Picnik

If, like me, you like photography, and don't want to spend fortunes on expensive photo-editing software, then Picnik could be just what you need.

Picnik is an online photo / picture editing suite, that allows you to manipulate, enhance, crop, resize etc, pictures and photos, before saving them, either to your hard-drive, or sharing them across multiple social networking sites, such as Facebook, My Space, Bebo, Flikr and Picasa.

It was recently announced that Google had acquired Picnik for themselves, as it fits neatly into their portfolio of online applications, including photo storage (Picasaweb).

Because Picnik is browser based; i.e. it's on the web, there's no application to download.
What's more, it's really easy to use.

1. Just upload the photo
2. Select the action you want to take
3. Apply the action
4. Save the changes
5. You're done

To quote them from the site:

A bunch of our editing tools are one-click fixes, including auto- fix, exposure, colors, and red-eye. And the others, like rotate, crop, resize, and sharpening, can be controlled with easy-to-use sliders.

Once you've done that, go to the Create tab, and there is a whole myriad of custom effects; a text tool, shapes and frames.
It does a whole lot more too - like create collages, email photos.... oh, you're just going to have a look for yourself.
And all this is FREE.  Incredible.

They do also offer a Premium (paid for) service, with more choices of effects and the like, and they allow you to upload more photos at a time; but, to be honest, the free version is ideal.  In fact, most of the pictures on this blog are put through Picnik Paces first.
You can find out more at www.picnik.com