NCC Blog

I recently found an online service with powerful editing tools for tweaking photos. It’s called Picnik and it’s truly awesome. It’s free to use and registration is not required, not even to access its fairly active user forum.

It also works with any files you have in jpg format. So whenever I refer to photos, note that it works with your other jpgs as well. Using this service you can quickly and easily crop, resize, rotate, and add special effects to your photos. You can correct redeye for humans or pets and fix your exposure settings (light/dark). You can also touch up photos by whitening teeth and removing blemishes.

There are dozens of options which you can control. And there’s even an auto control for many features if you’re feeling overwhelmed by too many choices. There is no download and nothing to install. Just click the Get Started button and you’re ready to begin.

To upload a photo from your computer, just browse to its location. You can also use the service with photos you’ve stored online at sites like flickr, FaceBook, and MySpace.

If you grant the service access to your web cam, you can also upload from there. (I haven’t used this feature yet). You can upload photos one at a time or in batches. The system keeps track (they call this your history) of the last five photos you’ve used. You can only have five active photos at any time.

You can delete photos from history manually (if you’re done with them) to make space for more and prevent the system from deleting your oldest photo first. You can email your finished photos and/or save them to your local computer.

I played around for ten or fifteen minutes to look at a lot of the features and was pleased to find a powerful undo feature. I was able to reverse every change I made.

By the way, you can make Picnik even easier to use by downloading their browser extensions (available for Firefox and Internet Explorer). This allows you to capture a screen shot from your browser and send it directly to Picnik for editing.

If the free service doesn’t have enough features for you, premium service is available for $24.95/year and gives you the ability to batch upload 100 photos at a time and keep an unlimited history.

I’ve been saying for a long time that I didn’t want to spend the money for Photoshop or the time required to learn how to use it. With Picnik, I don’t have to.

Neither do you!

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Sheryl Schuff is a Certified Public Accountant and founder of the Business Startup Success Club. She specializes in consulting with solopreneurs about business formation, taxes, recordkeeping, and technology.

This entry was posted on May 21, 2009 at 7:00 am and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.