We’ve set our away messages, synchronized our watches to Central Daylight Time, and hit the dusty trail (A.K.A. I-5) to Sea-Tac airport. Today, we three ladies of Picnik are boarding our flight for the Windy City!

What’s with the globetrotting, you ask? Lisa, Sarah, and I are off to reveal the superhuman photo editing powers of Picnik to the ladies of BlogHer at their 5th annual conference! We’ll be demoing the best of Picnik out of Booth #112 alongside our trusty press rep, Bridget, while giving away some choice Picnik swag. Come find us!

Don’t worry, we’re leaving a few days early to scarf some deep-dish, cruise the Magnificent Mile, catch a few bars of the blues, and rofl to some world-class improv.

Along the way, we’ll be posting photos to a Flickr stream here. Follow along on our whimsical forays and misadventures in America’s 3rd largest city, Chicago!

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.

Picnik passed another big milestone this week, with every more millions of happy Picnikers using the site to add a little fun and awesomeness to their photos. We’d like to say we’ve been doing our part here at Team Picnik to boost our numbers, because we’ve got a little happy news.

Team Picnik is thrilled to announce that Charlie, our QA Manager and Community Relations Guy is back at work. Why was he gone? Because he had a baby!

That’s right, baby season continues at Picnik World Headquarters with baby Wyatt, the third baby this year. First Brian, our Quixotic Softographer, then CEO Jonathan, and now Charlie. Congratulations, Charlie and Kristi!

Justin (our Penguin Handler) and Mike (COO) are in San Jose this week for the annual Velocity Conference on web performance and operations. Keynote speakers this year include Jonathan Heiliger of Facebook, Marissa Mayer of Google, John Adams of Twitter, and Justin Huff of Picnik! That’s right, Justin gave a keynote today on “2 Years Later: Loving and Hating the Cloud,” and Mike went along to cheer for him.

Most of our users might hear about “the Cloud” and wonder, “Why would Justin hate the Picnik clouds?” but actually the Cloud is where most of Picnik is stored! It refers to all our offsite data storage, processing, flexibility, and not making Justin install all that hardware himself. That way, it’s where we don’t have to look at it, as if it were hidden behind big white fluffy clouds. So Justin was down there to talk about love, hate, and laziness.

They’ll be there for the rest of the conference, so if you run into them, say hi!

Update: The video is now online!

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!

Next week Team Picnik is giving away a couple one-year Picnik Premium Memberships in a new Twitter contest: Use Picnik to Tweet your favorite summer photograph, using the hashtag #SummerPicnik so we can see you, and Team Picnik members will choose the best ones, with winners announced on Friday, June 19!

Directions: Make a Twitter account, if you don’t have one! Announce yourself by following @picnik on Twitter! Take your picture, then upload it and edit it! Then find the Twitter page under the Save & Share tab to Tweet your summery masterpiece!

The contest runs from Monday at 12.01 am through Thursday at 2 pm PDT. So why are we telling you this early? Because it’s a beautiful weekend in June! So get outside and get those photos!

Note to our Southern Hemisphere Picnikers: You are entirely welcome to include your photos of the grumpy weather you’re having right now.

Update: The contest is now open! Feel free to start Tweeting your submissions!

Update #2: The contest is now closed! Thank you to everyone who participated! We will announce the winners tomorrow, June 19 at 2pm PDT. In the meantime, check out the submissions on Twitter by searching for “#SummerPicnik”.

Today Yahoo! has launched a whole new set of applications inside Yahoo! Mail, and Picnik is launching right there with them!

That’s right, the internet’s most gigantor webmail provider is now offering Picnik as the photo editor for their users! And without having to go digging in an application directory, either, but right there in the applications menu at the left.

Similar to our integrations with Facebook and Flickr, having Picnik inside your email brings Picnik’s photo editing awesomeness to where so many of your photos are kept anyway: in your inbox! Just click on “Edit Photos” next to the Picnik icon and hit connect, and Picnik automatically grabs all the images attachments in your Yahoo! Mail. Can’t find something? You can also Get From Computer, a Website, a Yahoo! Search, a Webcam shot, the list goes on. Then edit, add Effects, Stickers, Text, and Touch-Ups to your heart’s content, and when you’re done, Save to your Computer, Flickr, Print, other third party storage sites, and, of course, email!

We here at Picnik World Head-quarters are all still scraping our jaws off the floor after COO Mike Harrington completed a Half Ironman in Saturday’s Ironman Hawaii. He did his 1.2 mile open-water swim across the Kailua-Kona Bay, 56 mile bike across the lava desert to Hawi and back, and 13.1 mile run along the Big Island coast between the Puako Petroglyph Archaeological Park and the Nomura Hawaii Village, for a total of 70.3 miles, all in just 7:09:39. There are those of us who can’t sit in a chair for that long without getting tired.

Also on Saturday was the annual Issaquah Triathlon, a sprint Triathlon of much more humane distances of 1/4 mile swim, 15 mile bike ride and 3 mile run all around the Lake Sammamish area just to the east of us, which Penguin Handler Justin entered again and finished in 1:13:22, a 20 minute improvement on last year!

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.

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Our 14th Featured Picniker is Trevor Reed, head foreman of a three-bay truck wash and detail facility of the largest trucking company in Idaho, aka (in Picnik World Headquarters) “Trucker Dude”. Living in Idaho Falls, Idaho, Trevor grew up in nearby Shelley, Idaho after moving away from the Mt Saint Helens area of Washington as a kid. He’s been working for the same trucking company for 12 years, he was in his high school band, still plays the drums when he gets a chance, and writes science fiction.

We here at Picnik HQ have actually been following his Flickr stream for months, where his photographs of gleaming 18-wheelers, incredibly dirty faces, and wide, “Tatterland” vistas certainly stood out in our Flickr Picnikers group. A lot of his photos are of big trucks with Vibrance effects, but sometimes a little baby in Black & White and Vignette. You get the tough guys looking rugged and mean with HDR-ish over top, but also the tough guys hamming it up with Gooify and Orton-ish. Each picture stands out and it’s obvious that “Trucker Dude” enjoyed taking every one of them. Plus, they actually are really good photographs: well-composed, well-set up, well-lit, well-edited, and each has a personality, tells a story, and actually is worth a thousand words. So we couldn’t wait to get in touch and make him our 14th Featured Picniker!

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