Drawn! The Illustration and Cartooning Blog

I can’t for the life of me remember where I first saw this post, but Chanpory Rith over at LifeClever.com shares handy links to 10 Free web-based alternatives to Photoshop*:

I’m fed up with Photoshop and its one billion rarely-used features. How about a simple photo-editor that’s quick, easy, and doesn’t cost a thousand dollars? Fortunately, there’re tons of web-based photos editors popping up.

By far the most outstanding one on his list is Picnik (pictured above) for its simplicity and five-second learning curve (it’s free, but ad-supported). You may be familiar with Picnik since it was recently integrated into Flickr. I admit I loved how, when saving a file as a low-quality JPG, it describes it as “Big, ugly blocks of pixels, teeny tiny file size.” And when saving as a medium-quality JPG: “Meh quality, small file size.” It’s the kind of photo-editor your Mom would understand.

I found Picnik particularly useful this week when a client needed to convert a bunch of BMP files to JPGs for their site. They are not tech-savvy, nor did they have the interest in purchasing and learning new software for such a simple task, but they figured out how to use Picnik in just a few minutes.

*Johnny posted similar free Photoshop-clones just over two years ago here as well.