Picnik: Zooming in on Photo Editing Tools

Picnik is an online photo editing and image enhancing service. You can upload photos from your hard drive and edit them using a multitude of powerful photo editing tools. You can also draw photos directly from your other online photos sites such as Picasa, Flickr, Photobucket and Facebook.Picnik is very easy and fun to use. Its sleek tabbed interface has a blue-sky background and blades of grass, and it claims to be floating kites, buttering sandwiches, planting trees and cueing up birdsongs as it loads. The playful personality of the website together with it’s capabilities of enhancing your photos, made it one of the premier names in online image editing programs . The site allows you to edit your photos without the need for expensive graphic manipulation computer-based software.

You can adjust the contrast and brightness of your photos, fix red eye problems and even whiten teeth! It’s also possible to crop photos, throwing away the parts of the photo you don’t want. You can add a number of built-in icons and text (in any font you want) to your photos and even set their transparency and layer-ordering. Rotating and moving objects is as simple and intuitive as it would be in a computer based program. Once you’ve finished editing your photo,you can save it in multiple formats, you can save it to your hard drive in formats, such as GIF, JPEG, BMP , PNG or PDF. You can even set how much you want your images to be compressed before they are saved. Picnik also has automated photo adjustment and improvement tools that instantly configure a photo’s light, hue, saturation and whiteness levels and adjust them to an optimal setting. All these functions really set Picnik apart from other online photo sites. You can do all these for free. A more advanced version of the service, with advanced color correction and unlimited photo editing history, is available through a subscription service.

Just this March, the search engine giant Google, announced that it has acquired photo Web site Picnik. “We’re not announcing any significant changes to Picnik today, though we’ll be working hard on integration and new features,” Brian Axe, product management director at Google, wrote in a blog post.

So we can expect for an even better Picnik in the next couple of months!

Below is a comparison of pictures edited just using the automated photo editing feature of Picnik:

A  better quality of picture, lesser effort!

 

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