Editing Features:  

Picnik takes a very loose, relaxed approach to image and photo editing, encouraging users to play around with effects, filters, levels and embellishments, as opposed to cut-and-dry adjustments. That said, Picnik is still perfectly-suited for more standard and traditional image and photo editing and makes these tools available in an easy-to-find tab. There, users can crop and resize images, sharpen or soften lines, adjust layers for optimal contrast and saturation and implement other everyday polishes.

Picnik also has automated photo adjustment and improvement tools that instantly configure a photo’s light, hue, saturation and whiteness levels and adjust them to an optimal setting.

Import/Export:  

Perhaps Picnik’s strongest argument comes in the form of its integration with other online photosharing and social networking sites. Users can edit photos from a variety of sites and services without having to rely on photos and images saved directly to their computer. As more and more computer memory is being outsourced to the Internet and smaller PC types like the Netbook are becoming popular, this seems a particularly progressive design decision; one which will hopefully only be expanded in the coming years—or even months.

As for exporting and sharing, Picnik, again, integrates perfectly with sites Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Photobucket, Webs, Picasa Web Albums and others, enabling altered and edited images to display instantaneously.

Ease of Use:  

As mentioned previously, Picnik is designed with flexibility and playfulness in mind. Users can upload from their source of choice and get to work editing, improving and even transforming photos. The history features are easy to find, with a preview window showing applied effects and changes in advance to save users the trouble of making use of them.

Help/Support:  

Despite its relaxed interface and playful tools and features, Picnik never leaves users on their own to discover the program tools and features. Users can learn tips, tricks and discuss finished photos in the forums, find information about tools and features in the topically-organized in-depth FAQ section and even give feedback to the site developers using the contact sub-portal in the Help menu.

Picnik manages to strike an incredible balance between playful and professional, giving users a variety of tools to edit, improve, personalize and transform photos and images. Though its bandwidth heavy, multi-tab navigation interface might take a back seat to Pixlr, it seems to have found a niche in the midst of photosharing and social-networking sites, embodying the fun, personal and social nature of these sites.