Have you ever wondered how to add a starburst or other special effect to a picture? Have you ever wanted to change the frame or make them stand out more on your website? Now you can with a service called Picnik Picnik.

I read about it somewhere and decided to give it a go as I have always used Illustrator or Photoshop and they were overkill for some of this and in some cases cannot provide the same function.

Some of the features of Picnik include the following:

1. Fix your photos in just one click
2. Use advanced controls to fine-tune your results
3. Crop, resize, and rotate in real-time
4. Tons of special effects, from artsy to fun
5. Astoundingly fast, right in your browser
6. Awesome fonts and top-quality type tool
7. Basketfuls of shapes from hand-picked designers
8. Works on Mac, Windows, and Linux
9. No download required, nothing to install

It is easy to use and has more features than you can imagine.

yep between that and picasa, I don't need the more expensive programs for most stuff.

i still use paintshop pro though for web design graphics (poor man's photoshop)

Hmm interesting. I have always used Gimp which is a very powerful FREE image editor. It is a lot like photoshop and has some great capabilities. You can also get a lot of free brushes for it.

I've tried gimp too, but got away from it in favor of Illustrator. Paint.net is good for simple stuff too.

Adobe Fireworks (ex-Macromedia) is what I use, it also helps to reduce picture size in batches saving time and aggravation.

I tried Gimp as well but found it not very user friendly (at least for me.) Perhaps I was already too entrenched in PaintShop Pro (which was challenge enough to learn!)

Right now I have a nice, fast laptop and don't want to add a memory/resource hog like Paintshop Pro to it - I have it on my old laptop and use it there when I need to. I like the idea of the online Picnik - I'll have to try it out. I've looked at it but never even went to the "dabbling" stage.

Yes, Gimp is hard to get used to after using Paint Shop Pro for years. I started using PSP with their very first shareware release.

Regarding the speed issue with PSP, I have PSP 10.0 but do not use it. Instead, I still use version 7.0 on my laptop - because it may have been the last fast version and does everything I need it to do.

Sometimes an upgrade is a downgrade

I would like to use PSP but my laptop just runs so much slower when I run it. Maybe when I get a new laptop I can upgrade.

We like using Photoshop because of the large number of photos we work with. The action allow us to batch process the enhancements, resizing and watermarks. It's also good for removing the random car or pet from the photos.