Overall Rating
Ease of Use
Editing Features
Import/Export
Help/Support
Design Features
Picnik has quickly become the premier name in online image editing programs. It was on TopTenREVIEWS Gold Award winner since it offers dozens of tools to improve picture quality, countless filters and effects to stylize photographs and images while integrating seamlessly with many of the post popular photo-sharing and social networking sites on the internet, including Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Photobucket and others.
Picnik also includes a variety of textual and visual embellishments such as themed graphics to further personalize photographs and even provide scrapbook-like polishes.
Standout Features:
- Creative page creation features, including photo collage and other scrapbook-style embellishments and themes
- Extensions for major Internet browsers Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer
- Picnik API available on request to append additional tools and features or customize the user interface
Editing Features:
Picnik takes a very loose, relaxed approach to image and photo editing, encouraging users to play around with effects, filters, levels and embellishments, as opposed to cut-and-dry adjustments. That said, Picnik is still perfectly-suited for more standard and traditional image and photo editing and makes these tools available in an easy-to-find tab. There, users can crop and resize images, sharpen or soften lines, adjust layers for optimal contrast and saturation and implement other everyday polishes.
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.
Import/Export:
Perhaps Picnik’s strongest argument comes in the form of its integration with other online photosharing and social networking sites. Users can edit photos from a variety of sites and services without having to rely on photos and images saved directly to their computer. As more and more computer memory is being outsourced to the Internet and smaller PC types like the Netbook are becoming popular, this seems a particularly progressive design decision; one which will hopefully only be expanded in the coming years—or even months.
As for exporting and sharing, Picnik, again, integrates perfectly with sites Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Photobucket, Webs, Picasa Web Albums and others, enabling altered and edited images to display instantaneously.
Ease of Use:
As mentioned previously, Picnik is designed with flexibility and playfulness in mind. Users can upload from their source of choice and get to work editing, improving and even transforming photos. The history features are easy to find, with a preview window showing applied effects and changes in advance to save users the trouble of making use of them.
Help/Support:
Despite its relaxed interface and playful tools and features, Picnik never leaves users on their own to discover the program tools and features. Users can learn tips, tricks and discuss finished photos in the forums, find information about tools and features in the topically-organized in-depth FAQ section and even give feedback to the site developers using the contact sub-portal in the Help menu.
Summary:
Picnik manages to strike an incredible balance between playful and professional, giving users a variety of tools to edit, improve, personalize and transform photos and images. Though its bandwidth heavy, multi-tab navigation interface might take a back seat to Pixlr, it seems to have found a niche in the midst of photosharing and social-networking sites, embodying the fun, personal and social nature of these sites.
Picnik Specifications
- Fix your photos in just one click
- Use advanced controls to fine-tune your results
- Crop, resize, and rotate in real-time
- Tons of special effects, from artsy to fun
- Astoundingly fast, right in your browser
- Awesome fonts and top-quality type tool
- Basketfuls of shapes from hand-picked designers
- Works on Mac, Windows, and Linux
- No download required, nothing to install
- All this for free! Want more? Upgrade to
- Picnik Premium for only $24.95 a year!
In Safari for Mac OSX, select Safari->Preferences->Security Tab. Under Web Content check every option except for "Block pop ups."
If you use Firefox, make sure to disable add-ons (extensions) like Adblock, Flashblock, or NoScript.
Internet Explorer for Windows, Firefox for Windows, Firefox for Mac OS X, Safari for Mac OS X or Firefox for Linux are our only supported browsers.Website Link:
Pixlr is a cloud-based set of image tools and utilities, including a number of photo editors, a screen grabber browser extension, and a photo sharing service. The suite was intended for non-professionals, however the apps range from simple to advanced photo editing.
ReplyDeletewww.pixlr.com/editor