Picnik, Google and Furballs...
In the news today, I see that Google acquired on-line photo editing site Picnik. Picnik is one of any number of photo editing sites out there that let you do some basic and some not-so-basic editing and special effects on your photos. Interfaces nicely with other online photo sites such as Flickr and PicasaWeb. Of course the others do to. Picnik had about the simplist user interface to get the things done that I usually needed to do - crop, re-size, adjust brightness and contrast, tweak the color balance, etc. It has really become the photo editing tool of choice on my laptop since I don't have Photoshop Elements installed there.
The one thing I really liked about Picnik was the way it could correct "red-eye" in my pictures of my dogs. Red-eye is an artifact in flash photos where the light from the flash is reflected off the retina. It seems that dogs have a different structure in their retinas and when you take a flash pic of a pooch straight on, you don't get "red-eye" but rather "green-eye" from the light reflected off the back of the retina.
Photoshop, Gimp and most other photo editing software have tools to eliminate "red-eye" but I have not had much luck getting rid of the "green-eye" effect in the dog pics. Picnik handled this nicely with a "fur-ball" option in their "red-eye" tool. After selecting the tool, select the "fur-ball" option and then put the cross-hair over the green spot in the eye and click.
Here's a "before-and-after" shot of the same pic where Picnik was used to correct the green (blue?) spot in the eyes.
I wish the folks at Picnik well with the acquisition by Google - and Google, please don't screw up a good thing.
