Don't want to spend good money on an advanced photo-editing software that will only be used sparingly? We look at some free online alternatives
Off on a holiday and need to touch up some holiday shots before you send them off to make your mates in the office or family members at home jealous?
Even if you did not bring your laptop along with you, it is not a problem nowadays there are plenty of web-based image-editing software available to help you finetune those images. All you need is an Internet café.
A crop of photo-editing programs has sprouted on the Web over the past year, mostly based on Ajax or Flash programming.
In case you missed its arrival, Ajax stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. It is a development technique for creating interactive web applications. Adobe's Flash will, of course, need no further introduction as the de facto program to develop rich Internet apps.
Back to the online image editors, what you get are applications that offer simple editing that you can then save on your local hard drive (or thumbdrive) as well as upload to photo-sharing websites such as Flickr and MySpace.
Bear in mind that these applications are no Photoshop or Gimp but they do come in quite handy when it comes to simple editing. Based on our experience during the course of this roundup, most are pretty good at what they can do.
Best of all, these applications are all free!
However, before reading further, do check out the editing functions that come with your digital camera as most manufacturers like Nikon, Canon and Samsung include basic image editing functions on the camera itself.
If all you need are simple editing tools to crop, adjust brightness or remove red-eye, there is no need for you to waste time going online to edit your pictures when your camera can do it.
Seventh (online) heaven
There are many picture editing software available online. In this roundup, we look at seven of them – Fauxto, Picnik, Picture2Life, Pixenate, Snipshot, Preloadr and Webtoolpic. All offer a myriad of functions from simple touch-ups to adding special effects.
Another three programs that we think users would do well to check out are Wiredness (
www.wiredness.com), Phixr (
www.phixr.com) and Pixer.us (
www.pixer.us). Unfortunately we couldn't include them in this focus due to time and space constraints.
Back to the seven – most of them are still in beta and are free to use – although some require registration.
As expected some of the advanced tools available in Photoshop or Gimp such as lasso, clone stamp or magic wand are not available in these online applications.
Mostly, what users get are resize, crop, rotate, red-eye removal, brightness adjustment and contrast tools. Surprisingly though, some do offer a few impressive extra options, ranging from layers, graduation curves and histogram to cool fun effects, such as borders and collages.
You will also find that the menu interface varies a lot, from sleek and simple to totally confusing. They all seem to work with both Internet Explorer and Firefox with one exception – Webpictool.
Since all the applications require that you upload your image onto their server for editing, the actual time it takes to process just one picture may take a lot longer compared to doing it on your own PC.
Depending on your bandwidth and the current load of the server, this may take several minutes to complete. And this is just for one picture – imagine if you have several images that you need to upload as well.
So, in other words, use these online applications just for casual editing.
Also take note that some programs have limits on the file sizes while others will automatically resize the picture when you upload them for editing.
Final words
As digital photography grows, the need for a good photo editor also increases. Not everyone wants to pay for commercial software when all want they want to do is simple editing.
Thus a free online photo editor seems a good alternative. Sure, it is not a replacement for a full-fledged software like Photoshop but hey, if you're stuck using someone else's PC (without any editing software installed) or want to do stuff on the fly, such an application can be a godsend.
Best of all, there is no sharp learning curve usually involved with many other commercial graphics programs.
As a sign to show how important these types of applications will be in the future, industry heavyweight Adobe recently announced that it is going to launch a free (with ads), online version of its hugely popular Photoshop in second half of this year.
As to how much "free" tools that we are going to get, it remains to be seen.
In meantime, here's what we think of the current crop of online photo editing software. Each program provides something unique so it's difficult for us to recommend one over the other.
However, if we were pressed to make a choice, Fauxto and Picnik would be the two that we would go for thanks to their sleek user interface, advanced tools and ease-of-use.
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