Teft’s Blog

I was “digging” today and found out about this photo editing tool called “Picnik“. It’s completely Flash based (from what I can tell) and allows you to do basic post processing of photos. Control the white balance, saturation, contrast, exposure, sharpness, etc. Pretty cool. To the left is a picture from Death Valley at Zabriskie Point that I took last May, edited in Picnik! They’ve also got a feature to edit your Flickr photos (or any public Flickr photo). Even better!

For people who are use to Photoshop, it’s not going to feel strong enough. It’s definitely not a tool for pro photographers. But then I realized, this is the perfect Flickr companion! Anybody within reason can now do quick photo edits online without desktop software!

Judging by there blog, they’ve got about 100k users and launched Picnik around January of 2007. Take note, Flickr and gang (Yahoo) may be plopping some doe on these guys to integrate this tool directly. It totally fits into there toolset (they probably designed it that way!) Take a look at Flickr’s set/collection editor …. very similar. Except, Flickr uses Javascript/Prototype/Scriptaculous type tools instead of Flash based tools. But then again, having Javascript perform white balance and saturation and sharpening would be a huge task (imagine the cross browser compatibility nightmare that app would spawn!!)

I ripped there Picnik widget off of there blog code and posted it below, linked it to the Landscape Photography group. Click on one of the photo’s and give Picnik a whirl!