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.

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!

It’s much better than “Tuna Surprise” (sorry, mom). Our Labor Day Surprise is something fun to play with during your relaxing Labor Day weekend. Check it out:

• Drop Shadow! Find it underneath the Frames section of Special Effects. This effect goes fabulously with Borders.
• Better Save to Computer! We’ve squashed a number of bugs and redesigned this feature to make it even easier to use than before.
• New and Improved Inner Workings! Lots of boring under the cover fixes and improvements that make things faster and smoother.

And for those of you Facebookers who haven’t yet tried our Facebook integration, give it a go today. Click here to add Picnik goodness to your Facebook account.

Stay tuned for our next release - Summer has much more in store for Picnik! And as always, thanks for all the feedback. We do love hearing from y’all.

 p.s. Summer isn’t over until we say it is…

Thanks to some great feedback, we’ve decided to tweak and massage the poll. If you’ve got a better suggestion, please leave it in the comments! So, on to round two:

 Loading …

Update: The poll is now closed! Many thanks to everyone who voted and for all the great feedback. You guys rock.

Walt Mossberg’s Wall Street Journal column just came out and I think it’s the best column he’s ever written. Sure, I’m a wee bit biased, but check it out for yourself. “If you want to see how good a Web application can be, take Picnik for a spin”.

Quite a lot, it turns out. So much, in fact, that we’ve decided to let you help us out. Which brings us to the first official Picnik Poll!

Update: Thanks to everyone who commented and voted! We’ve opened up a new poll with some new options here.

(more…)

We’re looking for a select bunch of dedicated Picnikers to help us test some big new features. We have some new features that are more complicated and we would like to make sure that they are fully baked before we release them into the wild. This includes features like text, clip art and a bunch of things we’re not ready to talk about publically (but they are really cool).

The ideal tester would be someone who uses Picnik several times a month. Bonus points if you are a Flickr or Facebook user. Active beta testers will get a free subscription to the as-yet-unnamed premium version of Picnik.

 If you’re interested, send us feedback from Picnik (top right corner, click on “feedback”) with the subject “beta tester”.

It looks like Google is returning errors to the requests that we make. So, for the moment, our PicasaWeb support is broken:(

We’ll update this post as we learn more.

Update:  Looks like it’s working again.  Enjoy!

While summer in Seattle officially starts the day after the 4^th of July holiday, summer for the Picnik team started early. The blog has been a little slow because some of us have been traveling, on jury duty and/or attending family reunions. Now that some of us have gotten that out of our systems (more or less) we’re back on and working on getting rid of that pesky “beta” tag. We’re a little old skool here, we think “beta” is a temporary state of being, not a postfix to a product name. Stay tuned; it’ll be an interesting summer. I promise.

I would be remiss if I didn’t mention that we have over 200k users on Facebook, and we’d love to see more. When we were not attending to family and civic duties, we were quietly polishing our Facebook experience. We really like how it has turned out. If you haven’t tried Facebook yet, go sign up! Facebook is open to all users now, not just the elitist college folk. And if you’re already a Facebook user, be sure to check out the Facebook-enabled version of Picnik. Facebook users can try it out here: http://www.facebook.com/apps/application.php?id=2258014869&b.

And last, but most certainty not least, I’d like to welcome the newest member of the Picnik team, Monica Harrington, marketing guru. The attentive readers of our blog probably noticed that Monica and I share a last name and quickly jumped to some kind of relationship conclusion.  You are probably right, but it’s only through a quirk of fate. Monica and I are married, but Harrington is her maiden name. Mine too.  It was a nice convenience when we got married, but family reunions can be a little confusing. It’s great to be working with Monica again. We haven’t worked together since the Valve days. As much as I’m looking forward to working with Monica, I’m especially happy to be working with her assistants, Frank and Emma.

Monica and her assistants. 

Rumor of the day: Text. Stay tuned.

Last night, Picnik passed the 100,000 user mark on Facebook! Proof!

Thanks to everyone for adding us and for all the great feedback! We’re stunned, thrilled, and downright giddy. Stay tuned as we work out kinks and come up with some great new Facebook features.