Published 3rd January 2008
While recently in the need to correct a picture of mine, i decided to try a few web based solutions.
All of them can perform the basic operations (crop, resize or enhance attributes like contrast, brightness, sharpness, saturation or hue) that one would expect from an "real" image manipulation program. While the seemingly best applications offer a flash based interface, there are also a few ones that are based on Javascript.
Another positive aspect noticed was that all services do not require a user registration to work mostly complete.
Splashup or "photoshop online" as some people call it because of its flash interface and tools which resemble very much that of Photoshop, offers nice tools like the "Lasso" and even supports layers. Splashup is only app that lets you start from a blank image and has it's own file format for storing pictures with multiple layers.
Lunapic has a rather horrible Javascript interface with no preview feature available. It strengths definitely lie in applying animations to your pictures.
Iaza's interface is pretty plain. It has no preview feature and the browsers back-button is used to undo changes. However, Iaza has some fancy effects like "Cookie Cut" and also lets you create a few nice animations like "Bad TV" or "The Matrix".
Picnik has a nice flash interface and is the only tool that offers crop constraints like "3x5" or even predefined avatar constraints like "Last.fm-Avatar". It doesn't have outstanding features or effects but does it job very well.
Snipshot is another non-flash image editing app but has a nice and clean interface. Very few tools and effects are available in the non-pro variant (actually, the only effect offered in the non-pro version is "grayscale"). It lets you upload up to 25MB and save images directly to a permanent url at Webshots.
Fotoflexer implements the content-aware image resizing algorithm presented at siggraph. The flash interface is well done and offers many advanced effects and tools. The most interesting ones like "Smart Cutout" (content-aware image resizing) or "Morph" (with facial recognition) are located in the "Geek"-tab.
Pixenate was developed with standard web technologies (HTML, CSS and Javascript) to be available on all modern web browsers. The interface is horrible and the only outstanding tool is "spirit balance", which corrects non-level horizons.
Pixer.us has an rather buggy ajax-interface. The effect-tab was not clickable and the application sometimes had problems with displaying the image.