Edit photos sans software with Picnik

Picnik is a really slick piece of Webware for tweaking and editing photos. You can pull in photos from any URL or upload them from your home computer. There are a variety of basic photo editing tools like cropping, resizing, red-eye correction, and a handy auto-fix button to make a picture look better without fussing around with each setting.

When you're done tweaking your photo you've got a few options. You can save it to your hard drive, print it, e-mail it or even publish it if you've authorized Picnik to sync up to your online photo service. Picnik lets you use a number of photo hosting services like Flickr, ImageShack and PhotoBucket. Also cool is the ability to send your photo to Costco Photos (where I often get prints made.)

Picnik is very responsive. Any changes made to a photo are almost instantaneous. This is helpful with the rotation tool, as you don't have to wait for your shot to render on-screen. There's also a special effects menu which features a few instant presets like sepia, black and white, and color boost. These presets let you make quick and dramatic changes to your photos.

Picnik, like Fauxto (which we covered last month), is a great way to get creative without having to install anything on your machine. The export options are really well thought out and completely intuitive for novice users. The sliders and quick pre-sets remind me a lot of Picasa's edit interface, but have some of the more powerful features you might find in the most recent version of Apple's iPhoto. Give it a whirl here.

[Found on Mashable]