I’m beginning a series on free tools that are designed to edit photographs in the cloud. There is a surprisingly vast collection of free photo-ending applications in the cloud and I will cover many of them in the next several posts. These applications range from some very simple ones with limited features to one that is so sophisticated that it can, for many users replace Photoshop and the interface even looks like Photoshop. Also there is an application called Photoshop.com from Adobe that has a lot to nice features including a generous amount of free space to store your photographs.
One of the first cloud photo applications was Picnik. Picnik gives you two free options. You can create an account with user ID and password and then you can store a limited number of jpegs on their website. Or you can select jpegs from your computer, work on them with Picnik and then save the results to your computer. This second alternative is not a true cloud computing solution since the files are not stored in the cloud, so if you want the complete benefits of the cloud, create an account and store your pictures online. You can also edit pictures that you have stored on Flickr, Facebook, or Picasa.
The screenshot shows some of the things you can do with Picnik. Besides “Autofix”, you can rotate, crop, and resize an image. Among the image editing options are a fairly sophisticated exposure adjustment with some advanced features including a histogram display that can help you judge the proper exposure.
You can adjust the colors in three ways: by letting Picnik guess the correct colors, by using a “neutral picker”, and by adjusting the color temperature and saturation. If the subject has “red-eye” from a flash that is close to the subject’s eye level, they you can fix the red-eye with the red-eye adjustment.
The create tab has many useful and fun capabilities. You can superimpose text in your choice of colors over the image. Your can transform the image by applying filters, such as black and White, Sepia, “Gritty”, etc. You can attach stickers and add one of several frames.
There are some Touch-up tools that require a paid premium account. The premium account also lets you use the “Advanced” tab, with tools such as levels, curves, burning, dodging and cloning.
If your requirements in a photo editor are fairly straight forward, take a look at Picnik.
Cloud Computing for Free 
Ooh I’m glad to know about this! Just in time for my vacation , on which I will likely take hundreds of pictures. I’ll have to play with this when I return. Thanks, Harvey!
Geoff – You may have some truth in that samnetett if you remove the cost factor. Include the cost factor and cloud computing beats physical computing in almost every measure; uptime, performance, resiliency, etc.As for it being automated, there are many companies that automate and enable thousands of machines (instances) to be under the perview of a single business with a single administrator if need be. The ratio is drastically different, and vastly less expensive than physical computing administration and maintenance. I’d love some links or thoughts on what you’re referring to though.Even though I am discontent with the usage of the words to describe cloud computing, or “cloud” almost anything, it doesn’t mean I’m not an advocate for cloud computing in general. Node based storage, with parallel compute among instances, and these core cloud characteristics are truly the future of computing. The other notions that SaaS == Cloud Computing is however a load of nonsense.
I hope Picnik provides the kind of adjustments you want for your vacation pictures. If you need more sophisticated processing there are several other cloud photo editing programs like Photoshop.com, Sumopaint, and Aviary. I intend to discuss these in future posts.