Good thing this generation can't spell anyway

Picnik, like Flickr, follows the ever popular misspelling trend in creating brand names, no doubt popular with the illiterate texting crowd. Regardless, it's a pretty nifty tool (and free!) for on the fly digital photo editing. While it is no Photoshop, you can run a number of simple editing tricks, including color and brightness manipulation, sharpening, cropping, rotating and resizing. You can always resort to "Auto-fix" if you're impatient or not feeling so adventurous.

Picnik is a pretty intuitive application, and no Photoshop skills are required to understand how to use the basic editing tools. It's pretty easy to tinker with and offers handy undo, reset and cancel buttons for each action. The only potential drawback is trying to edit a photo during periods of high internet traffic. When I tried Picnik for the first time yesterday, this is what I ran into; trying to perform a basic sharpening function resulted in a minute-long hourglass that I ended up canceling out of. This morning, with relatively slow internet traffic, I was able to perform a number of editing functions with lightning fast speed.

I also appreciate that unlike with many web 2.0 sites, no login is required, and none of your files are automatically saved on the remote server (at least not that I know of). You can anonymously edit a file from your computer and save it back to your computer with no online tracks. This makes it a true stand-alone tool. You can also email the photo by providing just the email address, or print the photo from your computer or through a paid online photo-printing service. You don't have to upload anything to a third-party server, much less are you forced to save the file in a strict pre-fab format like you do on Flickr (unless you have a paid account), and you don't have to share your photos with the rest of the world if you don't want to. However, if you do want to share and/or keep an online repository of your work, Picnik makes it easy to upload your photos to a number of online accounts that you may have with Flickr, FaceBook and the like. Like Flickr, Picnik also offers and encourages their free, registered account and a paid account with more perks, which is very similarly priced to Flickr. If you can deal with the annoyances of banner ads and periodic prompts to register an account, Picnik may be worth your while for quick photo editing--ants not included.