Online Photo Editors

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I demo'd several online photo editing software websites six months ago, among them Phixr and Cellsea.

 

At that time, neither of the websites was really adequate to my work needs editing photos for online publication; so I settled on a portable Gimp application that lives on my thumbdrive and plugs into the USB on my work computer (which doesn't have Photoshop).

 

With a new year upon us, and a leap forward in Flash technology, comes a bevy of new photo editing websites: Fotoflexer and Splashup and a promise of a new online Photoshop product from Adobe called Photoshop Express, release date not yet determined.

 

First Fotoflexer:

 

This site is similar in look and feel to Cellsea (which I figured the best of the online editors I reviewed last summer). It offers most of the features you want for quick editing like resizing, cropping, adding a border, sharpening etc. Its major drawback is the lack of fine control on some of the most-used functions (i.e. unsharp masking).

 

If Cellsea is a B- (because it was so slow) and Phixr a C- (it's pretty clunky overall) then Fotoflexer is a B+; it does work faster and uploads files quicker, and is about as user-friendly as photoediting software is likely to get. It certainly beats Gimp, which I find the most unbearably dense and stubborn photoediting software I've ever had the misfortune of using.

 

Next up Splashup:

 

This online editor is a dead ringer for Photoshop. The site opens with a toolbox bar on the left, dropdowns along the top and palettes at the right--exactly like PS CS3 or any of the other iterations of the program. And the functionality of the various tools and commands is right in line with PS: the crop tool looks like the PS crop tool, the foreground/background color switcher the same, it's a near-identical rip-off of the Adobe standard-bearer.

 

The website comes up short in one important respect (for me) and that is the lack of a stroke function. I got around this by simply using the pen tool and drawing a rectangular border around my picture. Otherwise it does everything well, including speedy uploading of the image from your computer (or from Flickr, Facebook, Photobucket etc); and I love the familiar look and operation of my favorite Photoshop tools and functions.

 

I give it an A- with hopes its developers will continue to bring more editing tools and features to the site (I emailed them a request for the stroke function already!)

 

In short, if you need a quick fix and you aren't near your usual computer with your photoediting tools at hand, give Splashup a trial on the fly.

 

Thanks.

 

Allan