Online Photo Editors – Three of the Best

Almost everyone I know now has a digital camera and uses the web to share their photos, even my Grandmother is now using Google's Picasa to send me photos on a regular basis.

Since more and more of the applications we use on a daily basis are now available via the web, I decided to have a look at what exactly is available for editing your photos online. I chose three of the most consistently high rated editors to look at in more depth:

• Picnik

• FotoFlexer

• Photoshop Express

1. Picnik

The first of the applications I looked at was Picnik - one of the most popular online photo editors at the moment. You don't need to register for an account and can start editing photos straight away. As well as uploading photos from your computer it also allows you to open photos from a variety of sources such as Flickr, MySpace, Picasa, Facebook, Twitter and Photobucket.

Pros

• Really fast – both for uploading/saving photos and the actual editing

• Easy to use

• A huge variety of effects and touch up tools:

  • Basics such as crop, sharpen, red-eye

  • Additional features such as teeth whitening, the ability to make one part of the photo full colour when the rest is black and white and you can even add some snow to your photo for a festive feel

• Simple explanations of features and how to use them to best effect

• You can play around with the premium features and see what effect they will have on your photo without upgrading (you have to upgrade if you want to save your changes)

• It is really easy to save your edited photos to your computer, email them or save them to any of the social media sites supported

• You can create collages of photos

Cons

• The only thing I can think of is the adverts in the free version, although they are just along the top of the screen (see screen shot below) and didn't annoy me at all.

           Screen Shot of Picnik when editing a photo – I have used the pencil sketch effect in this case to turn my dragonfly photo into a drawing.

Overall I think Picnik is a great tool for editing your photos online, it has a range of features for fixing up your photos (even removing wrinkles if you upgrade to the premium version) and a lot of really cool effects. It is easy to load photos from your favourite online store or your computer and save them back once you have made changes.

2. FotoFlexer

FotoFlexer claims to be the world's most advanced online image editor. Like Picnik it allows you to upload photos without creating an account and open photos from your favourite sites such as Flickr, MySpace, Picasa, Facebook and Photobucket.

Pros

• Video tutorials – step by step video tutorials showing you how to achieve some of the more advanced features

• Relatively easy to use interface

• Allows layering of images

• A lot of features and effects

• Some really cool features such as the smart resize which allows you to shrink and remove parts of an image whilst still keeping the context e.g. you can remove a tourist in the background of your holiday shots

• More fine detailed control over the effects you create

• It is really easy to save your photos to your computer or your favourite online storage site such as Flikr

• Full screen mode

Cons

• I found it a little bit slower in general to PicNik especially when initially loading photos but it still performs better than I expected

                         FotoFlexer Interface – I have used the black and white effect to change my photo to black and white apart from the waterfall 

I really like Fotoflexer as well although I found it a bit harder to get to grips with some of the more complicated features at first such as the smart resize however the video tutorials are really good and cleared up a lot of these issues. It took me slightly longer to get to grips with the Fotoflexer interface but once I did I was really impressed with the results.

3. Photoshop Express

Photoshop Express is Adobe's offering in the online editing arena. You have to register for an account but this takes less than a minute. You get 2GB of storage with the basic free version. You can pull pictures in from Flickr, Facebook, Picasa and Photobucket.

Pros

• Nice user friendly interface

• You can create albums that you can share with family and friends

• 2 GB of free storage space for your albums

• The scroll wheel along the top that allows you to preview and select thumbnails of all your images

   

• Allows editing of both photos and video

• When editing it gives you several options of results (see screen shot below)

• Easy to save and share your photos

• Fast uploading and editing of photos

Cons

• It doesn't have the same range of special effects as the other two

The Photoshop Express interface – this is the results when you click on saturation, you get several results (the thumbnails along the bottom with the original in the middle) and can choose the one you like best.

Using Photoshop Express was really easy, I really liked being able to create albums for organising and sharing my photographs. It doesn't have the same amount of fancy effects as the other two (although the Decorate section is still in beta, so they may add more), but if you are looking to improve your photos rather than apply special effects then this is a really effective tool. I especially loved the brightening of the colours in my dragon fly image that you can see in the screen shot above.

Conclusions

This was the first time I had used an online photo editor and over all I was really impressed with the quality and feature set of those I looked at. I was also pleasantly surprised by them in terms of performance, I found them all to be a lot quicker for uploading and editing than I had expected.

I would certainly use any of these again and would recommend all three for anyone looking to edit photos online.

Specifically if you want a one stop shop for basic editing and sharing your photos with family and friends then I would recommend Photoshop Express with its 2G of free storage and ability to create albums that you can share.

If you are new to digital photo editing then I would recommend having a look at Picnik as I found the interface the easiest to use and it has some cool, really easy to apply features for touching up and adding effects to your photos.

If you are looking for something that you can use for more advanced editing such as removing an object from a photo or resize one without loosing the context then I would highly recommend FotoFlexer, it does have a slight learning curve to work with the more advanced features but the great video tutorials should help you on your way.