Fotoflexer (www.fotoflexer.com) is a FREE online photo editing application that allows you to do most of the things that desktop software like Photoshop Elements and Paint Shop Pro do. This includes cropping, recoloring, adding effects, inserting captions and much more.
Like several other online photo editors, Fotoflexer integrates all the major online photo services, such as Flickr, MySpace, Picasa and Facebook. This enables you to easily download and upload photos to an existing account.
So how does it work?
Go to the website and click on download. Select where you want to pull a photo from. Once you’ve downloaded the photo, Fotoflexer will expand to a full-screen editing canvas, where you have easy controls for all the usual editing actions such as rotation, cropping and resizing. There are also some fun distortion effects similar to the liquefy tool in Photoshop.
One of the big steps forward is Fotoflexer’s smart cutout and recolor effects, which can help you cut out various pieces of a photo or recolor them to match the tone of your choice.
Smart cutout is the more useful of the two; it lets you cut people or objects out of a shot without having to trace their outlines. If you’ve ever used Photoshop’s magnetic lasso or masking tool, you know full well how tedious this process can be. With smart cutout, you use a small paintbrush to “tag” objects you’d like to keep or remove. One click later, Fotoflexer will make a good attempt to cut out those parts of the photo. If it makes slight mistakes, you can then go back and remove or replace bits and pieces manually.
Once you’ve got a cutout, you can add it into another photo or bring another shot into the workspace. Fotoflexer lets you have as many layers as you want, and you can move them up and down or merge them by simply right-clicking. Again, it’s probably one of the few web apps for photo editing that offers contextual menus.
There are some features that the service doesn’t have, but they tend to be for advanced editing. I use online services for 90 percent of the photo manipulation that I do.
Fotoflexer is a really well-put-together service. The fact that it’s free and runs in your browser makes it even better.
I recommend that you give it a go to see how easy it is to create some great photo effects.
Also try Picnik – www.picnik.com