Online photo editing tools

[Sound Of Vision]

I see many of you play around with your photos in Photoshop (or whichever program you use) to crop, resize, put frame on or slightly edit your photos (hey! no cheating on makeup!) But not everyone has Photoshop or knows how to use it (I think having it is the easier part, lol)
I posted this on my journal, as a info for my flist @ LJ (I guess...) but I think some of you might find it useful. These are all easy-to-use online photo editing tools.

So, reminded by the recently launched Adobe Photoshop Express, I remembered two other online photo editing sites I love, so I'll post it here, in case you didn't know.

¤ Adobe Photoshop Express ¤

I expected much more, since the Photoshop is worldy famous for all their gadgets and options for creativity and manipulation.
Simple interface, looks professional and serious, easy to navigate, a bit slow.

* you must have account to use it
* option to connect to your Facebook, Photobucket and Picasa accounts.
* you can upload pictures up to 2GB
* creating albums.
* Basics: crop&rotate, autocorrect, exposure, red-eye removal, touchup, saturation
* Tuning: white balance, highlight, fill light, sharpen, soft focus
* Effects: pop color, hue, black&white, tint, sketch, distort
* embedding photos

It's still in beta, and I'm sorry to say, it's obvious. I just tried to edit my photo and it keeps saying Preparing photo for Edit...and that bar just rotates but not loading...But when I tried it 2 days ago it worked fine, so maybe it's just a little glitch. I hope they'll be adding much more options in the near future. Right now, they offer you almost the same thing as you can do in Picasa.

¤ Picnik ¤

I discovered Picnik accidentally on Box.net. Then I saw it on Flickr, which is awesome. Picnik's look is adorable, makes it more fun and simple to use. Recently it made much more options available for Free users (they also have Premium users).

* option to connect to your MySpace, Facebook, Flickr, Webshots, Photobucket, Picasa accounts, Yahoo search and even your webcam
* you don't have to have account to use it
* they don't offer storage, but after editing you can save it to your computer or one of your photo hosting sites (Flickr, Photobucket...etc)
* Basics: auto-fix, rotate, crop, resize, exposure, colors, sharpen, red-eye
* - effects black&white, sepia, boost, soften, vignette, matte, infra-red film, lomo-ish, holga-ish, HDR-ish, night vision, cinemascope, orton-ish, 1960's, tint, invert, duo-tone, heat map, cross process, focal b&w, focal soften, focal pixelate, focal zoom, pencil sketch, neon, doodle, gooify, pixelate, posterize, film grain, snow (many of this stuff weren't available for free users until recently so I was thrilled when I got notification e-mail...
- text lots of different fonts
- shapes hearts, stars, flowers...etc. Additional ones for special occasions: Christmas, Valentine's, Easter, St. Patrick's...
- touch up Unfortunately only 2 options: teeth whiten & blemish fix.
- frames 5 frames
- advanced Curves and Levels - this is for Premium members only

* You can find an add-on for Firefox

I hope they'll keep improving and adding more and more options, which seems to be possible, how they started.

¤ FotoFlexer ¤

I started using FotoFlexer after I saw it on Photobucket (Picnik is associated with Flickr and FotoFlexer with Photobucket). It offers almost everything I said about Picnik. Only difference is between shapes they offer for creating.

* uploading photos on your FotoFlexer account, not sure about limit
* after editing you can save it to your computer or one of your photo hosting sites (Flickr, Photobucket...etc)
* you can connect to your Facebook, Picasa, Photobucket, Flickr, Phanfare, SmugMug, MySpace accounts, Yahoo search, webcam
* you don't have to have account to use it
* Basic: same as for Picnik
* Effects: Blur edges, blueprint, neon, greyscale, invert, painting, cartoon, pop art, bronze, sepia, old photo, ink stamp, color rotate, pixelate, soften, tint, duoe-tone, heat map, sketch, color cketch, fresco, film grain, night vision
* Decorate: stickers, text, draw, erase, fill, grab color, speech and thought bubbles, insert-a-face, fun cards, borders (frames), poster
* Animate: stars, lovies, stickers
* Beautify: smooth, sharpen, fix blemishes, smooth wrinkles
* Distort: twirls, stretching, squishing, bulge, pinch
* Layers: complicated to explain, go and see and play a bit
* Geek: smart resize, smart recolor, smart cutout, smart scissors, curves, morph, webcam

And additionally

¤ Picasa ¤

Picasa is a photo organizing software you download to your computer. It offers simple editing, such as,: cropping, resizing, saturation, color, auto-fix, red-eye removal, back and white, sepia, sharpening and some other stuff. If other editors are too much for you and you don't need that much, Picasa is great for you. Only as I said, Picasa is not online editor. You must download the software. Also, if you use Picasa web albums, Picasa organizer has a button which allows you to simply send the photo to your online album.

***

I hope any of this comes useful to you!

If you need some help or have questions, just ask.

[melozburngr]

another great Photoshop substitute is GIMP, it allows layers, and a lot of similar features as PS. I, personally, have only used it once or twice, but the programmers where I used to work swore by it.

It is a download, but its free.

[Sound Of Vision]

Oh I know GIMP, I have it. But these online tools are like, 'for dummies', hehe. And you don't have to download them to your computer...

Btw, even simplest than GIMP is Paint.NET, have you heard of it? It's evolving so fast, and it's clean and simple. I never learned to work on Gimp...