Since joining Google in 2010, we have been creating editing magic in Google products while continuing to keep Picnik awesome. But now we get to focus on even awesomer things. Picnik will be closing on April 19, 2012.

Your photos liberated
Amazing photos are created in Picnik so we have launched a new feature, Picnik Takeout, that easily downloads your photos to your desktop in convenient zip files. You may also elect to copy your photos to
Google+ where you can store and share your creations. You may request your photos at any time and use this handy tool as many times as you like until our closing date of April 19, 2012. Learn More.

Premium Refunds
To our primo Picnik Premium members, we’ll begin processing a full refund of your current membership fee within a week of this announcement. By “full” we mean the whole darn thing. Yep, this means even if you are on your very last day of an annual membership, we will refund you the entire $24.95. Just because we want to say thanks.

Now the Good News – Free Premium for ALL!
To express our gratitude for your support over the past 5 years, Picnik Premium is free for everyone! Use Picnik in all of its premium glory, for free, from now until our actual closing day. Touch-up, Textures, Advanced, and more are all free for you to use!

We have been incredibly proud of building a product that is used and beloved by so many of you. We continue to be amazed and humbled by the photos you create and we are immensely grateful for all of your support, creativity, and passion.

We are excited by the photo-editing fun we have already brought to Google products, like Google+, where you can find many of your favorite Picnik effects in Creative Kit. We encourage you to visit Google+ and give it a whirl.

Please visit the Help Hub for more information on our wind down. Check the Picnik blog for updated information on our April closure.

It’s been awesome,
Team Picnik

Now that the tryptophantic coma has worn off, it’s time to turn our thoughts to snow, holly and red suits belted in white. To help you winterize, Team Picnik is rolling out our Holiday Effects, Stickers, Frames, Fonts and Fancy Collages.

Add some festivities to the family holiday card with snowflakes, a candy cane, or a dreidel. Or spruce up your profile picture with a white beard and jolly red nose, some antlers, or a spring mistletoe.

We are tickled to bring you a holiday set chock-full of cheer, so be artistic, be silly or somewhere in between just make sure to be merry!

A few of our very own Team Picniker’s joined men from around the world in recognizing Movember.   Movember is the dedication of the month of November to raise awareness, research dollars and support for men’s health and prostate cancer.

To participate in Movember men start out clean shaven on November 1st and then proceed to grow spectacular variations of mustaches for the remainder of the month.

If you are late to the party or follically challenged finish the month strong by adding a little scruff to your photos or profile pictures with our Premium Beard tool or free beard stickers.  Nothing says you are committed to a good cause like drawing some scruffy attention to it.

Halloween, the time of year when being morbid and gross is just part of the season. Here at Picnik HQ we can’t seem to get enough of it. We fraternize with ghouls and stare into the dark abyss to come up with effects, stickers, fonts, and other delectables to help you stretch your imagination to the truly horrible. As Sir Arthur Conan Doyle stated, “Where there is no imagination there is no horror”.

Channel your inner Dr. Frankenstein with creepy textures, spooky ghost stickers, or a flash of lightning. As you venture into our mad scientist laboratory, investigate past favorites such as Vampire eyes, Zombify, and last year’s runaway hit – Blood Splatters.

If you wander into our Picnik house of horrors looking for tamer Halloween fun, try costume masks, a candy corn frame, jack-o’-lantern stickers, or gobs of other fun ideas.

Before you depart, zombie lurch over to Fancy Collages to feast your eyes on custom made delights by our very own ghoul – Kelcey. Slide one of your creations into a Halloween collage template for an instant eerie touch.

Team Picnik has been working hard to bring all our best features together in one way more convenient location. Now in the Edit tab, the Edit Tools like Crop, Rotate, Exposure, even Auto-Fix can be found next to all the Create Tools like Effects, Text, Shapes, and Touch-ups!

We think this will make it even easier to add extra awesomeness to your photos, without having to switch tabs or go digging around to get those pictures perfect.

There are a few additional changes. Remember Local Contrast? It’s a fancy term for a feature that adds definition to your photos by enhancing contrast with advanced levels of detail and control. Now it’s called Clarity, and can be found in Sharpen, in the Edit section.

Highlights and Shadows are now easier to find in the Edit section’s Exposure tool. Use these sliders to fix photos that have been over- or under-exposed.

Do you recall that cryptic Advanced button in Sharpen? Now we’ve called it what it is: Unsharp Mask! Use this advanced Edit tool for finer control while sharpening blurry or featureless photos.

And Red-Eye (and that all-essential Pet-Eye)? It seemed strange to have them so far away from the other eye-themed fixes, so now they’re both in Touch-Ups next to Eye Color, Eye Bright, and Mascara.

