The title is, of course, a joke. If there’s any application that won’t easily be replaced by an online application, it’s Photoshop, one of the mightiest and most versatile software tools ever. Still, although Photoshop is bread and butter of every graphic designer, it’s a scourge of many offices, where poor users are struggling to use this powerful (and, for many, too complex) tool for actions which can be done with a much simpler piece of software. Add to that the fact that with huge popularity of Flickr and similar services a lot of user-generated photos have moved online, and it’s easy to see that online image editors are a great solution for simple and quick image editing.

Recently, a new online image editor - Picnik - appeared, and I’ve decided to compare it to five other similar applications (there are many more out there, but I felt that only these 6 are really mature products. If you know of any other great online image editors, please let me know). Here are the results.

Fauxto

Fauxto launches in a new window, which is unnecessary and will annoy many users. But when it opens up, you’ll be ready to forgive it, because it’s basically Photoshop’s little brother. It’s a very ambitious image editor: it has it’s own image format, it supports layers, several filters, 16 different tools including smudge, gradient fill, eyedropper…in one word, it’s as close to Photoshop as an online application can get.

This said, some options are sorely lacking. Zoom, for instance. Open up a big image and you simply can’t view it in its entirety. Also, the entire service seems to be leaning more to the drawing than the image editing features. I’m sure that many users would appreciate the ability to remove the red eye effect more than the ability to draw pretty radial gradients.

As far as stabilty goes, I’ve experienced one nasty problem. Every now and then, it stops reacting to clicks. It can also get generally slow at times. I haven’t noticed any other bugs, but these are bad enough and should be addressed quickly.

All in all, Fauxto beats the competition down with options, and you have to give them that. Looking at Fauxto blog you can see a stunning array of new fetures they’ve prepared for the next update. However, complexity is not exactly what most users will be looking for here, and Fauxto may be trying just a little too hard for its own good. The more features they add, the more will little inadequacies in the GUI stand out. But, if they manage to iron all the bugs out, Fauxto will be the online image editor of choice for many.

Picnik

The youngest application in this roundup, Picnik is definitely among the best. It has a simple and very usable GUI and it guesses all those frequently used features right, so that even seasoned Photoshoppers won’t grumble that this or that is missing after 5 minutes of using the service. The approach is similar to that of Picasa: take the stuff that 99% of non-professionals actually need on a day to day basis, and cut out the rest.

What’s even better is that Picnik is quick and works really good, although it’s not without bugs. One weird bug emerged when I tried to set a fixed crop size: I was unable to set an exact number in pixels. I would type 358 and I would get 357. This doesn’t always happen, but it’s quite annoying and it needs to be fixed fast. While we’re on the subject of cropping, one important feature is missing. I would like to be able to set a fixed crop size and then set the size of the crop rectangle to what I want, so I can crop a larger area of the image down to a set pixel size, just like in Photoshop.

It’s important to note that, besides saving images to your computer or printing them, Picnik also integrates with Flickr for easy uploading of edited image.

Although tiny bugs are present, and certain less important features are lacking, Picnik is very close to a product I would use for work or even recommend to my entire office. It has a perfect balance of versatility and usability: it has everything you need for casual image editing without going too far in the options department.

Picture2Life

Just like Picnik, Picture2Life makes the right decision by enabling you to try out the service without registering. Unfortunately, Picture2Life’s GUI leaves a lot to be desired. Some of the commands are unnecessarily crammed into a very small rectangle next to the image, and the options are presented as tags (you need to sign up to get the feel of the real GUI, it feels quite different than the tryout). There’s quite a bit of options, including some options none of the other apps included in this roundup have, for example animation and collage creation, and a live preview of all applicable effects at once. Personally, I’d rather have less options, but better organization.

Picture2Life also gives you a 25 MB storage space for your photos, or the ability to create a picture RSS feed, which makes for some interesting possibilities. But, I’ve had a hard time enjoying the service because the GUI is, simply, too crowded and inadequate for this type of application. After a thorough reorganization and repositioning of practically everything on the page, Picture2Life would be a great competitor in this space. Also, as you will see in the test below, some of its image processing algorithms can yield very strange results. Verdict: if you can get over the GUI, you’ll find that Picture2Life has something to offer, but it’s still has a long way to go.

Preloadr

Preloadr is tied to Flickr, and it only works with a Flickr account. This can be both a blessing and a curse, since it might lead to bigger adoption from Flickr users, but it will surely alienate everyone who’s not a Flickr user.

