Picnik: Call it Photoshop Lite

Digital cameras have made taking pictures easier. At the same time, digital photos have left most of us wanting to do more. We want to do things that only the pros could do in a darkroom when we all shot film.

The No. 1 program for photo editing, Photoshop, is powerful, but it’s costly and takes time to learn. It takes even more time to master. Photoshop is a great tool for the pros but it’s overkill for most of us.

Now there is a powerful Web application called Picnik ( http://www.picnik.com) to the rescue. You won’t need to read a thick book to tap the power of Picnik. And you can keep your wallet in your pocket. Jonathan Sposato, CEO of Picnik Inc., says there will always be a free version of Picnik. Eventually, he said, there will be a premium version for a fee as well.

My first concern before I started to use Picnik was speed. As a Web-based photo editing application running in a browser, I feared it would be slow. But after registering for an account, I could see performance was as important to the authors as much as ease of use. It is snappy (pun intended).

The site is clean and the tools are clearly organized to help get the job done. At the top, Picnik has large tabs for Home, Photos, Edit, Create and Save & Share to get you started.

When you click on the Edit tab, you will find buttons for such common tasks as Auto-Fix, Rotate, Crop, Red-Eye and Resize. Each of these brings up a submenu that will assist you in completing the task. Don’t worry if you don’t like the results, you can just click the undo button.

The other tabs in the application are just as simple.

Once you have tweaked to your satisfaction, you can save the photo on your computer, to Flickr, Facebook or e-mail them. Picnik lets you e-mail images to other services like PhotoBucket, Walmart-Photo, Costco, Windows Live Spaces, and LiveJournal, to name a few.

— Doug Dobbins