Editing Photos In Style

I’m a photography nut. If I could, I’d spend my life wandering through Flickr. I dream of immersing myself in Ansel Adams’ work at breakfast, taking in contemporary black and white prints ‘til lunch, then spending the rest of the day snapping away with my aged DSLR (A First-Gen Canon Digital Rebel), filling up Compact Flash cards till the camera can’t take any further abuse.

That’s why these next two web-based image manipulation products caught my eye. They’re called Picnik and Snipshot. Both allow you to make simple edits to photos, and they pretty much work just as well as one another. The only major difference between the two is the creators’ choice in layout: Picnik’s tools are up top; some of Snipshot’s tools also reside above the photo being edited, but for the ‘Adjust’ window. Yep, that’s it. Cropping, rotating, sharpness, exposure, red-eye, enhance/auto-fix. They’ve both got it all. Both even accept GIF, JPG, PDF, PNG, and TIF, do imports and exports to Flickr, and work with web-hosted images from elsewhere as well.

It’s a given that the two were bound to have similarities. How could they not? They’re photo editors, after all, and they each deliver “the goods.” Whichever one you land on as your favored cropper of choice will probably not be based on options alone, but with the environments you edit within.

I’ll come right out and say it. I’m partial to Snipshot. And that’s not because I know the developer or anything. I’ve no clue who made the site. But I like it, a lot. It’s got this simple gray bar with buttons places across in a clean sort of way, and we all know what gray is. That’s right, “boring.” It allows you to focus on the image, which, after all, is really what you want to be doing.

Picnik on the other hand is very “bubbly.” It’s very Web 2.0, which we here at Profy clearly love to see, but it’s got a very playful feel, and for someone who’s very much into photography, I tend not to take to stuff like that. Maybe you’d feel different, and that’s cool. You won’t find anything impressive about either editor that the other doesn’t have. When it comes to pure power, Picnik is right up there with Snipshot. In some ways – with its ‘Creative Tools’ for instance, in which special effects reside – Picnik wins out. Picnik’s still in beta, too.

I’m still a Snipshot kind of guy, however – until I find something that trounces both. Send in your suggestions and finds. We’ll be happy to hear about your favorite photo editor.

Screenshots:

Picnik

Snipshot