Go on a Picnik... Edit your photos

Sorry for the brief hiatus. Spring break wasn't actually much of a break. Anyway,I am back with fresh posts!

I really like web-based photo editors. They are not the most sophisticated photo editing applications but they are easy to use, fast, and do small jobs quite well. They are good for adding quick effects, fixing small blemishes, and a host of other small - but important - tasks. Today's site is Picnik.

wrong kind of picnic - but that would be fun too.

Picnik may be the most polished of the web-based photo editors out there. The site looks and feels very clean (very few ads) and navigating is straight forward. Here are some of the things you can do with Picnik:

• Edit Photos: use Picnik to auto-fix, rotate, crop, resize, sharpen, reduce red-eye, and change the exposure and colors of your pictures. These are the basic photo editing tools that pretty much all photo editors do. Picnik completes these tasks with relative ease as long as your internet connection is quick.
• Add effects: When you edit photos, there is a seperate tab that says "Create." This tools is for adding effects to a photo to make it more interesting. The most notable of the effects is the filter tool which creates a customized look for your photo based upon various preset filters. Other effects include: font, stickers, touch up, frames. Picnik will also allow you to create your own filters (although, you need to have some programming expertise to do so).
  
• Save and Share: you can save up to 5 photos at a time and share your photos automatically to Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites and to blogs as well.
• Create Collages: Picnik allows you to create collages of your favorite pictures, a feature missing from a lot of photo editors. Its fun to do and easy to share the collages you create.
• Scrapbook Collages: similar to the general collages, you can also make scrapbook-like fancy collages.

My Opinion: In general, I think Picnik is a great site that has a lot of good FREE freatures. The site does have a premium service that is not free but you get a lot out of the free stuff. If you really want to pay for a premium service, you probably should just buy a good photo editing program. But as for what you get for free, I like what Picnik has to offer. The only other downside is the lack of storage space provided on the site itself (Photobucket, for example, offers a lot of free space to users). To circumvent this obstacle, simply share your photos to a Facebook album (or even photo sites like Flickr) and store them there.

Anyway, thats Picnik! Go try it!