Adobe launched Photoshop Express today, an online Flex based application for editing and storing photos online. The press release has more details, and a number of sites have reviews of the service.

I'll have more details on this next week when I'm back from vacation.

Picnik took another step forward to cementing their lead in the online photo editing market with the release of their API - Picnik in a Box. As the Picnik team puts it:

"Picnik In A Box presents the complete Picnik UI right on top of your existing website. This is known as a "lightbox" technique and is becoming pretty common among advanced web applications. Although it takes a little more work than the other integration scenarios, it presents the most seamless experience to your users. They feel like they've never left your website and they still get to experience all of Picnik's photo-editing awesomeness."

This is great news for any site that has users uploading photos. Adobe's approach with Premiere Express has been to license the software to sites like YouTube and MTV, allowing their users to edit videos online. I don't know what effect Picnik's announcement will have on Photoshop Express, but the online photo editing space just got more interesting, that's for sure.

I can't wait until developers start mashing up these APIs into some truly cool applications. I'd love to see a Picnik / Ribbit application.

I really like it when a Flex application doesn't look like a Flex application. To me that shows that the developers have really put time and effort into the site - they've customized nearly every component available to make sure that the look and feel of the site is perfect. Kizoa is a perfect example of a site that does just that. Its a French photo site, allowing you to edit your photos, share your photos, and organize your photos all in a single Flex based interface.

Its a bit like Picnik and Flickr and Mixbook all mixed into one site. You can easily upload your photos (the site supports multiple file uploads at once through their Flex interface - nice work!), then organize them into albums. You can create slideshows or montages easily, with support for text, transitions, animations and more. Once you've got something you're proud of, you can easily share it with the world, or just your friends. Their site has a few samples of slideshows that they've created.

The entire site is in French, so if you can't read French then you're probably out of luck, but if you do, this is a pretty neat site to check out.

The integration of Flickr and Picknik is now live on Flickr's website - users can now use Picknik, a Flex based photo editing application, to edit photos that they've uploaded to Flickr. Photos that you've uploaded in Flickr should now have an "Edit Photo" link above them, which launches Picnik application right in the page. Picnik has added at least one feature that I hadn't noticed before: full screen editing. Under the Picnik menu you can select Full Screen and launch the editor in full screen, without any browser controls.

From a business standpoint, Picnik hopes to make money off their Picnik Premium subscription that is available. For $24.95 per year, users get access to advanced controls in the Picnik editor. The Picnik team deserves a lot of credit for the way they've implemented those features in Picnik. They're all available in the editor, and you can see what the changes will do to your photos when you use them, but to actually apply those changes you'll have to dish out the $24.95. Nice touch - much better than having me guess at what I'm buying. I'm sure more than a few Flickr users will dish out the $2 / month for those features, which should make the deal a success for Picknik and Flickr (who now have some happier users).

TechCrunch, News.com and Ryan Stewart have more information.

Picnik, the extremely easy to use, Flex based online photo editor has just released version 1.0, taking the beta out of their name and adding a bunch of new features. New features include support for Photobucket, augmenting their existing support for Facebook, Picasa and Flickr.

They've also added a new feature called Effect Painting, which allows you to colour only a certain area of a photo. This can really help a certain subject stand out in your photos. There are a bunch of new effects, and tools like Teeth Whiten and Blemish Fix, which do pretty much what you'd expect them to do. Finally, you can also present your photos inside a number of new borders or frames as they're called.

Perhaps the most interesting aspect of the release was their monetization strategy. Most web applications these days are relying on advertising of some sort to generate revenue, thinking that most online users will refuse to pay for anything. Personally, I don't believe that advertising will be the way that most web applications make money. For one, its impractical to show ads based on people's content all the time, so the best advertising strategy would likely involve behavioral advertising (I'll show you a Ford ad if I you visited a Ford website recently, or searched for Ford online.) However most Internet users would be pretty adverse to the privacy implications of such a platform.

Instead, companies are moving to subscription based models to generate revenue. Google is charging for extra storage for GMail, and the Picnik team has taken a similar approach. Many of the features are available to anyone for free, but advanced features are labeled Premium, and available to Premium members only. The Premium Feature Stream is available for $24.95 per year, or about $2 per month. I think that's more than reasonable, given the features that you get access to.

If you haven't checked out Picnik before, now's the time to do it. As far as I'm concerned, its the best online photo editing application that exists.

I've covered Picnik quite a few times before.

TechCrunch is running a story on another Flex based photo editing application - FotoFlexer. FotoFlexer allows you to create fun images from your photos, with distortion effects like stretching or shrinking area, and filters like stamps or cartoons.

FotoFlexer integrates with all the major online photo storage sites, including Flickr, Picasa, Facebook, MySpace and even Yahoo Search. You can also upload photos from your own machine if they aren't on the web (who does that anymore!) Once in the program, you can add any effect to the photo that you like. You can also make cartoons out of your images easily, as FotoFlexer allows you to add text and text bubbles easily.

This service would appear to be compete with applications like Photoshop Elements or Picnik, which I consider to be the leading online photo editing application. The space will certainly get interesting when Adobe launches the Photoshop Express tool.

No, the screenshot below isn't from the new Photoshop beta. Its Fauxto, an online photo editor that was written with Flex and launched in November. The biggest difference between this product and others that I've seen is that this one incorporates the concept of layers, similar to what you'd find in more advanced programs, like Photoshop. According to their blog, the initial beta release includes features such as adjusting the canvas and image size, adjusting layers, adding filters and more.