Greg Wilson’s Ramblings

At the intersection of my two worlds, Adobe and Photography, is a website called Picnik. Picnik allows it’s users to do many common photo editing tasks without installing any software. You basically go to the Picnik.com, point it to your photo and adjust cropping, brightness, contrast, color balance, sharpness, etc. When the site was first launched, I was fairly impressed but starting last week, Picnik now provides more advanced editing controls such as adjusting curves and more which led me to write this article.

The UI is very intuitive and extremely responsive. I also like that I can go to the site and try it out without having to provide my email address or register. Within 8 seconds, you can try out the editing controls either using your own uploaded photo or one of the test photos they provide. They also have the ability to work with photos stored on flickr, facebook, photobucket, picasa and webshots.

You will see more websites in the near future that offer features traditionally offered in desktop apps. This is due primarily to Adobe Flex. To see many other cool and unique sites built on Adobe Flex, go to http://flex.org/showcase/

Picnik also has an API so their functionality can be integrated into other sites. More information at http://www.picnik.com/info/api

Also check out these other Flex-based online photo editing sites – http://www.flauntr.com and http://www.splashup.com and http://www.fotoflexer.com

Flex is currently at version 2.x but version 3.0 is in the final stages of beta. Check it out at http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/

I found some YouTube videos that show off some of the features of PicNik: