You are sitting in a cyber café and need to fine tune some digital pictures before sending them across to friends and family. Unfortunately, the café owner has not installed any image editing software on his computer other than the web browser.
No problem – there’s little reason to worry as you can still edit pictures using just the browser without installing any software – all you need is a decent internet connection and a web browser like IE, Firefox or Safari on the Mac.
Several online photo editing software have made their debut in the past year or so and the most popular of the lot is Picnik.com – so intuitive and powerful that it can give some commercial software a run for their money.
Pictures can be imported inside Picnik for editing through various methods – you can upload them from your hard-drive, get them directly from Flickr or pull the images from any webpage. Picnik provides an impressive array of tools to make your edits look good and professional.
You can add borders, rounded corners, blurs, vignettes and other image effects which are not so easy to achieve inside a desktop equivalent like Picasa. The edited pictures can directly be saved online to your account on Flickr or other photo sharing website or download them locally.
There’s another very interesting feature in Picnik – you can capture a screenshot of any webpage in one click and save that in an image format using a free Firefox add-on available on the Picnik website.
If you are used to desktop photo editing apps like Photoshop, you’ll probably love Fauxto – the interface, palette layouts and the toolset in Fauxto are so similar that you might even confuse it for Photoshop. There’s a small difference though – while Picnik is a photo editing tool, Fauxto is a tool for creating graphics from scratch.
The online photo editing market is in for more excitement as Adobe will soon release a free version of Photoshop that will be completely web-based like Fauxto and Picnik. It may not be as advanced as the commercial version of Photoshop but still good enough to fulfill the needs of the most home consumers.
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