By now most of you have heard of the sad fate of Picnik and its final day in April. If you don’t know what Picnik is, it was a non-Photoshop lovers dreams (next to the gimp -free program by the way) for editing photos and making them uniquely beautiful.  With some similar functions to Photoshop, Picnik, made it easier to screenshot photos and make demonstrations for blog posts than spending tons of money on more expensive programs. A majority of users, including myself, used it tons of times to edit personal photos, add special features, add watermarks or just create custom photos for the fun of it. Now that Picnik’s fate is sealed, I was blessed to find a new program that pretty much made me fall in love again with the word FREE all over again.

Enter PicMonkey:

What is PicMonkey? First you need to understand the people behind PicMonkey: How cool is that?  Before you start shooting the messenger, yes there is another program out there that can do similar functions like iPiccy, but it doesn’t have the look and feel of PicMonkey. What I like about PicMonkey is the look and feel of it. Once you arrive to their front page, it’s pretty easy to see what you can do but if you know me, I had one of those (duh!) moments trying to find the registration button. You don’t need one!

Lets play a game:

Below is a photo I edited off their front page. Check out their photo on PicMonkey’s front page of the girl wearing shoes and see if you can spot the differences I made: This program has the some similar features of Picnik, but what attracts me most about this program, is it’s use of images to change your photos. With Picnik, I never used most of the options in its program because it didn’t appeal to me and wasn’t something I recognized. With PicMonkey, they use images and site features that I not only recognize, but makes me feel as if I already know what I am doing.  See below: PicMonkey uses real images to show the different functions you get to use to make doing touch ups so easy and fun.  In this picture my dog Bella appears to have blue eyes, when in fact her eyes are brown. The images used to describe each Touch Up that you can change makes understanding what each function means. This time around,  I tried them all because I found the images familiar and user friendly. Whether you wear make up or not, you get the picture. In this next picture I wanted to change my dogs eye color because she doesn’t have blue eyes. Here you can easily add text to any picture like I did for Bella: PicMonkey offers great Effect options to give your picture a professional look. Add special effects and take your photo to another level. In this photo I added “dark edges” to put more attention to Bella’s face. You can protect your images and create a watermark (Overlay) on top of your images to prevent photo copying. Either way, it still creates a beautiful look. The best photos I love that does this is DearCrissy. To finish my photo off, I added a creative border to give my photo that professional photo frame look and it came out great. That’s it! Easy as pie! This programs speaks volumes with its unique features, clean interface and no registration. Whether you use it for personal use or professional use, you can still give your photos that professional look without paying for that professional price. Note: You must have Flash player enabled to use PicMonkey.  Some features are premium options, but at this time, I didn’t notice any pricing on their website. While it’s still FREE take advantage of it now. What do you think?

• Like? Dislike? Don’ Care?
• What will you use PicMonkey for?
• Have you already started using PicMonkey?