In any case, Preloadr integrates with Flickr rather nicely, it has a simple, clean design, and it’s quite easy to use. The tools include cropping (it’s simple, but it’s done right), resizing, rotating and flipping, with a couple of ‘advanced’ tools, including image layers, histogram, scaling, moving, adding text and color channel graduation. Several filters, like sharpening, brightness, inverse or grayscale are also included. Most of the commands and options open in a popup, which might not be the best choice but it works quite well.

There is no one-click-fix type of option, which is a shame, because many users would benefit from it. There is, however, an auto-contrast option, the results of which you can see below in my little test. Overall, Preloadr chooses its features wisely, taking care to include only the important stuff and leave out the clutter. It’s a bit of a shame that it’s aimed only at Flickr users, but if you are one, I can recommend it.

PXN8

PXN8 earns points on simplicity. When you open the site, you’re greeted with an image and pretty well designed editing commands on the left. It has a great and fast zooming system, an auto-enhance feature (it could use a separate auto-colors feature, though), and the ability to crop, resize, and rotate the image. It also has color balancing, red eye removal, and several effects, some of which are dubbed as “fun” but are actually quite useful - rounded corners is one of them.

Like many other apps here, PXN8 fails at cropping. Many users are working in a CMS and have a custom format for their images. For example, the images on this site all have 500 pixel width. In PXN8 I can’t simply crop an area of the image down (or up) to 500 px width, which makes the crop feature almost useless. This feature can’t be too hard to code, so I expect PXN8 and other apps I’ve mentioned here will take notice and fix this annoyance.

PXN8 enables you to edit an image from your computer or from the web, and even includes a bookmarklet for easy adding of images from the web to the editor. From the editor, you can save the images to your computer or to Flickr, or upload it to MySpace, Bebo or other services via Webshots.

Apart from cropping, PXN8 works nice. Its GUI is decent but not beautiful, however it’s fast and for the most part bug-free, and that’s what most users will want. You can check out an example of its auto-enhance feature at the end of this text.

Snipshot

Snipshot is a bit of a mixed bag. It has a great GUI, works fast, and even offers a free API so you can include it on your own website. It offers unlimited undoing, and you can use it to edit fairly large images - up to 10 MBs.

On the other hand, its options, which include only resizing, simple cropping, rotation, an auto-enhance feature, and adjustments for sharpness, hue, saturation, brightness and contrast, are simply not enough. As a proof-of-concept it’s fantastic, but for everyday usage you’re going to miss some feature in the first 5 minutes.

So, the verdict here is simple: add some more features and more options (especially for cropping and resizing, which are currently free-form only), and it might just be the best application of this bunch. But at its current state, its adoption rate will stay low. It’s up to the developers to change this if they want growth.

The test

To test these applications, I’ve uploaded one overly dark photo and tried out the features users will probably be using the most: auto-fix, auto-colors, sharpen. Not all of the apps have the same features, so this is not a true comparison, but it will give you some idea how these image editors work in practice.. The results (with explanations) are below:

Original image

Fauxto (sharpen)

Picnik (1st image: auto-fix, 2nd image: auto-fix + auto-exposure + auto-colors)

Picture2Life (sharpen, value 6)

Preloadr (auto-contrast only)

PXN8 (enhance, essentially an auto-fix-all feature)

Snipshot (enhance, essentially an auto-fix-all feature)

Conclusion

As we’ve seen in the test, options are one thing, and real world usage is another. After applying some basic commands to the image, I’ve gotten very interesting results. Picnik’s auto-fix worked best, but its auto-colors did more harm than good, giving the image an unnatural blueish hue. The enhance feature of PXN8 definitely did too much (look at the loss of detail in the trees), while Snipshot’s was quite a bit better but still not perfect. Fauxto’s sharpen wasn’t useful at all (and interestingly enough, although Fauxto has the most options, when it comes to sharpening you only get one option: sharpen, without any additional settings). Preloadr’s auto-contrast was solid, producing similar results to Snipshot. Finally, I couldn’t find an auto-fix option in Picture2Life, so I tried with sharpen, but none of the settings produced remotely acceptable results.

As usual, there is no clear winner here, as each application offers something unique. For real everyday usage I would recommend Picnik and PXN8; you should definitely look at Fauxto if you want complexity and don’t mind a couple of bugs, while Snipshot is great if you want to include it on your own web site. Preloadr is good, but only for Flickr users, while Picture2Life needs a GUI overhaul and a change to some of its image processing algorithms, but it also offers several interesting and unique options. So, the moment when I’ll tell everyone in the office to ditch whatever software they’re using and switch to one of these apps is not yet here, but I feel it’s just around the corner.