Turn Your Digital Photos Into Works Of Art With Picnik
Picnik Online Digital Photo Editing – Anyone With Digital Photos Can Tweak, Fine-Tune, And Fiddle For Free
With the right tools, photo editing can be a lot of fun. When it comes to fine-tuning digital photos, the possibilities are limitless. Crop, resize, rotate. Add colors, filters, and special effects. Turn a casual snapshot into a work of art. Turn a family portrait into a holiday greeting card.
But until recently, if you wanted in on the photo-editing fun, you had to invest in expensive desktop applications such as Adobe Photoshop, which has long been the flagship software for digital photo editing. Although Photoshop remains the industry standard for professionals, digital photo editing has become popular among millions of regular folks who never dreamed of being artists or graphic designers, and who don’t want to spend several hundred dollars on professional editing software.
In 2005, a company called Picnik launched its online image editing software, which has become the Web’s most popular alternative to desktop image-editing applications like Photoshop. Anyone with a digital camera or access to photo scanning equipment can now enjoy Picnik’s advanced and powerful photo-editing tools, without paying a cent or installing a new program. The browser-based application exists completely online, and many features can be used for free. Premium versions of the software, which can be accessed for a fee (starting at just over $2 per month), offer more advanced features.
Picnik’s intuitive user interface makes photo-editing so easy that you don’t have to be a computer wiz to get great-looking results. Though not as feature-rich as a professional solution like Photoshop, Picnik boasts a simple user experience and slick design that have attracted nearly two million U.S. visitors to the site each month. The company also attracted the attention of the search-engine giant Google; last week, Google acquired Picnik. There have been no announcements as to Google’s plans for the Picnik image editing tool, but Picnik will remain up and operational with no immediate changes. It seems likely that Google might eventually turn Picnik into part of its Google Apps suite, or incorporate it into its popular online photo sharing site, Picasa Web Albums.
Though Google’s plans for Picnik remain unclear, the acquisition sounds like good news for anyone with a digital camera or photo scanning equipment. With Google’s worldwide infrastructure and world-class team of software engineers and designers, it seems like the sky is the limit for Picnik, and users can expect increased features and functionality in the future.
