It’s that time of year again, simultaneously the beginning of the guacamole season and the official end of the holidays: the Sunday when all Americans gather together for buffalo wings, nachos, and FedEx ads.

The championship game of the sport Americans peculiarly refer to as “football” (when in reality it’s closer to rugby), about a hundred million people watch the “Big Game” every year, which even if it isn’t as many visits Picnik gets in a year, is still a lot of gridiron fans. So as a service to all you hundred million devotees of the game, we have a brand new collection of Shapes for you to adorn your Sunday parties with: helmets, jerseys and, of course beer.

We would also like to announce the other big release today for Premium Picnikers: Gritty! Sort of like Orton-ish’s worst enemy, Gritty is designed to make you look real, tough, legit, right there, stepped up, and not taking nuthin from nobody. Like, don’t mess with me, I’m Gritty.

There’s an exciting new Effect just released for Premium Picnikers: Dots and Dots! Actually more like 8 features, Dots and Dots include Impressionist Dots, Light Peg Dots, Color Spots Dots, Circle Dreams Dots, Newsprint Dots, CMY Halftone Dots, Jumbotron Dots, and Scoreboard Dots. Also, each one has the full range of Advanced blend Modes and each can be painted in (and out!) of your photo!

We’re seeing pink here at Picnik! A hand-picked collection of Valentine’s Day Shapes, Stamps, Kisses and Candy is up! Plus two sets of over 20 brand new Valentines Day Fancy Collages! Now, we appreciate getting a Snoopy Valentine from a box of 36 as much as the next person, but go beyond grade 3 with Picnik’s power of personalization! Plus, they go great with a box of chocolates!

Brenda, our Community Liaison in Charge of Flickr Operations, has handily put together a short video tutorial on Layering (now in Premium Preview):

As seen in the video, Layering is done through the Photo Basket which can be found at the bottom of your Picnik window while in the Edit or Create tabs.

The days are getting shorter, there’s a briskness in the air, and the sun has finally come out: It’s the end of summer in Seattle. We must have Fall on the mind, and all of Fall’s attendant reminders of renewed responsibility (buying school supplies, investing in a winter wardrobe, those darned Christmas displays at Marshall’s), because the updates are coming fast and furious here at Picnik World Headquarters. Indeed, we’re happy to announce two new Effects in Picnik!

The first one is designed to mimic the effect first devised of one day by the photographer Mareen Fischinger as she stood on a bridge in Düsseldorf and began photographing everything in front of her in dozens of different angles, and then stitched them together afterwards on her computer. Said to more closely represent how the human eye pictures a scene than how a single camera shot does, the technique quickly took off on Flickr, with a group totally devoted to just panographs (indeed, as Mareen says, ” the effect panographic, and the result is a panograph, the whole thing is panography”).

The second one is Puzzle. And who doesn’t like Puzzles?

These two new features can be found in a new section inside the Effect tab called Featured Effects, and both are now only available for Picnik Premium users.

Given the fanatical font geekery here at Picnik World HQ, we’re thrilled to finally announce that we’ve unveiled our brand new and exclusive offering of 15 fonts from FontShop®, available only to Premium Picnikers. This collection of typefaces from the FontFont® library was hand-picked just for our users and represents an incredible selection of truly professional, quality fonts. In fact, if you want to use these fonts without the incredibly affordable Picnik Premium membership, you’ll be paying thousands of dollars. No joke, they’re that awesome.

So, without further ado, here’s the list:

FF DIN – Cool, crisp, minimal. Albert Jan-Pool’s skillful reworking of the official traffic type of Germany (DIN stands for Deutsches Institut für Normung, or “German Institute for Standardisation”) will work in any setting, and has been used on ABC’s World News With Charles Gibson, MTV Latin America, JetBlue Airways, and Adidas.

FF Meta – Erik Spiekermann’s humanist typeface is considered by many to be groundbreaking, and the most influential sans serif of the digital age. Designed to be readable and sturdy on a small scale (it was intended for Deutsche Bundespost, to be easily legible on postage stamp scale) and in large letters (or on a mail truck), it can be used for a look that’s both modern and approachable, as has the Stockholm Metro, Imperial College London, Environment Agency of England and Wales, and I.D. Magazine.

FF Meta Serif – It took three years and three designers to create this sturdy serif companion to Spiekermann’s FF Meta. Ideal for a classic look or longer passages of text.

