets you get complete access to special edit tools, effects, shapes, fonts, and a whole bunch more just around the corner. To celebrate, Picnik Premium is free and open for everyone to preview this week! There’s also a ton of new features, so here’s what’s new:

Photobucket Support: Our mission of connecting Picnik to anywhere your photos might be continues and today we add Photobucket to the list of major photo sharing sites like Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, and Facebook, which you can get photos from or save your photos to!

Effect Painting: Many of you have asked to apply an effect to precise areas of a photo. Now you can with Effect Painting! Choose a Black and White, Sepia, Boost, Soften, Tint, or Pixelate effect and click the new Paint Brush button. You can brush in the original through the effect or check the Reverse effect box to do it backwards: paint in the effect just where you want it.

New Effects: Lots of these! There’s Holga-ish, Night Vision, CinemaScope, Invert, Cross Process, Focal Pixelate, Pencil Sketch, and Pixelate, all under the newly organized Effects section in Create. In fact, the whole Create section has been reorganized, with three new sections…

Shape Tool: Add shapes, symbols, speech bubbles, hearts, arrows, paw prints and the odd spaceship to your photo. You can choose your color, spin it around, make it as big as you want to shape up that shot!

Touch-Ups Tool: Whiten teeth or remove blemishes with these tools. Put your best face forward!

New Frames: We’ve moved Frames to their own section, and have added Museum Matte and Polaroid to the ranks of Border, Rounded Edges, and Drop Shadow.

Stay tuned as we open the floodgates on our Picnik Premium Feature Stream!”

So go check it out and if you hurry, you can try the premium features for free too! At least you could make a couple of cool pictures while it is free.

~Susan Mellott