Picnik has announced that it is making its premium editing features, previously restricted to Premium members only, available to everyone for free. They will maintain the Premium subscription, at $24.95 USD per year, for people who want new advanced editing tools, full screen editing, fonts from FontShop, and more.

This is a sad day for people, who like me were hoping that rich Internet applications would be monetized by subscription, rather than advertising. (Picnik will be adding in advertising for non Premium members to supplement the loss of revenue.)

The move is obviously a reaction to FotoFlexer's announcement that its editing tools will be made available for free.

Still, I'm disappointed. First, I don't think that having advertising in an RIA like Picnik makes any sense whatsoever (banner ads rarely make sense anywhere). Unless they find a way to make the ads relevant, users will end up with mass media advertising at the top of every page - surely a distraction to most, and something that negatively affects the (otherwise amazing) user experience.

Secondly, its sad to see that the value of an amazing online application continues to erode. I really like Picnik, and actually think its worth $24.95 a year. Its disappointing that not many others see the value in that. I'm hoping that one of the online editors can find where the value is for the end user - with these two announcements its obvious not in the editor itself.

Here's hoping that someone figures it out soon - the last thing we need is more banner advertising online.

More at Mashable. Ryan Stewart also has some great things to say.

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.

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.

In my opinion, Picnik is one of the top Flex based applications that have been built. Its ease of use is outstanding - I find it easier to use than iPhoto even (and I'm a huge iPhoto fan). So, its no surprise to see them getting accolades like "the slickest pic app out there" from Business 2.0.

The Picnik blog also has a link to a Linux Journal article about the Picnik Firefox extension.

RIAs are getting more and more attention from the mainstream media these days.

Picnik is an online photo editor, similar to iPhoto, that allows you to do simple edits to photos from the your computer, your webcam, or the Internet. It is similar to Fauxto in that it allows you edit photos online, but the functions are more like iPhoto than Photoshop. For instance, unlike Fauxto, there's no concept of layers. However, it does do what most of us want to do with photos: autofix, rotate, crop, change the exposure, change the colors, sharpen and remove red eye from photos.

Unlike any other online photo editors that I've seen, there are a number of ways to get photos up to Picnik. You can upload a photo from your computer, like any other service, but you can also get photos from Flickr, Yahoo Image Search, a website or your webcam. Because the site is built with Flash, it can access your webcam directly, and you can easily take a photo of yourself and edit it in just a few seconds. That's pretty cool.

You can save the photos back to Flickr, your computer or your website. If you've got your website setup properly, you can actually email the photo back to the website, similar to what you could do with emailing photos from a cell phone.

This looks like an application to keep an eye on. The front end is done with Flex, and it appears that the backend is done using Python. This is also covered over on Mashable.