Wednesday, March 11, 2009

Have a Picnic with Picnik

Previously I have mentioned Adobe's Photoshop Express and Google's Picasa for photo editing. One problem with Picasa is that you need to download the software to your computer and it seems to take over all you digital images. I found this frustrating since I also use Photoshop CS4 for editing and didn't want the Picasa logo on my images. Flickr, a Yahoo application, does not require any download (by the way, neither does Adobe's Photoshop Express) and does a nice job in photo editing. But recently I discovered an application I like better than these three and there is no download required and, like the others, it's a FREE registration. Yea!
 
This application for photo editing that I recently discovered, and really like, is 
Picnik (http://www.picnik.com/). This application will allow you to do the usual editing things like crop, rotate, resize, make color corrections and remove red-eye. But it will also let you do a lot more. For example you can add effects to your photos. Like adding vibrance, vignettes, mattes and making color changes. You can also turn your image into a pencil sketch, increase film grain and posterize them. You can add stickers, text and frames. All these are done with easy clicks of your mouse.
 
Above is an an image I edited with a few mouse clicks using Picnik. The results can be seen in the image below. As you can see, its been cropped, text added and it has been sharpened and posterized and had a frame added. Give it a try--after all it's free, what do you have to lose?