While the HTML5 editor doesn’t have all the fancy bells and whistles of Aviary’s impressive Phoenix Flash-based editor (it’s missing layers, for example), it does have all the features that you need for basic photo editing:

• Rotate
• Flip
• Crop
• Redeye reduction
• Blemish removal
• Color and saturation adjustment
• Brightness and contrast tools
• Drawing and text tools

There are also some special effect filters you can apply, like the “Old photo” filter applied above (these work like the filters available in Instagram and Hipstamatic). The tools are all easy to use and worked well when I tested it in Firefox and Chrome on my Mac; there are “Undo” and “Redo” buttons available if you make a mistake.

Adding the editor to your own site is simply a matter of selecting some options, grabbing an embed code and pasting it into your code. If you like you can customize the functionality that’s available in the editor; Aviary is planning on adding skinning and CSS options for further customization of the widget in the future.

Let us know hat you think of Aviary’s HTML5 photo editor below.

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Myna is Flash-based. The layout of the app should be familiar if you’ve used other audio editing tools, but shouldn’t be hard to figure out even if you haven’t: there’s a timeline across the top of the screen (that can be set to display in beats/bars or in minutes/seconds), while down the side is a number of tracks that you can place your audio clips on.

You can bring in audio clips in a few different ways: importing them from your computer, recording them from a microphone or using Myna’s fairly extensive built-in library. Clips can be dragged and dropped onto the tracks and moved about as required. You can also edit the clips (trim, loop and stretch) and add a limited range of non-destructive effects, such as reverb. Automation can be added to each track to provide fade ins/outs and panning. Once you’re happy with your mix, you can save it to Aviary’s server (which also allows you to share your creation with others) and also export it to your desktop as a WAV or MP3 file.

Here’s a short demo video showing Myna in use:

There’s also a nicely done demo track that you can check out here.

Myna is by far the best online audio editor that I’ve seen. It’s free to use. Users should note that the licensing of the audio content in the included library of clips state that those clips cannot be used for commercial purposes.

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To check out the possibilities I tested several image editing sites, and found them a somewhat mixed bag, but was pleasantly surprised by how good several were. Here’s what I discovered.

Sumo Paint 2.0

One of my favorites is Snap Group Ltd’s Sumo Paint, which can be used as a paint program and photo editing program, and which was recently upgraded with a claimed 100-plus improvements, and a totally renovated web site to make it easier, faster, and more attractive, and several new tools:  Layer FX, Change Layers With Blending Modes, change layer alpha, Shapes Tool, Brushes, Ink Brush Tool, Gradient Tool, Shape Trails, Zooming, Symmetry Tool , Color Picker, Swatches, Smudge Tool, and Custom Shape Tool.

Along with Pixlr (see below), I found Sumo Paint’s user interface to be the most Mac-like in a Photoshop-ish sort of way.

Sumo Paint works with any browser that has the Flash player plugin (ver 9). You can find the Sumo Paint user manual here.

Fotoflexer

Another free online image editor I liked a lot was Fotoflexer, which is impressively fast and slick, with no registration or login necessary. Fotoflexer doesn’t have as many tools as Sumo Paint or some of the other online image editors I tried, and they’re laid out in a non-orthodox configuration, but it’s pretty intuitive, fast and responsive, and the adjustments refresh in real time so you can finely tune your enhancements visually as you move the sliders.

This is a very-well executed tool with a convenient full-screen mode that’s easy and fast to get in and out of.

Aviary Phoenix Image Editor

Phoenix is part of the Aviary online image editing suite, and has a range of functions from basic image retouching to complex effects, providing the key features of a desktop image editor, with the simplicity and accessibility of a web-based application.

Its suite of creation and editing tools includes undo and redo, brushes, magic wand, and blend modes. Phoenix also supports layers, groups, and layer masks, and has an intuitive drag and drop interface.

Other features are collaboration with other users, step-by-step tutorials to learn new skills, and image import from popular photo-sharing sites like Flickr, Picasa, and Facebook.

Aviary offers Phoenix in a free basic plan plus a premium Pro plans that allows more control over the application’s usage ($24.99 a year).

Phoenix is a good program, and well worth checking out, but I didn’t like it as much as some of the others. for more details, check out our previous posts on Aviary.

Pixlr

Another online image editor is Pixlr from Sweden. It’s free (donations accepted), starts up very quickly with no login required, and has a good selection of tools, adjustments and filters that work quite similarly to functions in Photoshop, including tools such as layers, image adjustments, and the magic wand, and which I found generally work well, although one thing I didn’t like is that the adjustments don’t refresh in real time as you move the sliders.

Pixlr also supports multiple languages, and an available Pixlr plugin for Firefox turns your browser into an image editor. Once the plugin is installed, you’ll notice a little icon in the Firefox status bar that you can click to automatically import any web page you’re on to Pixlr for editing. Or if you just want to edit an image from the web, right click and select Edit in Pixlr. The image editor will open in a new tab and load the picture automatically.

Dr. Pic by PicResize

PicResize has been around since March 2005 and claims to be one of the most popular online image editing tools available on the Internet due to its ease of use, with more than 5 million pictures resized and edited to date. In late 2008, PicResize’s online picture editor, PicResize 3.0, was renamed DrPic.com. The service is free, and promises to remain so.

DrPic.com uses HTML and Ajax with absolutely no Flash, so no plugin is required. In testing I found it fast, but doesn’t have a lot of tools, and the image view is especially clunky, with no standard “File” and “Edit” command menus, and I wasn’t terribly impressed with its capabilities.

