Top 8 Photo Editing Sites Reviewed

Web 2.0 is in full swing right now, but there’s more to the contemporary web than just online word processers and spreadsheets. Most basic photo editing tasks like resizing, cropping, color adjustment, etc. that one would use something like Paint Shop Pro, Paint.Net, a certain level of IrfanView or ACDSee, or perhaps even the Windows Paint application, can now be performed online in your browser, thanks to the advancement of web technologies in use today. In today’s feature, we’ll tell you about a few such photo editing web applications.

Snipshot (formerly Pixoh)
Snipshot, formerly known as Pixoh, is a very true Web 2.0 site, complete with pure white backgrounds and large fonts on the homepage. Jokes aside, it boasts of a good set of features like unlimited undo and redo, support for large files upto 10MB or upto 5000x5000 in resolution (that’s 25 megapixels!), direct loading of images from anywhere on the web, including Flickr, support for PDF, JPG, GIF, PNG and TIF file formats (opening as well as saving) and also exporting directly to Flickr.

But it’s image editing capabilities are the most basic. You can resize and crop images easily by dragging the corners, you can rotate the image, adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, hue and sharpness, but that’s it. Probably the only thing I can highlight about Snipshot is that you can numerically specify the height and width of the image to resize it. This feature should be available in any photo editing app.

PXN8
PXN8, pronounced “Pixenate”, is one of the more feature-rich photo editing apps online. It may not look as pretty as Snipshot at first, but it’s features are right there and there’s no denying the fact. PXN8 lets you zoom in and out of the image, which is an extremely useful feature. Then, other than the usual crop, resize, rotate and color adjustment features, PXN8 also offers some ready filters to generally enhance a photo, to fill light in dark pictures, reduce/remove red eye, whiten parts (like teeth!), and to get the omnipresent sepia effect. There is a unique “Sprit Level” tool that lets you fix photos that were taken at an angle by mistake. If your pictures have a horizon that’s not purely horizontal, this tool will rotate the image to level it up. It’s essentially a rotate tool, but it does it automatically instead of you keying in manual rotation angles. There are also some “fun” effects such as the one that gives your images rounded corners (so, so Web 2.0!), an interlaced video effect, a blur / out of focus effect and snow, so you can have Christmas in October!

PXN8 also lets you upload the image to Flickr, or to WebShot’s All You Can Upload service for use anywhere on the web. It uploads the file, generates a TinyURL for it and gives it to you to use.

PXN8 can also be bought and installed on your own website if you want to provide your users photo editing capabilities in your web browser, but it’s a little expensive at around $749!

__PAGEBREAK__
Phixr
One downside to Phixr is that it needs you to register for an account before you can start uploading photos to edit. It does have an option to instantly use the site without signing up, but that creates a temporary account that still takes two clicks. Anyway, once that is done, the app is quite impressive. It offers a toolbox quite similar looking to the one found in Photoshop or Fireworks and it offers more features to work with the images than PXN8. Almost all the tools pop up a more comprehensive box (not window) that let you select the options for the tool and also let you preview the result before applying.

In addition to whatever is found in PXN8, Phixr offers you a paint bucket tool to fill an area with a particular color, a noise removal tool for grainy, low light camera pictures, a variety of effects such as pop art, charcoal drawing, oil painting, emboss, sphere, funnel, dot art, posterize, shade, spray, swirl, wave etc., a photo overlay option for super-imposing preset images (such as hearts) or an option to mix two of your own photos and it even lets you add text to your images! Impressive!

Once done, you can either email the photo from Phixr itself, or upload it to Flickr, FotoPic, Photobucket, Fotolog, Buzznet, DropShots and LiveJournal.

The other downside to Phixr is that it doesn’t support editing photos of very high resolution. A two megapixel image I uploaded (1600x1200) got automatically resized to 1280x959 and when I saved it, was saved in that resolution instead of the original 2 megapixels. Also, the free account only lets you upload and work with two photos for a period of around 3 hours per image.

GIFWorks
One look at the site and you know it’s been around since the time animated GIFs were considered cool. Totally Web 1.0, GIFWorks only works with GIF files upto 400k in size, and offers basic features such as cropping and resizing, more effects (comic strip, fade/unfade, 3D glasses) than any other online editor, GIF-specific tools such as reduction of colors, snapping to web-safe colors and splitting up the image into frames.

I like the comic strip effect - it looks pretty good on gadgets!

__PAGEBREAK__
Online Image Editor
Wonder how they came up with that name. OIE doesn’t look too good, but its still pretty good Web 2.0 with drop down menus with submenus etc. Again, this does your usual resizing, cropping, saving in different formats, overlaying (mixing) images, adding text, flipping the image, etc. It doesn’t have any color adjustment options, but only preset effects (like sepia, negative, etc.), but it does have good support for animated GIFs - it lets you add/remove frames, create new animations from scratch and add stars or glitter effects to your pictures for that are so 1999.

Yes, that’s the name of my band!

On-Line Photo Tools
This is actually an application that you buy and install on your own site to provide the web-based photo editing service to your users, but it is worth a mention. ‘On-line Photo Tools’ is a suite of tools to crop, rotate, resize, remove red-eye, add text and just one effect: convert to black and white. It also offers undo features.

__PAGEBREAK__
ImageCrop
As its name suggests, ImageCrop is a simple online image cropper/resizer. It doesn’t offer any color or brightness adjustments, filters or effects. All it does is crop your large image into a smaller one, as specified. The crop area can be moved around using the mouse, and can also be resized by dragging sides or corners and holding down shift or control. Alternatively, it also allows you to enter the height and width manually, adding a little extra touch for power users alike. However, it’s value addition is it s preset size selection feature for screen (800x600, 640x480, etc.), instant messengers (MSN Messenger, Yahoo! Messenger, AIM, Skype), and common forum avatars.

ImageCrop would work for absolute novice users who just want to cut out pictures for instant messengers, forums or to remove unneeded people from personal photographs.

Resize2Mail
This is a little less useful compared to ImageCrop, as it only offers you preset ’emailable’ resolutions such as 480x360, 600x450 and 720x540, in both landscape and portrait mode, or by percentage (75%, 50%, 25%), irrespective of the size or orientation. Once resized, it also lets you crop to a small area, and you can adjust the size using shift or control. There seemed to be no way of maintaining the aspect ratio while resizing an image, which is why ImageCrop is better. But Resize2Mail also let’s you rotate the image, which ImageCrop doesn’t do.

Now the next time you find yourself in a cyber cafe or on a machine that has no photo editing tool installed, pick one of these and make use of it. Bookmark this page and add it to your del.icio.us, you’ll need it wherever you’ll go!