Edit Photos, online.

Lose that habit of uploading bad pictures to Flickr. And not having Photoshop is not an excuse anymore.
Below are two fabulous online photo-editors.

Picnik.com is a cool service that allows anyone to edit photos online.
Fix underexposed photos, crop, rotate, remove red eyes, or apply effects to your photos. It has a flash interface and the smoothness is fabulous. It loads
real quick(even in Pilani).
You can upload picture from your computer or from an url. And after you are done with editing the photo, you can either download it or upload it directly to your flickr account. Pretty cool, heh?

I tried playing around with a wallpaper on picnik.com.

Before picnik.com



After picnik.com.

Hah! Actually just added a sepia effect and sharpened stuff a bit.


Not another photo editor.

Fauxto.com is an advanced image editing tool. It feels like a
desktop application and to create images you don't need to pay for expensive desktop image editors(read photoshop). It is the only online editing tool on which you can have layers and work on tabs inside your browser.

Basically its the free, online version of Photoshop. On fauxto, you have most of the frequently used features of Photoshop. If you frequently use photoshop, then Fauxto shouldn't be much of a problem, but for newbies its not the best editing tool.

Here's a screenshot below.


The faxuto blog lists the features of Fauxto and all that you can do on it.

• Image Size
• Canvas Size
• Layer Adjustments:
  • Invert
  • Desaturate
  • Colorize
  • Hue/Saturation
  • Contrast/Brightness
• Filters:
  • Sharpen
  • Blur
  • Find Edges
  • Emboss
  • Enrich
• Fill/Clear Selection
• Movable Marquees

So Fauxto is actually awesome to use for professionals, but for most of us who just need to get rid of the red-eye or crop the photo, Picnik.com is the best.

You decide for yourselves and tell me what you think.

Abhishek

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Photohosting

Flickr or Zooomr?

While trying to make this blog, I was looking at various photo sharing web sites. Flickr is the most famous one and then there are others like Photobucket, Fotolog, Panoramio, Fotki, which are not as user-friendly(therefore not as famous). But one photosharing site which is creating waves is Zooomr. Its been created by a 17 year old (Kristopher Tate). Its commonly described as Flickr on steroids. The advantage of Zooomr is that it offers users tagging, rss, and importantly 100mb limit per month, while Flickr offers only 20mb. Well, bloggers around the world are loving it!

related links-

• Worship Kristopher Tate, here- Hot Potatoes
• good old Wikipedia on Zooomr
• Zooomr blog.
  
• TechCrunch on Zooomr
  

In Indian context an example of a photosharing site will be Pixrat, its a very well made site and certainly better than Flickr . Its main feature is that you can not only upload your pictures, but you can also bookmark online pictures. So if you find an interesting picture online, you can just save its link and tag it for others to see. It was possibly the first Indian site to be reviewed by TechCrunch(link in the sidebar) and recently got acquired by a South African company.

related links-

• Techcrunch review of Pixrat
• Acquisition of Pixrat

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A little more about something called the Tag cloud, which is one of the features that distinguishes a web 2.0 site from one which is not. A tag is basically something which describes the pic or the music you just uploaded. Tags are what the search program looks for when another user is looking for something. What is exciting about it is that while a search engine like Google uses algorithm only, tagging depends completely on users. This results in more relevant content turning up as search results, because as more users tag a content its search rating goes up.

happy clicking!
abhishek

addition:
Talking about photosharing and hosting, I had missed the feature called as geo-tagging which Zooomr and Panoramio offer. As Eduardo says in the comment, Panoramio has a feed called KML feed using which you can watch photos on Google earth.( I still haven't used it, but the idea sounds like funk!) And then Panoramio is also good because it offers 2gb storage per user for free. If you've just returned from some trip, you'll have some hundred photos to show off, then Panoramio is for you. I just got my account and the service is pretty decent. For bloggers looking at making slide shows, look at rockyou.com or Photoshow. I'll cover these soon.

links-

• Edit your photos online- PXN8. PXN8 has a brilliant name and I'll write more about soon.
• Make your social networking profile picture online on mypictr.
• What is geo tagging? use the wikipedia!
  

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Last word
What you can use?
Use Zooomr if you are a blogger
Use Panoramio if you want to upload a lot of pictures at a time.
Use Pixrat if you want to tag online pictures for others to see.
Use these because they are quite new and very open for more development, so will become better if more users start using them.


again,
abhishek