Education & Technology

Picnik Picnik isn’t about trying to be an online Photoshop, but rather is intended as a way to give digital shutterbugs a convenient way to fix up their snapshots. Its competition in the installed software world is Picasa rather than Photoshop. But don’t think it’s a simple rotate and red-eye correcting app: Picnik offers plenty of impressive capabilities. Its interface is slick and Web 2.0, but if you don’t have your browser window wide enough, some of the main menu buttons will overlap each other. It’s a very pleasant and intuitive interface to work with. click on image for full view There’s no registration at all to try out Picnik, just start loading and editing those pictures. You can open an image file directly from your PC using the standard OS dialog, rather than having to use an unfamiliar web uploader. Other ways to get pictures into Picnik for editing are by using a URL, Yahoo image search, Flickr, or acquiring it from your webcam. Picnik has strong integration with Flickr, and you can browse and open your Flickr images directly from within Picnik. In fact, it’s so well integrated with Flickr that we were almost under the impression that Picnik was a Yahoo! product. During the course of our review, the service actually added a Picasa Web Album. Whenever you return to Picnik, the site remembers what you were doing last to what picture, so you start right back up where you left off. And there doesn’t seem to be a limit on file size; we were able to upload a 3000×2000 JPG that weighed in at 2.5 MB. This is probably essential for any online photo editor, given the ever-increasing megapixels on today’s digicams of all levels. As you resize the browser window, the image stretches and contracts with it, and in the lower right corner a zoom indicator tells you what percentage size you’re viewing at. Clicking the Picnik name at top left, instead of launching the company’s homepage, fullscreens your view; surprising the first time, but quite useful for photo editing, because clicking it again restore the window size. Main editing options are show along the top here: click on image for full view All the basic image editing tools are there: Red-eye correction Rotate Resize Exposure–including histograms Color correction–with a neutral color picker and Auto Colors option Sharpen. Most of these correctors include an auto-fix choice, and there’s an overall auto-fix option, too. Controls for each edit tool appear right along the top of the image. The Creative Tools menu option offers 13 special effects (6 of which will be only available as part of the Premium version once the service fully launches). They include: Standard: Sepia B&W Boost Soften Vignette Matte Border Rounded edges Premium (available in beta now): Tints Infrared film Focal B&W—Lets you chose a circular area to keep color and makes the background B&W. Doodle—just drawing on top of the picture with a color brush. Gooify—a smearing brush. click on image for full view Sharing options include Email Photo, Save to Flickr or Flickr slideshow, Email to Website (read: blogs). You can also simply save your edited photo art to your local computer. And you can even share the old-fashioned way—by printing it and showing it in person. Print choices aren’t even as extensive as those built into Windows XP; your only choices are Full Page or Half Page. But, remember it’s beta, and the Print option has a little box stating the feature is extra beta. In all, Picnik is a capable and very friendly-to-use image fixer for amateur digital photographers. Continued… Product: Picnik   Company: Picnik, Inc.   Price: Free   Pros: No signup; the best looking interface; good integration with Flickr and Picasa web albums; bookmarklet for easiliy getting web images for editing; fun and useful creative tools.   Cons: Picnik has the nicest, most Web 2.0 interface of the bunch in online image editors. It offers excellent integration with online photo sites like Flickr and some fun creative tools, in addition to the photo correction basics.   Summary: Picnik has the nicest, most Web 2.0 interface of the bunch in online image editors. It offers excellent integration with online photo sites like Flickr and some fun creative tools, in addition to the photo correction basics.

Picture2Life Picture2Life’s tagline is “The easiest way to edit your pictures online” This sounded like it might really mean “dumbed down, lightweight online photo editor.” But we found that not to be the case at all: The site offers plenty of editing and special effect options—including collage and animation features. However, the implementation of these features left something to be desired.

