No Faux Modesty

No Faux Modesty
www.fauxto.com
I wonder how many potential Fauxto users are put off by the dull, grey start page? To see Fauxto in all its glory, you have to complete the simple (free) registration process first. This is a really quite impressive tool. The interface is clean and uncluttered and I liked the way the tabbed image browser made it easy to work with multiple pictures. If you’ve ever used a photo editor, then you should have no trouble working out how to use Fauxto. The layer and text tools are particularly impressive. It is clearly still in Beta (the Help menu for instance was greyed out when I visited the site), but that doesn’t mean you can’t put it straight to work on your simpler image processing chores right now.

2 A Life
www.picture2life.com
Another free online photo editing service (well, you do have to give them your email address), Picture2Life limits users to 25MB of bandwidth per month. The interface is not as intuitive as Fauxto, but there are some interesting options such as a collage creator and an animation builder. Picture2Life’s designers have put a fair amount of effort into integration tools for bloggers and users of online photo services (eg, Flickr and Photobucket). Worth a look, particularly if you’re into blogging.

PixanWhat?
pixenate.com
Pixenate takes a very Web 2.0 approach to online photo editing. The design is clean, the options are clearly illustrated and all accessible via big, obvious icons, and the site does not require registration. Pixenate certainly doesn’t push the boundaries of online photo editing tool kits, but it is so easy to use and covers such a significant percentage of what might be called bread-and-butter functions (cropping, red-eye reduction, rotation, fill, etc), that I think it will find a place on many browser toolbars. Well worth a look and a play.

Snip in time
snipshot.com
Snipshot is another web 2.0 photo editing site. Again, you don’t get every tool imaginable, but what’s available is easy to use and clearly set out. No registration is required to use the site and I like the way it offers unlimited undo’s and lets you work on seriously large files. When you’re finished, the images can be saved to your own computer, saved to a Flickr account or stored for free online at a unique web address for each picture (very handy when you don’t want to email somebody a picture and don’t want to hassle with uploading it to another website). Files can be saved as GIF, JPEG, PNG, TIFF or PDF. A free browser extension puts Snipshot’s facilities as close as your right mouse button.

Good Egg
videoegg.com
When you arrive at the Video Egg home page it isn’t obvious that there is in fact quite a useful video uploading service available to anyone with an email address and the necessary interest. (By ‘necessary interest’, I mean those of you who’d like to share a video clip with friends by posting it online.) Go to the log-in link at the top left of the home page, follow the simple account creation steps and you’ll be set in no time. Video Egg is similar in ease of use to YouTube, but the video quality is much better and uploads are far, far quicker because the site downloads a convertor to your computer, so all image processing is done before you transfer the resulting compressed file to Video Egg. The web based interface is drag-and-drop simple and easy to use.