Picnik has been reincarnated as PicMonkey,
despite Google’s efforts to kill it off
A few months ago, this
column touched on the sad demise of
Picnik. Picnik, in case you missed it, was an inspired online photo editor that did away with the staid, technical overtones of the likes of Photoshop.com and replaced them with
joyful design and popular editing
options, while carrying with it enough technical welly to produce nicely
finished, high-quality images. In a sea of mediocre online editors with intrusive advertising and little to recommend them, it was a breath of fresh air.
Dave
StevenSon has been a camera buff ever since the whirr-click of his first autowinding compact in 1993. His
book, the Pocket Guide to
Digital Photography, is available
from magbooks.com
Then it was bought by Google, and after an
initially promising start, its
various bells and whistles were folded into Google Plus, a social network
so unpopular it makes Rupert Murdoch
look like Justin Bieber. Then, just as hope was fading that Picnik’s newfound
sugar-daddy would move the service to bigger and better things, Google shuttered the entire service with all the compassion of a fox in a chicken
coop.
(To be fair, for a while Google recommended
PicMonkey and Aviary as alternatives
in its FAQ on the closure of Picnik. More commercial heads prevailed, though, and now the
only suggested alternative is the
Creative Kit in Google+.)
Fortunately, the internet is a rare stomping
ground for phoenixes, so it’s
pleasing to see some of Picnik’s former engineers taking to the web again with PicMonkey, which, true to form, is a visually arresting, stress-free online
image editor. If you used Picnik, you
know what to expect. Airy-fairy web 2.0
copywriting, sprinkles of
(occasionally grating) light humour
and a frankly incredible amount of
image editing prowess. Indeed, PicMonkey is so similar to Picnik that technical types using
the API in their own applications generally only need to change ‘www. picnik.com’
to ‘www.picmonkey. com’ in their
code.
PicMonkey
can produce some excellent results – no technical knowledge required
While sniffy high-end types wrinkle their noses at
PicMonkey and its lightness of touch,
there’s no denying the need for the service. For every photographer who wants to
spend hours retouching every pixel of
every shot they take (to the inevitable detriment of their pictures, by the way), there are a hundred snappers with perfectly decent compact
cameras who simply want to apply a professional finish to their
images without necessarily needing –
or wanting – to know what a curves
tool is. It’s a bit like drivers who
simply want to be able to get their
cars up the M1 without an in-depth knowledge of heel-toe braking or
flywheels.
Evidence of the non-expert need for powerful
editors is evidenced by the
popularity of the effects on offer from the likes of Instagram: it might
be well and truly getting on people’s nerves (just how many over-saturated, faux-vignette images do we have to look at?), but with 50 million users, you can’t deny the enormous market for something that will give normal compact
camera images some extra sheen.
At the very least,
PicMonkey isn’t a one-size-fits-all effect. Indeed, there is a vast number of image editing options available. Of course, not all of these are good: there’s a
soft-focus effect at the top of the
filters list called Orton that I wouldn’t inflict on a picture of my worst enemy. And while many of the others cover inevitable ground (just how many
cross processing options does an
editor need?), there are plenty more that enable you to create totally bespoke images. Impressively, there’s even a curves tool that updates the
colours in your image as you pull it
about. PicMonkey is currently free, but there will ultimately be a paid-for ‘Royale’ membership option, so those who fancy trying out its full range of features should do so now.
More than anything, the reappearance of
Picnik, albeit with a slightly
different team and a new name, is a magnificent two fingers at Google, whose behaviour in buying Picnik in 2010 and closing it two years later was a
surprisingly antistartup move for a
company supposedly championing web technology.
It’s reassuring to see that a service can survive being chewed up by one of the
monsters of the web.
There are still worries, though. PicMonkey’s
natural home is on the iPad, a device
that perfectly suits applications that do technical jobs in non-technical ways, but is built in Flash. We may presume that this made the building process
(and probably the process of
converting Picnik to PicMonkey) simpler, but the work of converting PicMonkey to a platform to which it’s
ideally suited remains to be done. To be sure, its performan ce within a browser is impressive – not least
because of Flash’s reputation as a
battery-sucking processor-killer – but it often feels like the flexibility to run applications inside a browser window has been supplanted by the ability
to run applications absolutely
anywhere.
But perhaps what’s most pleasing about
PicMonkey is that it’s at the
vanguard of photo editors that enable you to produce nicely finished
images without noodling about with
Photoshop – even Photoshop Elements is a complicated series of levers and pullies, and without a decent theoretical understanding you’ll struggle to pull off subtle,
effective edits. It’s possible that without PicMonkey and its ilk, the
natural one-stop solution of casual
photographers would continue to be
the tedious, one-size-fits-all cliché
of Instagram and other lomographic
pretenders. And anything that gets us away from homogenous photography is a good thing, despite Google’s worst intentions.
Check out those curves – A full-on curves
tool is more than you get with many photo editors, much less free online ones
