Free Online Image Editing Software

Ever just wanted to quickly edit a photo or picture online without having to own Photoshop or some other image editing suite? Fortunately, simplified image editing services are available in several locations online. This is a quick review of two of the larger and more reputable services, Sumo Paint, and Pixlr.

I used to use Sumo Paint all the time, and when I first discovered it, it was a total godsend. However in recent weeks it has started running in an overtly shonky fashion and also developed annoying glitches, like the way you can copy paste an entire image, but only part of the image will be there when you paste it into the new document and even then it will paste it into the far right corner for no reason at all. When you try to pull the pasted image out of the corner, you find that it has been cut off entirely. So essentially, copy paste is a semi broken function on Sumo Paint.

Pixlr, on the other hand, is a very slick, very fast little piece of image editing software available online that actually works quite well. It's not as 'I own an iMac' pretty as Sumo Paint, but it actually works pretty much all the time, which is nice. I find that Sumo Paint loads properly about four times out of five, which is okay if you only use it five times a year, but pretty annoying if you use it five times a day.

Feature wise, Sumo Paint and Pixlr are very similar. You can crop, copy paste, add text, fix color levels, and both have an 'Auto Levels' function which is quite handy as well. You'll also find paint functions, layer functions, brushes, erasers, stamp and clone tools, and all that sort of thing, so for basic image editing, they're both very solid. The notable exception from both tools is the 'extract' function that is so useful for pasting one person's head onto another person's body. Unfortunately, this makes both online tools entirely unsuitable for creating a black mail portfolio, but if you're going to be doing that sort of thing you should probably be doing it on your own computer anyway.

Pixlr is designed to primarily be an online photo editing program, so it comes with red eye reduction function, whereas Sumo Paint is designed to allow users to create online works of art, so it has a bunch of pretty brushes and interesting designey shapes and whatnot. It also allows you to add gradients to object and is, overall, more of a 'design' tool than an image editing tool.

So Sumo or Pixlr, which one do you choose? It depends what you want to do. For quickly cropping an image to size, I would recommend Pixlr, for anything more involved, Sumo Paint will probably do the trick.