WEBSITE FREELY EDITS YOUR PHOTOS

There's an abundance of applications you can buy to edit your photos. At the top of the heap is Adobe's Photoshop that weighs in as the $600+gorilla. There's not much you cannot do with Photoshop. Their latest version CS3 is about as good as it gets. Adobe even makes a scaled down version called Elements for around $99. It uses the same Photoshop "engine" but is more consumer-friendly in that you don't have to be a photo-manipulative expert to productively use it. Adobe makes versions for both Macintosh and Windows. But if you don't have the time to learn or the money to spend on these or any of the other fine photo-manipulative products out there, I recently came across a website that lets you do a variety of those photo-enhancing manipulations. Yes, it's a website and not a product you buy or a service to which you have to subscribe. In fact, right now it's completely free so now is certainly a good time to check out picnik.com.

Picnik.com uses a web browser such as Firefox or Internet Explorer to do its thing. You just log onto the picnik website and begin. When I surfed on over, I began by clicking on the "Upload Photo" button. A dialog box appeared on my computer and I selected one of the photos I had on my computer's hard drive. Picnik.com uploaded the image to the picnik website and I was presented with an editing screen that displayed my photo.

A series of tabs above the image let me select from a variety of features. The Edit tab offers abilities like Rotate, Crop, Resize, Exposure, Colors, Sharpen and Red-Eye. All of these abilities are fairly self-explanatory but picnik.com let me easily experiment without the worry of corrupting my original photo which was safely stored on my computer.

Clicking on the Exposure button for example brought up two sliders; one for Brightness and the other for Contrast. As with everything on picnik.com, sliding either of them instantly reflects the changes to the image. An Auto-fix feature lets picnik.com do the adjustments for you. In fact there's an Auto-fix for Colors as well as a master Auto-fix that does a really good job of making your original photo look its very best.

With every adjustment is an Undo and Redo button as well. In no way, shape or form are you burning any bridges here. Besides, you still have your original photo safely on your computer. Remember that everything you are doing on picnik.com is with a copy you uploaded to the website.

The Creative Tools tab offers additional special effects like converting the photo to black and white. Others are Sepia, Boost, Soften, Border, Tint and many more. I found myself have quite a time playing around with all of
them.

The last tab is Save & Share. This lets you take your adjusted photo, define its size and file type (jpeg, TIFF, etc.) and save it back onto your computer's hard drive. Other options let you save the photo to Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, Facebook, email it or send it directly to your computer's printer.

According to the website, picnik is currently in public beta so all of its special features are available now for free. After the beta is over, many of the features will remain as a free service. Others will become part of their extra service which may have some kind of charge for their usage. Check the picnik.com website for further details. And by the way, picnik.com truly understands the concept of the Internet being platform independent as all of this works on computers running Windows, Macintosh and yes, even Linux.

In the meantime, if you have photos you've taken with your digital camera, scanned in or already have on your computer, picnik.com is a really cool way to enhance them without having to buy any more software.

www.picnik.com

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