Monday, June 16, 2008

Online Photo Editors

Adobe recently announced a free online, web-based version of their flagship, Photoshop. Of course, it will not have all the features of the standalone products but it does provide an interesting alternative for people who need to edit a photo on-the-fly, or out in the field and there is no photo editing software installed on the machine (eg. in a cafe).

While I haven't tried the Photoshop online version, I came across another one called Phixr. You can use it without registering an account first (although your temporary guest session will be limited to about 2 hrs, I think). You can easily upload a photo from your PC or ask it to retrieve an image from the web via HTTP. The photo loads on the working canvas and you can do basic edited such as cropping, converting to sepia tone, adding voice bubbles, red eye reduction, noise reduction, blurring, adding border frames, etc. It also comes with some advanced photo effects such as posterize, dot art and many others.

The resulting edited image can be re-downloaded as jpg, or converted to other formats such as png, pdf or tiff. It also has the option to send it as email. And most importantly for people maintaining web albums, it can send it directly to your album of choice. It supports several including the popular ones like Flickr, Picasa, Photobucket, Webshots and SmugMug.