Have you heard about Picik? It’s one of the coolest things I have seen in a very long time. I am a long time Photoshop user and will be for quite a while longer, but in my dealings with clients of my design services, I have one re-occurring issue that rears it’s ugly head nearly every time I complete a project.

“I don’t have Photoshop, so how do I edit photos for my new website?”

Previously, I would be forced to recommend one of several options that were met with all sorts of responses. Here are snippets from some of my conversations:

• Photoshop: By far the best image editor money can buy and for good reason, it’s fairly spendy and packs a nice big learning curve before you can actually go from no knowledge to basic image editing. I don’t recommend this option very often as I know what would be involved.
• Photoshop Elements: A nice alternative for the money and ease of use. My most recommended solution so far.
• Paint Shop Pro: I haven’t used this one in a very long time, but it offers a lot of the same options as PS and is fairly comprehensive (complex) as well.
• Gimp: Free and pretty good, but still has a hefty learning curve. Not the best solution for the light-hearted.

There’s a ton of other editors, but nothing just covers the basics and keeps it really easy for the end-user with no editing experience. I just want something that I can tell them a height and width and let them go at it. Well, it’s not the PERFECT solution, but it’s darn close… Picnik

Picnik is a flash browser-based application that requires no special hardware at all. As for ease of use, it’s really pretty self explanatory. Crop, resize and basic image operations make it a really good recommendation for anyone who has the basic needs of image editing but doesn’t want the headache of learning a new piece of hefty software. There is a free version of the software that most likely will cover most of your basic needs, and a premium version with all sorts of cool tools for $24.95 a year. Right now, the premium version is free so if you want to see what the difference is, swing by and play with the app. After poking around myself for a bit and making the image below, I made a small pro/con list:

Pros:

• Browser Based (minimum requirements are Microsoft Windows XP or Mac OS X, with a 1GHz processor or better, and at least 256 MB of RAM. You will also need a web browser such as Internet Explorer version 5.0 or higher, Firefox 1.0 or higher, or Safari 1.3 or higher.)
• Flickr, Picasa, Facebook & Photobucket integration (I loaded the above image right from my flickr account, edited it and saved it to my desktop without ever leaving the Picnik interfaces.)
• Nice Effects (Sepiatone, Vignette, Color, Camera FX, Goo, Pixelate and many more very nice effects that I commonly use in PS)
• Save & Share is very easy to use

Cons:

• Scrollwheel doesn’t work in flash windows. You can zoom with the scroll wheel, but for pages with a scrollbar, you have to actually click the bar and move it. More of an annoyance than a con, but there’s only two categories.
• Brush actions are a little slow. This might be my browser, but it was a little frustrating having to go slowly with my cursor for accurate brush strokes.
• Only five fonts in the text screen. This may not be a huge issue to some, but to a guy like me, I need fonts and the more the merrier. I understand adding many fonts potentially bloats the application, but it was a con in my book.

All in all, I give Picnik 4 out of 5 stars for their initial “big” blast onto the internet radar screens. I think they are really on to something (like a buy out soon if you ask me) and I can’t wait to see what they add in the future. That said, my recommendation for future clients with limited photo editing needs will most assuredly be Picnik.

Thanks guys for a great web app!