FotoFlexer, a web-based photo editing application, has rolled out an impressive upgrade with new features designed to compete with desktop software like Photoshop. Although FotoFlexer Pro, as the new features are called, probably won't lured any graphics professionals away from the Adobe suite, it does offer the rest of us a very close and free substitute on the web.
FotoFlexer Pro includes all of the current, one-click editing tools and adds few new ones geared more toward advanced users. Perhaps the most welcome news is the ability to edit images at their highest resolution rather than potentially degraded copies.
Part of FotoFlexer's appeal for many users is its simplicity — almost all of its tools are available as single-click options — but the new tools are more in line with the options you'll find in Photoshop or the Gimp.
For instance the new Curves panel works exactly like Photoshop's curves panel, allowing you to control the exposure, color and contrast of an image. But it also requires some degree of finesse — one-click editing this is not. That said, it isn't hard to master the curves tool, it just takes a little practice.
Among the other notable new features are:
Like other online editing suites, FotoFlexer's killer feature is the ability to pull images from your online photo sharing sites and edit them without ever touching the desktop. Although Flickr partnered with FotoFlexer's competitor Picnik for its built-in image editor, FotoFlexer is part of Google's OpenSocial project so we expect to see more “on-site” examples of FotoFlexer in the future.
I gave FotoFlexer a hard time for its choice of sample images when I first reviewed it, but thankfully those images have largely been removed and the new features make FotoFlexer a solid competitor to Picnik and perhaps even Photoshop Express, the online image editing suite that Adobe plans to reveal later this year.
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