Top 8 Photo Editing Sites Reviewed

Web 2.0 is in full swing right now, but there's more to the contemporary web than just online word processers and spreadsheets. Most basic photo editing tasks like resizing, cropping, color adjustment, etc. that one would use something like Paint Shop Pro, Paint.Net, a certain level of IrfanView or ACDSee, or perhaps even the Windows Paint application, can now be performed online in your browser, thanks to the advancement of web technologies in use today. In today's feature, we'll tell you about a few such photo editing web applications.

Snipshot (formerly Pixoh)
Snipshot, formerly known as Pixoh, is a very true Web 2.0 site, complete with pure white backgrounds and large fonts on the homepage. Jokes aside, it boasts of a good set of features like unlimited undo and redo, support for large files upto 10MB or upto 5000x5000 in resolution (that's 25 megapixels!), direct loading of images from anywhere on the web, including Flickr, support for PDF, JPG, GIF, PNG and TIF file formats (opening as well as saving) and also exporting directly to Flickr.

But it's image editing capabilities are the most basic. You can resize and crop images easily by dragging the corners, you can rotate the image, adjust brightness, contrast, saturation, hue and sharpness, but that's it. Probably the only thing I can highlight about Snipshot is that you can numerically specify the height and width of the image to resize it. This feature should be available in any photo editing app.

PXN8
PXN8, pronounced "Pixenate", is one of the more feature-rich photo editing apps online. It may not look as pretty as Snipshot at first, but it's features are right there and there's no denying the fact. PXN8 lets you zoom in and out of the image, which is an extremely useful feature. Then, other than the usual crop, resize, rotate and color adjustment features, PXN8 also offers some ready filters to generally enhance a photo, to fill light in dark pictures, reduce/remove red eye, whiten parts (like teeth!), and to get the omnipresent sepia effect. There is a unique "Sprit Level" tool that lets you fix photos that were taken at an angle by mistake. If your pictures have a horizon that's not purely horizontal, this tool will rotate the image to level it up. It's essentially a rotate tool, but it does it automatically instead of you keying in manual rotation angles. There are also some "fun" effects such as the one that gives your images rounded corners (so, so Web 2.0!), an interlaced video effect, a blur / out of focus effect and snow, so you can have Christmas in October!

PXN8 also lets you upload the image to Flickr, or to WebShot's All You Can Upload service for use anywhere on the web. It uploads the file, generates a TinyURL for it and gives it to you to use.

PXN8 can also be bought and installed on your own website if you want to provide your users photo editing capabilities in your web browser, but it's a little expensive at around $749!