After the typical simple signup, in which you choose a username and password and enter a valid email address, you’re encouraged to notify everyone you know about the service, with icons for six email providers and ten spaces for entering their addresses. Beta startups are always looking for that viral buzz…

Picture2Life gives you 25MB bandwidth per month with a free account, which for some cameras means a measily 10 pictures, but hey, it’s free, so we can’t complain. To get started working on photos, you upload them either picking from a standard file browse dialog or you can drag and drop them into a Java-based box. There are also options for getting pictures into the service via flickr, 23, photobucket, and direct URLs. (When we tried the Flickr method, after giving P2L permission in our Flickr account—using Internet Explorer 7—we got a big error page and reported the bug via P2L’s feedback form, but that produced a server error, too! Beta will be beta.)

click on image for full view

click on image for full view

When you upload a picture, it’s scaled by the service; a 3MB file we uploaded was 200K after the service got done with it. So this may mean the 25MB transfer limit isn’t such an impediment after all. In fact, we had no problem downloading a 10MB TIF file several times, but for some reason, Photoshop couldn’t directly open files downloaded from P2L when the Open With choice was specified, nor could IE7 display GIFs or JPGs downloaded this way, instead rendering garbled text. But if you download to disk and then open, they displayed correctly. The interface also resizes your image to fit into the editing screen, but you can undo that to see full size.

The edit menu is a little weird in that it uses a cloud view list of the available commands instead of buttons or menus, but this turns out not to be a problem after the initial head-scratch.

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The list of editing tools is pretty ample:

• Brightness
• Color
• Contrast
• Crop
• Flip
• Gamma
• Grayscale
• Hue (just a monochrome tint)
• Invert
• Resize
• Rotate
• Sepia
• Shadow (drop shadow)
• Watermark

And special effects include the following:

• Emboss
• Gaussian blur (didn’t work in our tests in IE7 or Firefox 2)
• Jitter
• Oil Paint
• Picture Text (handy for titling, but you can’t choose the text size)
• Pixelate
• Sharpen (we’re not sure why this is in the second group of editing effects, but like blur, it didn’t work on our test image either in IE7 or Firefox 2.)
• Smoothen (not sure how this is different from ‘blur,’ but no matter, it didn’t work)
• Swirl
• Time warp (I guess because it could make someone look old and puckered), and
• Water

Editing options don’t include Auto options, such as auto-contrast or auto-colors—something we’ve come to expect from consumer image editors. Nor can you adjust the canvas size, leaving the image alone in the middle, or add borders. It’s nice that there’s a Gaussian blur feature, but it didn’t do anything to our test image. Some of the effects are slow to show up. When you apply an effect, it is noted in small text below the image display, and there’s a red circle with an x in it that lets you undo the effect; this will also undo any effects applied after the one your undoing. More control over some effects would be nice, such as for the sphere, water, and swirl.

Creates collages are a fun extra, but we were disappointed that you can make one that looks like snapshots scattered on a table, as you can with Picasa—in all the collage layout choices the pictures are always straight up and down. (Strangely, one of the ads on a P2L page went to Google’s Picasa—a prime competitor!) Another feature not found in most basic online photo editors is Animate. You click on images for the animation to flip through (it said we could unselect by clicking again, but that wasn’t the case), and then choose the time delay between images. Again we couldn’t get this feature to work in Internet Explorer 7, but it was fine in Firefox.

P2L also offers an Internet Explorer extension, but we shy away from these as they slow down tab creation. The interface isn’t as polished as Picnik, it doesn’t have auto-adjustments or histograms, and ads clutter its pages. The service was also buggy in IE7, but since that browser is still fairly new, we should cut them some slack.

Export options include transferring pictures to (of course) Flickr, 23, ImageShack, and Slide. Like many of the online image editors, there’s no printing capability. Continued…

Pixenate
Pixenate has a fairly uncomplicated interface, with all options clustered on the left as icons. You can start playing with it as soon as you first land on its homepage, with the random sample photo that appears. A basic text box browse button lets you pick a file on your system to upload and edit. There’s also an Import to Pixenate bookmarklet available, which you can simply drag to your browser links for a way to edit any web page image you come across. With the bookmarklet installed, when you go to a web page with images on it and click the Import to Pixenate link, you get a numbered list of all the images on the page; you can click on any one of them for editing.

