Edit photos like a pro—without the pro price
Jen Maney -- School Library Journal, 2/4/2009 6:38:00 AM
You work for an organization with a small budget? These days, we all do… even those of us at big organizations. When you can’t afford to buy expensive software solutions, you start looking for something comparable and cheap, or even better, free. Photoshop is a great photo-editing tool but it’s expensive. So I went online looking for a free photo editor. Picnik kept showing up in searches and top-10 lists, so I decided to try it.
Playing with a photo I took at San Xavier del Bac, I found that Picnik makes it easy to edit and save photos. The tabs at the top make navigation straightforward. Hey, even I can figure out what Edit, Create, and Save & Share mean! Under Edit, you’ll find options to auto-fix, rotate, crop, resize, exposure, colors, sharpen and red-eye. Using resize, I was able to make my photo small enough to fit in this article.
Create is the tab-o-fun, with options to add effects, text, shapes and frames, as well as touch-up (whiten those teeth!) and advanced options (like cloning). Using the Frames tool, I made my photo into a faux Polaroid, and with the Tint tool in the Effects area, I used hard light to give the photo this bleached-by-the-sun look.
Picnik also allows you to save directly to Flickr, MySpace, Facebook, Photobucket, Picasa web albums, and Web shots. You can email and print the photos, or make a Flickr slideshow. There’s a free version of Picnik and a premium version, which is really inexpensive at $24.95 a year. So next time you need to fancy up a photo, or one of your patrons needs to touch up their look on Facebook, try Picnik.
