How to use Picnik in 1 minute: Also see my extended tour for why I m enjoying Picnik so much! I freshly upgraded to a Picnik Premium account. This US$25 investment was a no-brainer, considering how many right things they ve got going for them. For one, their website design is exemplary, consistently-themed (grass s benefits, it s a winner all- round. Picnik itself is fantastic: totally integrates with Flickr (altho you can upload images from your hard drive and other sources too), the effects enable you to get stunning results in just a few clicks, and it s severely smile-inducing. And especially important to me is the convenience of being able to pop or enhance an image within minutes, or even seconds, without wasting time downloading and re-uploading — that s a chief strength over any offline image editor, and I bet it ll be a big market strength in time to come. I hope they add some more useful tools soon to keep pace with/beat other contenders in the field: I m in want of a selective fade edges option. I ve tried other web image editors but I found their rough edges led them to far be less satisfying than Picnik, which reinforces to me that aesthetics m starting to recommend Picnik to Second Life photographers, particularly newer ones who are curious how to get great post-process effects without spending a lot of money or time. Picnik makes it that much more accessible, and while it s inevitable some snobs will decry it as a toy , consider how many great achievements begin with play, and here s an easy, rewarding learning curve which bypasses frustration almost entirely. Also after I made the video, I found I didn t need to relogin to Picnik via Flickr, and it had saved my Premium status. Not sure why it happened before, but chalk another plus point. More companies should follow Picnik s lead — did I mention I had a lovely time with their customer support too? Yes.
