Thursday 19 April 2012

picmonkey photo editor - it's in english!

a few days ago, i wrote about meitu xiu xiu photo editor, a chinese based photo editing tool for our photo beautification needs. it's a good app but for the chinese language-challenged lot, it does pose a bit of a... well, challenge.


so just imagine my delight when i came across a post by howaboutorange talking about picmonkey, an online photo editing website. if you're a picasaweb user, you'll know about picnik, and also the fact that they're no longer available to people without a google+ account. that's not really a problem with me as i have an account, but i decided to check picmonkey out anyway, just for the heck of it (and also coz i'm attracted to its quirky name).


anyway, the team behind picmonkey is the former engineers of picnik (which maybe explains the "pic" in the names), and they've decided to come up with this new website after picnik was bought over by google. like meitu xiu xiu, it's free without a need for registration, meaning anyone can just pop in there and start editing their photos without having to have everything connected to each other (email connected to your facebook, which is connected to your twitter, which in turn is connected to your picasaweb account and your flickr and god knows what else...).


for those who've used picnik before, you'd notice that while picnik's interface is more on cute butterflies-ladybugs-picnic-basket-ish look and feel, picmonkey's is more cool-summer-laid-back-yesteryears-ish feel. and it offers much more cooler photo effects than picnik! for now, all the cool effects are free, but i suspect they're gonna start charging for those tagged with the "monkey king" head soon, something like added features or extra special effects or whatever.


one thing that i noticed lacking in picmonkey that meitu xiu xiu has is the background feature, that i specifically wrote about previously. but they do have some cool frames and other features that we can play around with. here's a sample:


this is a sample photo that's provided by picmonkey for us to edit and play around...


here's another sample photo by picmonkey. to get this effect, i chose the frame feature, daguerreotype effect #2 and the film effect of "brady" (all circled in red), and a fade of 0%... the top photo is the same, only with the fade of 25%. so cool, right? oh, see that crown thing i circled in blue? that's an indication that this is a "monkey king" feature, so it MAY mean that it won't be free anymore next time!

2 comments:

Biow said...

you can try this as well..

http://www.mixbook.com/

but need to register.. but the catch is cannot download 1 image.. what i did is printscreen.. but not as nice..

meitu is slow.. and my office blocked some of its images :(

stargal said...

oh, i just went to look see mixbook. it's more for photo booking, kan? no wonder can't download.

yeah, meitu is a bit slow, but i think it's just the web version. i downloaded the pc version in my laptop and it works fine.