Thing 36: Online Photo Editors

For this discovery exercise, instead of taking several photos and testing them on one editor, I took one photo and looked at several editors. I posted the results on Flickr, tagged Cinnamon, since that is the subject of the photo.

Original Photo
Here is the original photo. This is our neighbor's cat, Cinnamon. She is too skittish to hang around if I go outside but I got this shot from the kitchen window.

Picknik
Registration required. For an inexperienced photo editor like myself I found that Picknik offers the right amout of simplicity and level of detail. It also helps that Picnik is already the photo editor partnered with Flickr and Box.net, both of which I use to store my photos. Very nice.

Splashup (Formerly Fauxto)Registration required. If I was a Photoshop user I'm sure that I would have taken to Splashup. But there was no tip sheet and some things I just didn't understand how they could be used. So for this novice, the picture probably didn't turn out as good as it could have.

Pixenate
I appreciated that I did not have to create an account with Pixenate. I could just upload my picture and get to work. It was also nice that Pixenate gave you the ability to upload your edited photos directly to Flickr or save to disk. I was able to get the contrast I wanted on Pixenate but not the level of sharpness.

Snapfish
Registration required. Very limited on what it offers for online photo sharing-except for email. It really pushes you to buy things. It didn't even give me a place to save the images I edited back to my PC. I had to right click and copy and save it myself. I was afraid I wasn't even going to get to do that. Like Pixenate, I was able to get the contrast I wanted but not the level of sharpness.

Pixer.us
Another nice site that I did not have to register on. I just uploaded my picture and set to editing. It gave me the ability to save back to my PC. Pixer.us gave me the sharpness that I wanted but not the contrast.

CellSea
Since I do not have a cell phone camera I did not use CellSea.

ImageEditor
ImageEditor would not let me upload my original, untouched photo to edit so I did not use it.

Wiredness
No registration required. Wiredness gives you many places you can upload your photos from and back to. You can integrate with Flickr or Picasa, save as a .jpg, .gif, or .png. You can also bookmark the site directly to Delicious, Stumbleupon or Digg. I wasn't able to get the level of sharpness or contrast that I wanted though. Again this may be due to my lack of photo editing experience.

Overall I choose Picknik for its ease of use and intuitive layout and autocorrect features. At almost every level there is an auto-fix feature which made it so straight forward. I recommend Picknik for online photo editing whether you are a novice or an expert. If you are an expert you may appreciate Splashup more.