Editing Your Photos With Picnik

holga-ish on my dragonfly necklace

Whether you have an online business and you would like to make your photos really pop, or you want to enhance your blog photos, or you enjoy photography as a hobby, or you just want to edit your family photos to make you look ultra hot, then you would love to try Picnik. It is a free program that is quite user friendly.


infrared film with yellow matte a signature and logo

Though only the basic edits are free, you still get some neat choices. I edited the same exact photo in this post using only the free tools for examples. Now, for basic editing, I really love Picassa 3 which is totally free does have lots of neat features and easy to use, but Picnik has lots of other features for more "play". You can really acheive the look of vintage photos, holga photography, and the style of film noir and a play on exposure that is just beautiful. Of course, this program is probably a nightmare to the true photographer that has studied and learned their own tricks and uses the lens and darkroom to capture these effects, but this is just for fun!


boost, vingette, 1960's round corners and a touch of film grain

Of course on the free version, you have limited uploads and for more advanced tools like "gritty" (so neat!), and photo editing for people, like eye and teeth whitening, sunless tanning, eye color brightening, red eye reduction, wrinkle softening, airbrushing, mascara highlighter!!, shine reducer... (wish I could get these and a belly roll reducer and a make dinner and do dishes tool in real life!). All of these tools are in the premium package that you have to sign up and pay for, but you can at least try them out (one at a time though) to see if you would like the investment.


touch of black and white, cross process and focal softening

I hope you have fun experimenting with your images. You can give your shop or blog an entire overhaul without ever having to retake photos. Unless your photos are very dark, overexposed, blurry or poorly staged, most can be saved with an artful flair with Picnik.


boost, filmgrain, vignette and orton-ish

Edited to add~ as you can see through my photos, the colors have changed drastically. For fun, artful purposes, this is totally acceptable and encouraged! But remember, if you are selling online you need to remember to keep the colors as close as possible to the real thing so that your buyers won't be mislead.