Global Moxie
http://globalmoxie.com/blog/image-editing-online.shtmlImage Editing for the Rest of Us
Picnik and Photoshop Express are two sites that let regular folks edit images directly from the browser.
Once upon a time, dealing with digital images and photos was a black art, practiced only by an elite group of geeks sporting pricey software called Photoshop. Now, of course, the whole world has a digital camera, and it's common practice for regular folks to sling digital images across the web and through e-mail.
Editing those images has nevertheless remained a relatively rarified task. I'm frequently asked by designers how they might make it easier for their clients to crop, reduce or improve photos before adding them to their Big Medium image library. After all, few individuals (or even organizations for that matter) can afford a full-blown image editor like Photoshop; even when they can, the complexity of the software is more than most folks can grok.
A new crop of web applications is turning up to fill the gap, and web designers might consider pointing clients to these tools for easy image editing. Photoshop Express (launched in beta just last week) and Picnik are two sites that provide free, easy image editing for the rest of us.
Both sites let you edit your images in the browser and offer a similar tool set: crop or rotate images, adjust color and exposure, remove red eye, and apply effects. The free versions of both sites offer a similar set of one-click editing tools, but Picnik also offers a pro version for $25/year with a bevy of advanced editing tools.
The biggest difference between the two is how they deal with your photo archive. Photoshop Express gives you space (2GB with the free version) to store your photos. Picnik does not hang onto your images but instead emphasizes integration with third-party galleries, letting you edit images directly from your online gallery at Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, MySpace, Photobucket or Webshots. (You can also load/save images directly from your hard drive for editing during a single session).
Picnik has been around for a few months longer than the new Photoshop Express site, and it shows. Picnik offers a few more editing options while still remaining easy to use. In particular, Picnik has better options for resizing images and adjusting compression quality, which is useful if you're interested in editing images to prepare them for the web. Photoshop Express, meanwhile, allows you to save your edited images in only one of three sizes: original, thumbnail or one reduced size somewhere in between.
I recommend Picnik if you simply need an easy, free way to clean up or prepare images for your Big Medium site or an external gallery. But if you need a site that also lets you store, share and publish your photos, the new Photoshop Express is worth a look.