Operation: Flicnik

We may have invested in a DSLR camera a few months ago, but we're not made of money. Which is why we've never gotten around to investing in Photoshop.

At this point in our learning curve, we'd rather spend our time taking a lot of photos than tweaking them to death on our MacBook Pro. Give us infinite possibilities and we're paralyzed.

Which is why, when we've been editing photos, we've been using locally based online photo editor Picnik. For now, for us, it's just about perfect: free, and including a relatively limited (but still impressive) set of essential photo editing tools -- crop, sharpen, exposure, etc. (There's also a bunch of other effects we've never used -- LOMO-ish, gooify, heat map...)

One of the best things about Picnik: easy integration with Flickr. Which is about to get even easier, as they announced late last week that Picnik would become Flickr's editing tool of choice. That's right: photo editing is coming to Flickr, and Picnik's the site that's delivering it.

It's classic: "You got your photo-sharing site in my image-editing application!" "You got your image-editing application in my photo-sharing site!" Two great tastes, etc. We love a local-Web 2.0-app-makes-good story.

One of these days we fully expect to invest in Photoshop. We've already run into some lens distortion issues that neither Picnik nor Elements 4 for Mac can fix easily. In the meantime -- and possibly forever, for family snapshots and the like -- we'll be more than satisfied with the Flickr-Picnik convergence.