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Pixenate offers 18 tools (8 of which are initially hidden under the link Show fun effects), but they can make a big difference in your pictures appearance. Here they are:

Tools:

• Enhance—a general picture improver to boost colors, reduce noise, and smoothen faces. We’d like to have seen some controls over how much it does each of these optimizations.
• Fill light—an automated light booster with no controls.
• Crop—includes presets for typical photo sizes—4×6, 5×7, 8×10, and square.
• Resize
• Rotate
• Spirit level—for straightening pictures with horizons.
• Red eye correction—At first it can be a little tricky aligning the correction box, and once we ended up with a blue pupil.
• Whiten—for teeth—no brushing or trays required! (But this tool gave us a Javascript error in Firefox and IE7.)
• Sepia
• Colors—One of the few tools with some controls. For some reason brightness, saturation, and hue get slider controls, while contrast is relegated to integer adjustments up to plus or minus 3. Also, the changes are shown in the small detail of the image, but not live in the whole image.

click on image for full view

Fun effects:

• Lomo—a dark halo effect that saturates colors in the middle of the image.
• Filter—with colored lens.
• Round—for edges.
• Interlace—adds TV-style lines.
• Snow—for that wintry feel.
• Text
• Oil Paint
• Charcoal

As with all of these programs, Undo and Redo are available. The select command, in addition to letting you crop, lets you apply an effect to just part of the image.

When you’re done editing your photograph, you can save it to disk, upload it to your flickr account, or get a URL for it via Webshots for use on your blog or MySpace page.

We like the simplicity; Pixenate doesn’t try to be online photo storage or sharing service: It’s just for quick editing of one picture at a time and being done with it. Continued…

Product:	Pixenate
Company:	Sxoop Technologies
Pros:	Simple, easy-to-use interface; no signup; fun effects like lomo, snow, and oil paint; bookmarklet for easiliy getting web images for editing; Flickr integration.
Cons:	Doesn’t really offer enough control with many of the effect tools; no printing.
Summary:	A simple way to adjust or doll up your pictures, we only wish Pixenate offered somewhat more control over things like contrast and fill light.
Rating:

Snipshot

Similarly to Pixenate, Snipshot lets you start working on a picture right away by clicking on the browse button and calling up an image from your PC. Alternatively, you can enter a URL of a picture and edit that or just start playing with the sample image displayed on the service’s landing page. Also like Pixenate, Snipshot offers a bookmarklet for you to pick pictures off whatever site you’re visiting, and it goes one better by offering a Firefox extension for right-clicking pictures on web pages for editing. Unlike

most of the other sites we review, Snipshot doesn’t sport that little “beta” under its site logo, and we indeed encountered no unexpected errors during our testing.

Snipshot’s main interface is even simpler than Pixenate’s with only five actual editing buttons—Resize, Crop, Enhance, Adjust, and Rotate:

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You can move the image around and resize it for better viewing by dragging it and grabbing a corner handle. Enhance did a nice job adjusting the brightness. Rotate is unusual in offering no options: It just rotates the picture 90 degrees clockwise, and if that’s not what you want, you have to keep rotating—but that’s hardly a hardship.

The more interesting stuff begins when you click on Adjust:

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With this tool you can get a little more sophisticated; it has sliders for

• Size, in pixels
• Brightness
• Contrast
• Saturation
• Hue
• Sharpness—really two filters in one, as you can blur with it, too.

For all of these, the main image updates to reflect your adjustment on the fly. Undo works for as many actions as you perform.

When you’re done tweaking an image, clicking Save gives you a choice of uploading it to WebShots or Flickr, or of saving to your local computer in GIF, JPG, PDF, PNG, PSD, or TIF format:

click on image for full view

It’s surprising that you can save in Photoshop’s PSD format, as you can’t do that with the more Photoshop-like Fauxto. Then again, Snipshot isn’t doing anything as advanced as adding layer

Snipshot also offers an API for web producers to add photo editing to their sites. In addition, this means a site developer could use Snipshot to, for example, enforce image sizes on the site.

Read about Six Free Online Storage Services.

We found Snipshot to be just about the cleanest and clearest interface for a photo editor. There’s no funny business in the form of image special effects like you’ll find in many of the other services, and we’re surprised that there’s no red-eye correction, but if you just need to do basic resizing, cropping, rotating, and brightness and color adjustments, Snipshot is a cinch.

Product:	Snipshot
Company:	Treefly, Inc
Pros:	Super clean, simple interface; no signup; outputs six file types, including PSD; bookmarklet and broswer plugins for easiliy getting web images for editing; Flickr integration.
Cons:	No red-eye correction or fun effects; no printing.
Summary:	We like Snipshot’s super simple interface, and it lets you do the most basic image fixing, like resizing, cropping, rotating, and adjusting color and brightness. We wouldn’t mind seeing a couple of well chosen fun effects.
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