We hope you enjoy these changes and find that they make it easier to make your photos wonderful as the memories they represent.

Happy Picniking from all of us on Team Picnik!
- Jonathan, Brian, Justin, Steve, Charlie, Michael, Brenda, Sonia, Lisa, Kelcey, MB, Mark, Anthony, Sky, Ziling, Ben, Nigel, Jen, Peter, Adam, Brian, Jenny, Andy, and Virginia

Good news, Picnikers! We’re rolling out for all our users a whole new section to manage your account information.

Now, at a glance, you can see your membership info. If you have a Premium account, you can see what length of membership you purchased and when your next billing cycle begins. You can also confirm that your credit card’s details are up to date, so your Premium membership never accidentally lapses. If you don’t have Premium, you can upgrade!

You can also use this page to easily manage your account’s password (remember, it’s a good idea to change all your passwords every once in a while), plus change your image quality settings, and even, if you really wanted to (and we hope you never would), delete your account (caution: this cannot be undone!).

We’ve been working hard to make this small but essential page more useful for all our users. You can find your My Account page if you’re logged into your account on the last section of the Home Tab, or at any time from the Help drop down at the top of the page.

Happy Picniking!

The coming two weeks are huge, Picnikers!

For those of us in the US, this is the 4th of July long weekend. To celebrate, we have every kind of stars and stripes for your photos: Bokeh Stars, Red White & Blue color effects, flags and fireworks stickers, and more! And don’t forget to put those photos in one of our Independence Day themed Fancy Collages.

Today is Canada Day! Canadians: Check out our collection of Canadian flags, bunting and that essential Maple Leaf in the Seasonal Stickers section!

And on July 14, the French celebrate Bastille Day. We’ve got everything French in the Seasonal Stickers section: Le drapeau de la France, la Tour Eiffel, du café, des baguettes, des croissants, and more!

So we’d like to wish everyone a joyous 4th of July, a carefree Canada Day, and a fabulous Fête Nationale. Happy Picniking!

It’s the women’s turn: The world championship for women’s national association football is happening in nine German cities between the 26th of June and the 17th of July.

If you’re a fan of one of the qualified teams (or if you’re just now choosing one), come to Picnik to dress your photos in your national colors. There are scarves, face paint, flags, and everything else you’d need to show your support for Australia, Brazil, Canada, Columbia, England, Equatorial Guinea, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, North Korea, Norway, Sweden, and the United States.

It’s time to unpack the barbecue, put ice in the cooler and tell dad to put his feet up, because this Sunday is Father’s Day!

Now is the time to make a personalized card for all the dads in your life: Your father, your grandfather, your uncle, your mentors, new dads, and anyone else with an especially paternal streak. Choose a photo, make a Collage, apply an Effect or two (like Comic Book in the Father’s Day Featured section), decorate it with Stickers and your very own Father’s Day message, then email it, upload it to one of your favorite photo sharing sites, print it out as a card or get it printed (for instance, on a mug!) with plenty of time to spare before Sunday. That way you’ll have all that extra time this weekend to spend with dad.

Happy Father’s Day, and Happy Picniking!

Our 18th Featured Picniker is Nagehan Berre Erkılıç, a university student in İstanbul, Turkiye. Nagehan had a difficult childhood and from the age of 7, she and her brother lived with her grandparents. Growing up in a rural area of Turkiye, she focused on her painting, viewing the white pages as a space onto which she could paint the things she had lost. Later, when she passed her university entrance exams, she moved to İstanbul, the cultural center of the country, rich in art and history. She worked as a stand hostess, saleswoman, and private English tutor, and living away from her family for the first time, began to find herself. This let her rekindle her relationship with painting, which then led to her interest in photography. She spent some time doing amateur modeling, which meant she needed a tool to edit her photos. Searching for a good program that’s easy to use and rich in effects, she found Picnik!

A prolific photographer and editor, she has a Facebook fan site devoted to her photography, called Berre’s Creation. Her number one rule in life is to choose a job which really makes you happy, so it won’t feel like a job anymore. Through photography, she found a job she loved, and Picnik made her photography happen. Therefore, she adds, history starts at zero, if the zero is in the right place. And her history started with Picnik.

Picnik: How did you first hear about Picnik, and when was that?
Nagehan: Tuesday, 2 November, 2010, at 7:58 am. It all seems like yesterday! I was surfing the net to find a program to make me feel relaxed and busy with my photos when I saw Picnik’s link. When I first entered [the app], I’ll never forgot that I felt like Alice in Wonderland. Because some of sides of my moods can be bloody, the original reason to stick with Picnik was the Halloween effects. I have never seen such original effects before. So, I spent all my time making scary photos. Then, of course, day by day, I met all the colors and smells of Picnik’s wonderful world. I laid a blanket and started Picniking.
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