Ever wish you didn’t have to open up Photoshop every time you want do simple image editing for the use of blogging. I do all the time. Especially doing simple stuff like cropping & resizing.
For those lucky enough to be in the macworld there are plenty of tiny apps or widgets that can do the above. However for those stuck in the Windows world we’re left with sharewares and freewares that are badly designed and have horrible user interface, on top of that I personally don’t feel comfortable installing them on my computer.
[curtain opens] in comes Picnik, a web app that does just what I want.
Picnik has got to be one of the coolest and most useful web app ever. It’s is an online photo editor that interacts with Flickr and Piscasa among other things, you can also upload pictures from you computer, retrieve pictures from websites, from yahoo search, Flickr search and webcams. The coolest thing about this app is the user interface, its sleek, elegant and user-friendly.
You can do all your basic photo editing, from the basic auto fix, to rotation, cropping, resize, exposure, colour, sharpen, red eye etc. On top of that you can do black and whites, sepia tones, add borders, round corners and so on. All of which can simply be done by selecting the option and adjusting a slider.
Picnik does have its draw backs however, and being a web app is one of its draw backs. I personally like my apps on my computer not the web, but until I find one that I trust and like enough, this will have to do. The other draw back is the lack of batch editing, uploading multiple photos and editing them all at the same time, especially useful when resizing pictures for blogging. You also can’t have multiple images open at the same time, that means you have to upload, edit, save, then upload the next picture you want to edit. Very troublesome indeed.
Having said all that, Picnik is still in Beta, so there is hope for change and improvement. For now this will do and I can probably live with it’s several draw backs for a while.
Filed under: Photography, Tech
