The editors at www.makeuseof.com ranked online image editors, and in their words “starting from the best”:
1. FotoFlexer — “FotoFlexer is a powerful, simple-to-use, highly-automated and feature-rich online photo editing tool. It’s probably the closest online alternative to Photoshop.”
2. Fauxto
3. Phixr
4. Wiredness
5. Pixenate (PXN8)
Online photo editor FotoFlexer integrates with popular social networking and digital photo sites like Facebook, MySpace and Flickr to seamlessly edit and return pictures to your online accounts all from the comfort of your browser. Aside from the online integration, FotoFlexer does everything that you’d expect from an online image editor and then some (including webcam shots).
We’ve posted an embarrassing number of online image editors in the past year, but FotoFlexer looks like the editor that devoured the features of all the rest and then went back for seconds. If you need to do serious image editing, desktop editors like Photoshop, GIMP, or Paint.NET will always be your best bets, but if you want to do some fun, lightweight editing—especially with social sites—FotoFlexer is the place to go.
Online photo editors keep getting better and better. For hardcore image manipulation, desktop software like Photoshop or Gimp will always have its place, but online editors are free, easy to use and a lot of fun. We covered most of the online editors back in February (Fauxto, Picnik, Picture2Life, Preloadr, PXN8 and Snipshoot). But a relative newcomer on the scene, Berkeley-based FotoFlexer
, is worth a look.
The site first launched in July with basic functionality and integration with Facebook. This last week they relaunched a new site with more tools, direct access to your desktop/laptop webcam, and they also now integrate with Flickr, Picasa and MySpace.
Upload a photo, or grab one from a supported service, and edit it by changing colors, adding effects, bulging or pinching areas (to make body parts look larger or smaller
), etc. You can also turn any image into a sketch or cartoon. I spent about 10 minutes creating the different versions of the picture to the right (original is top left). The most fun is changing hair color, although the image third down on the left is my personal favorite.
Fotoflexer says they incorporate their own artificial intelligence algorithm to figure out the right way to alter images. And whatever it is they’re doing, it works. You simply point out a few areas of the site you want to remove or alter and it figures out the rest of the pixels pretty quickly. You can do all of this in Photoshop, but it takes a lot longer. And unlike most (but not all) of the online photo editing tools we’ve previously covered, FotoFlexer also supports layering for more complicated image editing.
FotoFlexer also now integrates directly to your webcam and to take a quick snapshot and edit it. Many of the effects are similar to the Photo Booth application that comes installed on all Macs.
The integration with third party services is a great feature as well. Pull down photos from Facebook or another service, alter them and re-upload in a few minutes.
The service runs in Flash and was built on the Flex platform with mostly custom tools. The company has not raised any capital and has 15 employees, all in the Silicon Valley/Bay area. About 50,000 people use their Facebook application and/or the website directly. I expect that number to grow as social networkers discover the joy of turning their pictures into cartoons, or turning their hair color to Fuchsia.
Mashable, August 27 2007 — 09:54 AM PDT — by — Share This 
Starting this week, you’ll be able to harness the power of FotoFlexer with all of your social networking needs.
The powerful online photo editing service will be integrating their tools with Facebook, MySpace, Flickr, Picasa and Yahoo to make it even easier to work on the pictures you find there, or even work inside their services.
Their technology (they say it’s patent-pending ) promises to bridge the gap between the current crop of online photo editing tools, and the more complex desktop tools we are all accustomed to using. Most intriguing is the promise of an artificial intelligence that will somehow assist you in your editing.
Demos are expected soon, but for those lacking photo-editing skills (such as myself) this may be the solution you’ve been hoping for: it seems to be directed to those of us who just can’t master photo trickery.
If you’ve ever used Picnik (review) before, you have an idea of how far online photo editing has come. Similarly, there’s Fotoflexer, a user-friendly photo editor that offers one click tweaks, along with some advanced tools on par with desktop class photo editing software. The service has been around since late last year, and is launching version two this morning.
Like several other online photo editors, Fotoflexer integrates major services like Flickr, MySpace, Picasa, and Facebook to pull your photos down for editing. Short of MySpace (which doesn’t have an open API), you can send your edited photos back to all of them if you’ve plugged in your login credentials. Once you’ve found a photo you want to “flex,” the app will jump you out to a full screen editing canvas, where you have quick tabbed controls for all the usual editing goodies like rotation, a cropping tool and a resizer. You’ll also find some fun distortion effects similar to the liquefy tool in Photoshop (as seen in the screenshot below). This is probably the most enjoyable of the bunch, since it processes the effect in real-time.
Fotoflexer’s liquefy bulge tool is a lot like Photoshop’s, except free.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
The real claim to fame however, 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. The cutout is the more useful of the two, and lets you cut people or objects out from a shot without having to trace their outline. If you’ve ever used Photoshop’s magnetic lasso or masking tool, you’ll know full well how tedious a process this can be. Instead, you use a small paintbrush to “tag” objects you’d like to keep or remove. One click later, and the app will do its best to single out those parts of the photo. If it makes slight mistakes, you can then go back in 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 in to 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.
Despite its beauty, there are a few snags here and there. For one thing, even in full screen, the editor remains the same size, which looks and feels very odd if you’re using a wide screen monitor. The feature is being added as early as this week according to the Fotoflexer team, although in the meantime, if you’re working with a landscape shot, things feel a bit cramped. There’s also a lack of some of the advanced editing controls on the quick color effects. For example, clicking the “stamp” button will do its best to make your shot black and white shot with an excess of contrast, however there’s no slider or option to tweak it. You either like it or you don’t. Luckily, if you know what you’re doing you can achieve similar effects by using the advanced options to recreate each effect manually.
All in all Fotoflexer is a really well put together app that could make a solid piece of standalone software. The fact that it’s free, and runs in your browser makes it even better.
Add captions or thought bubbles to your photos. Nearly every effect happens in realtime, so there’s no waiting to see the result.
(Credit: CNET Networks / Micah Pepper)
Fotoflexer’s smart cutout tool will let you keep or get rid of various parts of a photo just by marking them off. No lasso tool required.
(Credit: CNET Networks)
Can you keep a secret? We haven’t announced anything yet publicly, but there are LOTS of exciting changes implemented to the FotoFlexer website, including new patent pending technology. Check it out and tell us what you think…
And if you like what you see, then you’re in luck. There’s even more on the way…stay tuned.
Attention please, all loyal FotoFlexers, including the thousands of news users who have just started on the site in the past week! You will soon see some interesting new developments on the site…please stay tuned to www.fotoflexer.com
