Welcome to our site

Well, Brent and I have been trying to find time to write a little post-love for Picnik. So, in a busy moving week, we are brute-forcing it.

Picnik is a new, free, Flash-based web app for editing and sharing your photos. It lets you have the simpler features of Photoshop and/or Photoshop Elements, what you might use for a quick crop or color adjust, without having to open that pig of an app. Don’t get me wrong, I use PS to make a living, but it’s a pig and I only open it when I have to. Thanks to Picnik, for little things, I don’t have to. Blamn.

The editing options available are: Auto-fix, Rotate, Crop, Resize, Exposure, Colors, Sharpen and Red-eye. And under a tab called Creative Tools there are a few fun Special Effects available: B&W, Sepia, Boost, Matte, Vignette and Soften. Now, they don’t offer layers, or paint brushes, or vector masks, but most people who buy Photoshop Elements just want to kill some red-eye, crop a bad framing or correct the colors and contrast. Picnik delivers with ease. Besides, there are only about 10% of Photoshop’s stock filters that can be used tastefully anyway. Most folks don’t need them and most family photo-albums will fare better without their creators being made dangerous with too-cheesy filters. ::coughs “Watercolor” into fist::

Now for the sharing.

Picnik is gorgeously, seamlessly integrated with Flickr. Take these few steps with me.

*Take a photo and download it to your computer *Login to Picnik and grab the photo from your computer *Edit it *Upload it to Flickr from within Picnik with all the usual Flickr options like adding it to a photo set, tagging, title, description *Done

Additionally, you can use Picnik to edit a photo you have already uploaded to Flickr and either create an edited duplicate or replace the old photo. You can also email the edited photos from Picnik to a host of popular photo sharing and printing sites like Wal-Mart, PhotoBucket, Kodak EasyShare to name a few.

Picnik can also access your web cam (if you give it permission) and you can take a shot of yourself, edit it and upload it to Flickr. All right in your browser.

OK, the cover my Trapper Keeper is covered with “Charlie Hearts Picnik 4EVR.” It’s time to show you its handy-work. Here are three shots I edited in Picnik:

Please do enjoy. We are. Please also feel free to download the photos of me to decorate to your office, home, gym locker, that visor thing in your car. At least I’m wearing a shirt.