Au revoir Picnik

I'm meant to be revising for a series of Japanese exams and this, of course, means that I've been doing anything but revising for my Japanese exams. Procrastination breeds portraiture.

This picture was also a first experiment in Flickr's new inbuilt browser after Picnik integration was discontinued following it's purchase by Google (rival to the Yahoo-run Flickr). I have to say, I'm far from impressed. Picnik had a decent variety of features and filters but its replacement, Aviary, is not much more than Instagram in terms of variety. The most important omission (for me, anyway) is the ability to vary the strength of the effects- maybe I like one of their filters and it'd really bring out a photo if applied at 30% but ruins it at 100%. No dice; it's all or nothing.

This a dealbreaker for me and I don't think that I'm really left with an alternative other than looking into Photoshop which I'm reluctant to do. Picnik was a perfect tool for me as someone who took to post-processing somewhat reluctantly; it offered a decent variety of simple but potentially profound and scalable options with sensible options and parameters which supported versioning in the browser. Photoshop, by comparison, is an infinite, cumbersome tool and a technical can of worms I'd rather not open.