Picnik began life with one purpose: Bring photo editing awesomeness to everyone. We’ve approached this in three distinct ways: First, make it available to everyone, everywhere. Second, make it a joy to use. Third, make it cheap. Today, we’re unveiling significant changes to improve the Picnik experience in all three respects — and it’s all thanks to the feedback, support, and crazed fandom we’ve received from all of you.

Now all Picnik users will have full access to our huge range of edit tools, special effects, fonts and shapes that previously were only available as Premium features. Free users will have this largess supported by ads.

For a 100% ad-free experience and exclusive access to new Advanced editing tools, brand-new infinite Photo History, professional fonts from FontShop, Fullscreen mode, early access to new features, special partner offers, priority support, and much more to come, sign up for Picnik Premium for only $24.95 USD a year.

Why the change?
We want to make everyone feel like a photo editing superstar. Picnik is already the world’s leading online photo editor, but there are still a lot of people living tragic, gloomy lives believing that powerful photo editing tools cost hundreds of dollars, come in unopenable boxes, and are impossible to use. By offering an ad-supported version of Picnik, we can make much richer, deeper, and ultimately better photo-editing functionality available to more people around the globe: Photo editing awesomeness for everyone.

At the same time, we have a dedicated and ever-growing community of Picnik Premium users who’ve told us that they always want the highest level of Picnik functionality without ads. Above all, our goal is to make Picnik the best photo editing experience available, regardless of whether you support us directly or our advertisers do.

So, to break it down, here’s the new split between Premium and free:

	Premium	Free
No ads
Advanced editing tools
Fullscreen mode
Exclusive content, including professional fonts from FontShop (coming soon!)
Early access to new features
Exclusive partner offers
Priority support
Perfect Memory
Photo History	Unlimited	5 most recent
Easy and fast connections to popular photo sites and social networks	Unlimited	1 at a time
Easiest and most fun photo editor in the currently known universe
All the essential photo fixing tools
Tons of creative effects, fonts, and clipart
Instant and automatic feature updates
Unlimited undo
Browser plug-in

If you’ve got any questions or suggestions for the future, please send us all the feedback you want through Picnik. Meanwhile, stay tuned for more updates — we’ve got some features coming that we can’t wait for everyone to see!

Happy Picniking!

We’re thrilled to see we’ve once again been nominated as one of the 300 lucky finalists for WebWare’s annual WebWare 100! Of these 300, only 100 can remain, and that’s where we need you!

Click here to vote for your very favorite web-based photo-editor in the Publishing & Photography category.

Many, many Picnikers have asked us for help with their pet’s photos, the sad condition known as pet-eye, demon eyes, devil dogs and possessed kitties. Emma, 1/2 of our office security system, was sad. So, we leveraged the smarts of our red-eye feature to bring you Pet-eye! Our cool new tool helps fix tricky pet pics and gives them a little catchlight* for extra photogenicity. Clever feature even knows the difference between Humans and affectionately termed Furballs. Just in case though, you can make the call yourself for a little extra control. Remember, red-eye and pet-eye often get even better results if you do an Exposure: Auto-Fix first. Now Emma is happy!

Me and my furball before and after pet-eye… shameless!  And no, I did not whiten my teeth!

*Shouts to Brenda and Stevekeat!

Welcome, 日本語-speaking photographers: Picnik is now available in Japanese! That’s right, in addition to Chinese, German, Spanish, French, Korean, Italian, and Portuguese, we’ve translated our little photo-editor into that all-important ninth language, and we’re very excited about it, too!

As always, to change languages, just click on the little globe at the top of the Picnik page, choose your preferred tongue from the drop-down list, and enjoy.

よろしくネ!

The pace here at Picnik World HQ is never exactly slow, but 2008 is shaping up to be a record breaker. Not only did we just celebrate our biggest traffic day ever this past weekend, Team Picnik is also up to all sorts of terribly exciting new projects. Things we’ve wanted to add to Picnik for a very, very long time.

First up: a lot of performance work. We’re pleased to say Picnik now works even better for those few of you without nitrogen-cooled, eight-core monoliths, and those fewer of you on (gasp!) dialup. What else are we working on? We can’t tell you. It’s super secret. But it’s coming. Soon.

And in case this doesn’t quite feel warp speed enough, we’re proud to present: Focal Zoom! One of our favorite effects so far, if done right, Focal Zoom will actually make you dizzy. Note: applying this filter multiple times may very well lead to Ludicrous Speed. You’ve been warned.

Stay tuned as February starts to unwind. There’s lots to come.