Picnik has officially launched! We’re proudly taking our beta banner down and throwing it on the ceremonial bonfire. We’re also introducing our Premium Feature Stream which will be available for the super-affordable price of $24.95 for a whole year. This gets you get complete access to special edit tools, effects, shapes, fonts, with a whole bunch more just around the corner. To celebrate, Picnik Premium is free and open for everyone to preview this week! There’s also a ton of new features, so here’s what’s new:

Photobucket Support: Our mission of connecting Picnik to anywhere your photos might be continues and today we add Photobucket to the list of major photo sharing sites like Flickr, Picasa Web Albums, and Facebook, which you can get photos from or save your photos to!

Effect Painting: Many of you have asked to apply an effect to precise areas of a photo. Now you can with Effect Painting! Choose a Black and White, Sepia, Boost, Soften, Tint, or Pixelate effect and click the new Paint Brush button. You can brush in the original through the effect or check the Reverse effect box to do it backwards: just paint in the effect where you want it.

New Effects: Lots of these! There’s Holga-ish, Night Vision, CinemaScope, Invert, Cross Process, Focal Pixelate, Pencil Sketch, and Pixelate, all under the newly organized Effects section in Create. In fact, the whole Create section has been reorganized, with three new sections…

Shape Tool: Add shapes, symbols, speech bubbles, hearts, arrows, paw prints and the odd spaceship to your photo. You can choose your color, spin it around, and make it as big as you want to shape up that shot!

Touch-Ups Tool: Whiten teeth or remove blemishes with these tools. Put your best face forward!

New Frames: We’ve moved Frames to their own section, and have added Museum Matte and Polaroid to the ranks of Border, Rounded Edges, and Drop Shadow.

Stay tuned as we open the floodgates on our Picnik Premium Feature Stream!

We’d also like to thank all our early users, beta testers, emailers, bug reporters, criticism senders, fan mailers, Facebook hordes, and word-spreaders who have helped us get to this point. You’re the best a company like ours could have hoped for, and we’re looking forward to continuing to provide you with the very best photo editor out there.

Good afternoon! Let me introduce myself: I’m Steve Leroux, and I’m Picnik’s newest employee. I’m very excited to join the Picnik team (title: Software Engineer & Importer of Fine Teas), and frankly I’m also a little awestruck at how incredibly talented everyone here at Picnik is. But then again, given how awesome Picnik’s software is, the talent level should come as no surprise.

For the past month or so I’ve been immersing myself in all things Facebook, and you’ve already been enjoying some of the fruits of my labor (such as attaching photos to wall posts and browsing your Facebook friends’ photos). Well, today we released an update that will make our integration with Facebook even more seamless: you can now skip the approval step when saving your photos to a Facebook album. And even better, you can also edit photos you’ve already uploaded and then save them right back to Facebook.

We’ve got plenty of other exciting things coming down the pipeline, but I’ll leave that news for another time. Enjoy the new Facebook features, and have a great weekend!

Summer may be waning, but we’re churning out the new releases like a steam-powered printing press. Here’s what’s new:

Type has landed! By far the feature you’ve requested the most, Type has at last been added to our Create tools. You can find it next to Special Effects, and LOL to your heart’s content. Or you can say serious, meaningful things too. Check back for an ever-evolving type tool as we tirelessly strive for typographic perfection.

Facebook Friends Photo browsing. Now you can browse not only your own photos but all your friends’ as well, including photos other people have taken, tagged with your friends’ names. In the Photos tab, under Facebook, click the Facebooker dropdown menu. Your friends’ worlds are at your fingertips!

Facebook Post to My Newsfeed. Quick shortcut to push any photo (yours or your friends’) right to your Newsfeed. In Picnik, either click the new checkbox while saving a photo, or click the little gear menu beneath the thumbnail while browsing under the Photos tab. Your world is at your friends’ fingertips!

Facebook one-click photo editing. If you have Picnik installed in your Facebook account (click here if you don’t!), you’ll now be able to edit your own and your friends’ profile pics in just one click! You’ll also notice new edit links inside your Picnik Profile box that will let you pull those pics straight into Picnik.

The wheels are turning fast here at Picnik World Headquarters, so keep checking back for more thrilling updates!