"C" is for Cut & Compose

April 19 was a sad, sad day: Picnik closed.  I heard other bloggers rave about this easy-to-use, online photo editing software, but I didn't jump on the Picnik bandwagon until they had already announced they were closing. 

Picnik was like Photoshop Elements (PSE) but a 1,000 times easier to use and (mostly) FREE.  It had a great online user interface and was very intuitive.  I didn't do a lot of photo editing with it, but it seemed pretty straightforward.  I mainly used Picnik for making collages and adding text and "stickers" to photos like these.

If you visit picnik's website now, they refer you to Google+ or PicMonkey.  I like to think I'm pretty savvy with computer stuff, but, for the life of me, I cannot figure out how to edit photos in Google+.  It keeps wanting me to publish photos to my timeline (or whatever Google+'s equivalent of Facebook's timeline is).  I DON'T WANT TO PUBLISH MY PHOTOS FOR THE SIX PEOPLE WHO FOLLOW ME ON GOOGLE+.  I WANT TO PUT THE PHOTO ON MY BLOG.  Who uses Google+ anyway?

On to option 2: PicMonkey.  PicMonkey is pretty good, and it's going to have the same setup as Picnik where lots of features are free but you gotta pay for the good stuff.  It's a bargain, if you despise working in PSE like I do.  The only thing currently missing with PicMonkey is the ability to make a collage.  The examples I showed above were all made using collages, so this function is imperative.  I went to the help page on PicMonkey to find out how long it would be before they launched collages, and I got the following:

I added the arrow and red text using PicMonkey, and it took me about 2 seconds, so PicMonkey gets a +1 for ease of use.  On the flip side, PicMonkey gets a -1 for only offering 36 types of font, but I'm guessing the options will rapidly expand with a) time and b) paid subscriptions.  If you're looking for an easy-to-use, free-for-now, online photo editing software, I suggest you check out PicMonkey.

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