FF Tartine Script – This natural, flowing script drawn by Parisian font designer Xavier Dupré is at home on both greeting cards and cans of gourmet soup.

FF Erikrighthand – The handwriting of Dutch designer Erik van Blokland is bold and legible and yours to pretend ownership of!

FF Pepe – Give your images a vintage, personal touch with the elegant award-winning script by Spanish designer Pepe Gimeno.

FF Brokenscript – Get in touch with your inner Berliner with Just van Rossum’s interpretation of old German type. Known as a “textura blackletter”, FontShoppers might affectionately call it “heavy metal”.

FF Market – H. A. Simon’s script is the kind of casual freestyle lettering you’d see price-pointing produce or refrigerator markdowns.

FF Providence Sans – The basic print letters of a child are often the most human and legible. Drawn with youthful care by Guy Jeffrey Nelson.

FF Oxide – The letters found on shipping containers, warehouse walls, and military munitions can now be found on your pics, thanks to celebrated New York designer Christian Schwartz.

FF Cocon – Curvaceous and organic, the type of Dutch designer Evert Bloemsma has become synonymous with “Web 2.0″.

FF Marker – Legit graffiti can’t be made with a font, but Thomas Marecki’s typeface from FF Tag Team gets you pretty darn close.

FF Confidential – Just van Rossum’s deliciously damaged homage to industrial typography, FF Confidential is good for advertising, displays, or flyers for anarchist organisations.

So check them all out, and let us know what you think!

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!

In this world, there are photo editors, and then there are photo editors, and some photographers only use a photo editor that has Curves. Now those photographers can use Picnik.

What are Curves? They’re complicated, fiddly things that professionals, purists, and hardcore hobbyists like to use, because they give you complete control over the colors and exposure of your photograph and limitless creative variations. Our curves, which have all the functionality, individual channel adjustments, and amusing maths a pro would expect, also have lots of great presets, and are so non-fiddly that even a normal person can have fun with it and get great results.

As with all our features, Curves works in real time, which, we really should point out, is pretty darned special. And our presets, like Daguerreotype, Ambrotype, and Velvia, are all hand-crafted and Picnik-tested to be pitch-perfect and still adjustable. Curves can be found under a new Advanced heading at the end of the Effects section.

Check it out, and we look forward to hearing what you think!

The Picnik Premium Preview is at an end. Starting today, Premium features will only be available to Premium subscribers, for the low, low price of $24.95 per year. As always, the basic Picnik experience, complete with the best photo editor you can find anywhere, is absolutely free for everyone.

Fonts! Our new Font tool has been a smash hit, but one thing we’ve been hearing in spades is, “More fonts!” We had 6 fonts, so we added one or two here and there and now we have 70. Just a handful, really. The original six are still available for free for everyone.

Shapes! We also bulked up our collection of 23 shapes with a nicely weighty 154 Premium shapes. Everything from cute little baby bunnies to punk rock splats. And of course a tasty selection of basic shapes has been set aside for everyone to use.

Effects! An update wouldn’t be complete without new effects. Posterize, which we’re really quite proud of, and Film Grain, which is a dead simple way to add some nice texture to any photo.

New photo service! Webshots has joined the ranks of Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, and Photobucket to which you can connect via Picnik.

All of us are very heads-down this week on a wide variety of new things for Picnik.  For example (and in no particular order) Steve’s working on a couple very cool new effects that he demo’d for us the other day.  Plus he continues to improve and streamline the experience of editing photos from one of our many cool partners like Facebook, Flickr, Picasa and Photoworks.  Some new partners coming soon!

Mike is deep in the banking part of the e-commerce industry this week.  He is building the back end support for the subscription system… making it a solid experience so our Premium users can continue Picniking without a hitch.

Brian is working on very related stuff building and integrating the front-end aspects of the subscription system.  But also (spoiler alerts!) he is adding new fonts and shapes!  What I’ve seen over his shoulder is WAY cool… carrying some momentum from early design work Peter had laid out.

Jonathan and Monica have been connecting us with tons of reviews and write-ups… even a little TV action!  I’ll get a list together in the next few days for you to check out.

I won’t run down everyone today, you can see what I’m up to… especially if you’ve sent feedback lately. :)

BTW – did you know you can add Picnik as a Facebook application?  Do a search for “Picnik” on facebook, or just click this link.

Shouts to our Flickr and Facebook user groups!

- Picnik de Fotos… Hola!
- *picnik addicts * BFF!