![]() ![]() It’s the photographic equivalent of the Time Machine backup utility in Apple’s OS X 10.5 Leopard. Thumbnails provide a visual history of all your changes one click takes you back to any point in time. The service’s multilevel undo feature is a joy, freeing you to experiment without worrying about messing up your masterpieces. And applying Express’s effects is pretty zippy, too, even when you’re working with a high-resolution image. Admittedly, they were often too small to show the change well, but clicking on any of them provides an instant full-size preview. When you choose a tool for exposure, highlighting, or sharpening, you get thumbnails that show how different variants of the effect will alter your photo. While less fully evolved than photo-sharing sites such as Flickr and SmugMug, it’s the best organizer here.Įxpress’s editing interface looks nothing like Photoshop or Photoshop Elements, but it’s nicely done–only Picnik’s is more refined. One significant benefit that Express does deliver is a full-blown image organizer that gives you 2GB of storage and lets you create public and private albums as well as fancy 3D slide shows. ![]() While this relative newcomer is impressive in some ways, it lacks basics that all other editors here offer. The effect works well only with images where cloning surrounding pixels into the painted-out area is easy–but it’s simple to use and fun to watch at work.ĭespite its Adobe pedigree, Photoshop Express is by no means the closest thing you’ll find to Photoshop on the Web. Smart Resize, for instance, lets you change an image’s proportions by painting out elements–such as random strangers who wandered into your snapshot–that FotoFlexer then erases while preserving everything around them. ![]() You can place multiple pictures into one file, shuffle them, and then apply special effects layer by layer–a great way to create composite images such as photo collages.įotoFlexer’s most distinctive tools sit in a tab intriguingly labeled Geek. The service’s extensive layering features are outstanding compared with those of other Web applications, and more intuitive than Splashup’s more Photoshop-like implementation of the same idea. But FotoFlexer is far better at making them simple to find and figure out, thanks in part to a tabbed interface that organizes functions into areas such as Effects, Decorate, Beautify, and Distort. Like FlauntR and Picture2Life, FotoFlexer’s service is filled with image-processing tools of all sorts, from the mundane (red-eye reduction) to the oddball (fonts that sparkle). Ultimately, I preferred the slicker, more fully baked Picnik, but this ambitious service isn’t far behind. (Every other service here except Picture2Life allows full-screen editing.) The one feature Picnik denies freeloading users that I really missed is a full-screen editing mode the service displays banner advertising, which reduces the size of the editing window. Fortunately, however, its support for third-party photo sites is as seamless and comprehensive as that of any other contender that I tried. Those images must come from your PC or another site: Unlike the other services here, Picnik doesn’t store any photos. While not as powerful as Photoshop layers, Picnik Baskets lets you drag and stack up to five images from a nifty pop-up viewer into an editing window, where you can apply different effects to each to create a photo collage. And even though it’s the easiest to use, it also has the best help: Brief explanations of features pop up as you need them.Īs I was working on this review, I was able to try out a prerelease version of a new feature, called Picnik Baskets, that works something like FotoFlexer’s layers. Picnik is also the only editor here that lets you print photos. ![]() They all offer basic editing features, including cropping, resizing, and color-adjustment capabilities, plus at least a few fancier effects (for example, the ability to apply Warholesque pop-art colors or warp subjects into cartoony caricatures). For this review, I explored half a dozen services: FlauntR, FotoFlexer, Photoshop Express, Picnik, Picture2Life, and Splashup. And unlike traditional desktop software, the services work only when the Web itself works–a point that was driven home in July, when Amazon’s widely used S3 storage platform suffered an outage that knocked out several online editors.Īt their best, though, Web image editors deliver surprisingly strong tools, with decent performance and usability. Some of these Web-based editors are sluggish, clunky to use, or both. No online image editor delivers the wealth of features and precision editing tools that Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop have had for years most don’t even let you print your pictures. ![]()
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