Thread: Picnik Online Photo Editor

Picnik certainly takes its name to heart: Its sleek tabbed interface has a blue-sky back ground and blades of grass. But the service's playful personality belies its serious capabilities. It doesn't just do a lot of things-it does a lot of things well. The controls for browsing, choosing, and using the dozens of special effects are particularly slick, and they can show you an instant live preview of an effect's impact on your photo. Picnik remembers the last image you edited and automatically loads it when you return; the service also keeps track of the last five pictures you worked on and lets you undo the changes you made to them at any time, even after you've saved them to an external photo site such as Flickr or Photo bucket.



I was able to try out a prerelease version of a new feature, called Picnik Baskets. While not as powerful as Photo shop layers, Picnik Baskets lets you drag and stack up to five images from a nifty popup viewer into an editing window, where you can apply different effects to each to create a photo collage. Those images must come from your PC or another site: Picnik doesn't store any photos. Fortunately, however, its support for third-party photo sites is as seamless and comprehensive. Picnik denies free loading users a full-screen editing mode; the service displays banner advertising, which reduces the size of the editing window. The Premium version has no ads, however; its other benefits include stylish addi- tional fonts and Photoshoplike manual editing of image levels and curves. Premium also lifts the five-image limit on Picnik Basket documents, and lets you track back through any image you ever edited and undo any change. For heavy users, I think Premium is worth the annual Rs.1,000 fee.