October is Breast Cancer Awareness Month and we’ve brought back some great Effects and Stickers to help you take part and support the cause.

Add the Go Pink! and Frame it Pink Effects or add a pink ribbon Sticker to the photos you share.  Make your voice heard by tweeting your Pink-ified photos, showing them off on Facebook, emailing them out to friends, or adding them to the Picnikers group on Flickr.

Join us in spreading the word about early detection, prevention, and a cure.

As Summer fades into Fall and inevitably into Winter, we can help you hold onto those careless days in the sun. Pluck a few of our new Premium photo-realistic daisy Stickers and place them into any garden, vase, or flower press image.

No matter how rainy, windy, or snowy it is outside, you’re invited to relax on our evergreen grass fields and place a delicate yellow blossom behind your ear or craft a daisy chain as a crown. In sixteen lovely shades of yellow, white, and red, these resizable petal plants will add a soft accent to any photo in need of a little bloom.

Go Premium and enjoy daisies year-round!

The savviest of the online scrapper artists have already discovered the secret to easy, online scrapbook success: Fancy Collages! Whether you’ve celebrated National Scrapbooking Day with us in the past or you never even knew we had these crafty frames, we have some news for you.

Junior Designer, Kelcey, spent a week furiously cutting with her digital wobble-border scissors, punching virtual holes with her cyber grommet set, and pasting together two-dimensional ribbons, sequins, and beads. The fruits of her labors are twenty (yes twenty!) new Birthday Fancy Collages for Picnik Premium members!

Raise your hand if you have a birthday. So, that’s everyone then?

We owe a big thanks to our material supplier, Plain Digital Wrapper! They enjoy a cozy corner of the online scrapbooking world where their designers compile themed kits full of digital elements (backgrounds, ribbons, confetti, paper cakes, etc.) which our designers then turn into Fancy Collages. The people of Plain Digital Wrapper have been supplying us with the beautiful treasures that we use to create crafty frames for your fabulous photos, so enjoy!

Go Premium and see the new Birthday Fancy Collages now!

Can I just say, we’re delighted? Not only are we delighted, but we’re enraptured and, I won’t lie, we have a little extra swagger in our step.

Last week we launched our amazing new Touch Up suite! Now with 15 cool effects like Sunless Tan, Airbrush, and Lip Color to guarantee that every picture shows your best side. Goodbye shine, goodbye wrinkles; hello Mascara, Blush, and Highlights! We’ve even added a few Advanced Tools (Dodging and Burning) to keep shadows off faces and make spotty lighting consistent. No more do-overs, no more detagging, now all you need is one shot to capture the perfect you!

Find these new tools under the Create tab. Look for the Touch Up section with the cosmetic jar.

All across the Northern hemisphere people are celebrating the return of summer and here at Picnik we’re digging out the wicker basket and unrolling the checkered blanket by putting forth a challenge for Picnikers to show us how they’re kicking off the season by posting their best summer pictures with their favorite Picnik effects to Twitter, with a prize to the winners! Check out all 200+ images by clicking here or searching for the contest hashtag #SummerPicnik.

A big congratulations to our three winners @smith521, @wildcat24, and @bellavaz. All three winners received a one year subscription for Picnik Premium!

We also had two more favorites: @welstechtrainer received three months of Premium for posting an amazing collage that won her the award for the most amazing time capsule image, and @sandra6dee won three months of Picnik Premium for the most joyful jumping picture.

Want to share you favorite pictures on Twitter? We’ve made it really easy! When you get to the Save & Share tab select Twitter and connect to your account. Congrats to all the winners and have a great summer to all!

Eating. Let’s be honest, it’s something we Americans are experts at! And here in Seattle, the home of Pike Place Market, world famous coffees, geoducks, Salumi salami, and the only certified fair trade and organic chocolate factory in the US, we really know how to eat right. We even managed to turn the Space Needle into a restaurant, for goodness sake! So, it was an ideal location for the first ever International Food Blogger Conference presented by Foodista.

Tickets to the three-day event sold out immediately, proving that not only do we enjoy consuming food, we also love talking about food, sharing our experiences with food, and pouring over the digital concoctions of fellow food bloggers. Sarah and I joined a panel called “Food Porn: Food Photography & Styling” alongside chef and author Kathy Casey and food stylist Patty Wittmann. We walked through a quick and dirty Picnik demo, showing the attendant foodies how easy it is to make your food look as delicious as it tastes. We demonstrated how to adjust for poor lighting with a quick auto-fix, resize the image so it fits perfectly on your blog, or flip your pineapple upside down cake upside down! We also showed how to make your alfredo absolutely dreamy with the Orton-ish effect, recreate Mom’s famous apple pie with the 1960’s effect, or sweep away those pesky crumbs with the Clone tool.

What a perfect fit for bloggers who need a little help making their pictures as mouth watering as the masterpieces they whip up! Thanks to all the attendees who asked great questions and offered their testimonials on how Picnik is already as essential as their recipes. Picnik and delicious dishes make a steamy couple and now the word is out.

click to enlarge

Those of you who use the microblogging sensation Twitter are probably already aware of twitter.com/picnik. From that chirpy perch, first Steve and now a whole flock of us watch every Twitter mentioning “Picnik” go by, and have built up a whole colony of happy Picnik users to follow. Those of you reading this blog post on the blog can see to your right the handy Twitter widget that keeps blog readers abreast of our past 5 tweets. And those of you who are looking at our Twitter page will notice that the most recent Tweet was posted from (be still your beating wings) Picnik!

That’s because the most recent addition to our covey of connections is Twitter! Now when you’ve completed Picniking, say, your photo of finches, you can Save & Share directly to your Twitter feed, while tweeting about it, all inside of Picnik! All this is possible thanks to our new partnership with Twitgoo, a media-sharing service created by Photobucket for posting pictures on Twitter.

But twittering isn’t all that you can do from inside of Picnik! You can also post your perfectly Picniked Profile Picture, or set it as your Twitter background! Happy Twittering!

Picnik’s gift generator has gotten a massage to make it even easier to give your favorite someone the gift of Premium awesomeness for a whole year! Perfect for everyone on your list, click here and you’re guaranteed to have your gift code before Christmas! In fact, you’re guaranteed to have your gift code before you can say “Well that was easy!” Either email the happy news to your happy recipient, or print out a custom card for a little extra physicality.

For just $24.95, the gift of photo-editing awesomeness to your friends, family, teachers, in-laws, and secret crush gives them access to all of Picnik Premium’s features and content for a whole year. Not to mention, it’s light on packing materials!

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.

We got a great email today from the creators of EquiPortal (”Your Window On The Equine World“).  They were looking for a way to make it easier for their members to upload their photos, and found Picnik to be the perfect solution:

I have recently taken my first Picnik / Amazon S3 project live and just wanted to provide some feedback. I run a small company with limited resources so finding a feature rich product that was easy to integrate was a great find. I have created a blog about my integration exercise if you are interested: http://blog.contrastwebsolutions.co.uk/2008/08/using-picnik-and-amazon-s3-for-photo.html

If you would like a testimonial from the perspective of a small company feel free to take any text from my blog such as: “Picnik is a cool product, but it’s the way that it can be easily integrated in to our own websites that makes it great.”

Thanks for the service.

To find out how to bring Picnik’s photo-editing superpowers to your website, visit http://www.picnik.com/info/api.