A recent blog post on LifeClever briefly sums up several new online photo editors. These are web-based applications that generally handle most average photo editing tasks that larger software packages like Adobe Photoshop would normally be used to do.
So just what are the advantages to using these tools? Here’s an example. To the left, I’ve included a picture I took in Princeton. This is actually a very large photo that I wanted to do a small bit of color correction to and shrink the overall size of the image down so that it wouldn’t bloat this blog post. Using the application Picnik (a free application mentioned in the LifeClever post, as well as recently integrated into Flickr), I not only managed to quickly pull the photo up from my desktop computer, but I quickly adjusted the color, tint and size of the picture, and, just for fun, added a stylish border to the whole thing. This took <5 minutes and then provided me options for saving the picture back to my computer, sending it to someone via email, or posting it to a variety of sources, such as Flickr, Picasa – even Facebook.
What’s not to love? Some of these applications are awash in advertisements and gimicky clutter for one thing. You’ll not only find standard photo editing options, but sometimes you’ll also find downright silly icons and ‘eye-candy’ that really only get in the way of the stronger features. You’ll also be hard-pressed to find any of these applications that work well with really high resolution imagery (not even the recently mentioned online version of Photoshop)…a task still really reserved for Photoshop itself.