Best of all, they're all available online. Excerpt:

The web applications we consider here range from simple photo toucher-uppers all the way up to Photoshop wannabes. But none of them can yet perform the truly advanced functions you'll find in programs like Photoshop or Gimp. We tried out five online photo editors that go beyond the basic rotate and red-eye functions:

• Fauxto
  
• Picnik
  
• Picture2Life
  
• Pixenate
  
• Snipshot
  

In addition to letting you do things like resizing, rotating, and optimizing brightness, contrast, and colors, many of these will actually apply filters (blur, sharpen, etc.) and other weird fun effects, such as giving your image an old-fashioned border or making collages. So you can pick the one that fits your needs, from simple image correcting to elaborate artistic creations.

They're all free, and mostly in beta at this stage, but we didn't encounter any showstoppers—just the odd function not, er, functioning. Their interfaces vary from the cluttered and complex to the sleek and simple. We found that they all worked in both Firefox and Internet Explorer, though bugs would often appear in one and not the other.

We'd be remiss not to mention Adobe's plans for an online version of the big daddy of image editing, Photoshop. It's been reported that the online version of Photoshop will be free, with ads, but we have to wonder how much you'll get for free, with the exorbitant price ($649) for the installed software. What's more, the services here are working and available to try out now. Adobe's online Photoshop version is about six months out at the time of this writing.

The article continues for several pages, detailing the pros and cons of each of the photo editors. In any event, they might be worth keeping in mind if you're on the road and want to do a little bit of photo work.

Related update: Turns out that there are several free online storage sites that you can use, too. Pretty cool stuff.

Posted by: Physics Geek at 12:07 PM | Comments (3) | Add Comment
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