How many times have you found yourself needed to quickly edit a photo without the need for something as powerful as Adobe Photoshop? There are a number of inexpensive software applications you could buy to let you perform basic edits on your photo, but you don’t need to. There is a free option you can use to edit your photo: Pixlr.com.
Pixlr is a full featured image editing and post transformation tool. It contains image adjustment tools such as brightness, contrast, color balance, and filters including blurring, pixelating, vignette, pastel, emboss, engrave, and many more. In all, there are 28 different filters you can use on your photograph.
When you first open Pixlr, you see a screen to create a new image, or open one. We chose to open a spring picture to check out the features of the online software tool.
First, let’s explore the user interface.
We were amazed at how responsive the interface is in Pixlr. In some ways, it’s faster than some of our desktop image editing programs. The interface is very easy to use – you will likely pick it up very quickly as it is like most software applications. At the top, you have a series of menus to perform the functions you come to expect from a mid-level image processing application. On the left, you have a tool palette to cover editing functions. On the right, you have your navigator, layers, and history palettes. These can be closed and reopened later. You can also moved the palettes around to suit your needs.
Image Editing Tools
You have a standard set of image editing tools such as crop, marquee, lasso, pencil, brush, and so forth. We liked the red eye removal tool and found it easy to use on photos. The color select palette is a joy to use – easy to select colors by HSL, RGB, Web, or a slick IMG palette that selects colors from the loaded image. Finding a complementary color for your image is very easy.
Filters
We like our images to be as true to the original as possible, but there are times when you need a little creativity to really bring out what you need from an image. There are a number of filters to select from. For the image we were editing, we loved the Tilt Shift, it allowed us to bring a couple of flowers into focus and blur out the rest of the image.
Text Handling
Adding text onto a photo is easy. Unfortunately, the text tools are very simple with no real control over kerning or other powerful text functions we’ve come to rely on. For basic text addition, the text tools in Pixlr will be fine.
Overall, we were very impressed with the online photo editing functionality of Pixlr and can see using it for quick and fast photo editing or photo conversion.