Free forever is great, but here are other, better choices.

Piknik

I also tried Piknik, which has the virtue of fast startup and no login hassle, but I didn’t find the free version up to much. You would want to upgrade to the for-fee premium version with this one, at a cost of $2.08 to $24.95 a month.

Based on what I could gather from the free basic version, Sumo Paint, Fotoflexer or Pixlr would be better free alternatives.

Which online image editing tool do you use and why?

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Because it’s a hosted, online application suite, Aviary not only lets you use its photo and image editing tools, but also allows you to share creations with others online. When you sign up to use the suite, you even get a prompt to find friends who may be online, which you can choose to skip if you want. The screenshot above shows some images created and edited in Aviary’s image editor, dubbed Phoenix.

As seen in the menu to the right, which greets you when you begin using Aviary, there is much more than just photo editing built in. There are also more than twice as many modules in the suite as there were in October. You’ll find a vector editor, a color palette editor, a tool for creating visual effects, and more. All of the tools are available for you to use within your browser.

Aviary also comes with many tutorials, similar to those found online for Photoshop. You can browse many of them here. The tutorials are categorized from Beginning to Advanced, and provide instructions on shadows, adding saturation to photos and images, enhancing eyes in photos, and much more.

Using Aviary’s effects editor, dubbed Peacock, you can save image effects that you create and import them into the Phoenix image editor. This means that the number of effects you can use is essentially unlimited. There is also a module called Toucan for doing color management, and Raven is a vector editor that can translate bitmap images to vector images. It’s also a very useful screen capture tool, as Thursday wrote about previously.

My most-used image editing application remains IrfanView, which I wrote about here. It’s free to use, as Aviary’s tools are, although if you want to use all of Aviary’s functionality you need to sign up for a Pro account, which is $24.99 a year — significantly lower than the previous monthly pricing plan. I’m currently using both Aviary and IrfanView, and Aviary strikes me as quite powerful. It’s also adding modules and features at an impressive rate. If you haven’t tried it, definitely do so.

Let us know your thoughts on Aviary in the comments.

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Here are five things that make Aviary screen capture really useful.

1. Choose exactly what you’re capturing. With Aviary, you type in the URL of any web site you want to capture or just add “aviary.com/” to the beginning of the URL in your browser. Aviary offers you the option of choosing the screen resolution and quality of the image you’ll capture, as well as the region of the page. The site also plans to offer to capture sites as they appear in different browsers (very useful for web designers), but that feature is not ready yet. Aviary can capture Flash web sites with no problem.
2. Drop screen caps directly into an editing application. Not all screen caps can be used as-is. Sometimes you have to edit them before you can use them, and Aviary has made that process much easier. As soon as you take a screen cap with Aviary, you can move directly into Aviary’s image-editing applications. There are separate editors for different purposes, such as Phoenix Image Editor, Toucan Color Editor, Peacock Effects Editor and Raven Vector Editor.
3. Save your image online. As long as you have a free Aviary account (which takes less than a minute to create), Aviary will save your image and host it. It will even automatically provide you with embed codes for HTML and forums, as well as sharing tools for social networking. You can add controls on exactly who can see an image with a Pro account.
4. Use Aviary without visiting the site. As long as you use Firefox as your web browser, you can install Talon, Aviary’s Firefox plugin. It will add a button to your toolbar that will allow you to use Aviary’s screen capture tool without constantly needing to go back to Aviary’s site. You can even direct a screen cap into Aviary’s image editing application.
5. Set your screen capture as your desktop. As soon as you’ve captured a web site with the Firefox plugin, you can set that image as your desktop — along with sending it to email, saving it, copying it or even simply viewing it. You can complete similar tasks from the web site, as well, but I’ve found that the plugin significantly speeds up the process.

Aviary provides a simple solution for screen captures, along with image editing. It might not be my first choice for a large design project, but when I just need to get an image into a blog post or saved for future reference, it certainly speeds up the process.

Have you tried Aviary?

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Maxthon is an interesting alternative browser that happens to be hugely popular in China. In the Webware 100, it was cited as getting a “disproportionately large number of votes.” One of its claims to fame is that you can hold down your right mouse button and use gestures to navigate online. That alone sounds worth a try.

Probably the most interesting application I noticed in the Webware 100 is Aviary (shown above). No, it’s not a site for bird lovers. The application won the Webware 100′s Technical Achievement award for this year, and according to the editors: “Aviary started as a photo editor built into a browser, but since we first covered the app its developers have rolled out a vector editor, a color palette editor, and a tool for creating visual effects.” They describe it as a “layer-based image editing application implemented within a browser.”

The award for “Best Twitter Rip-Off” went to Present.ly, a microblogging application that includes features for business users not found in Twitter. Notably, Present.ly can be installed as software rather than just used as an online service, which could be of interest to anyone who wants to privately collaborate.

There are also a lot of familiar names on the Webware 100 list. One winner that I was happy to see is OAuth.  Somewhat similar to OpenID’s approach to password and identity management, OAuth is an open-source development standard that allows web services to interact with each other without users having to compromise their passwords and identities. It’s widely used to avoid having to give up Twitter passwords and credentials in order to use third-party Twitter-centric applications.

It’s worth spending some time checking out the winners from the Webware 100 for 2009, with the complete list found here.

Which apps didn’t make the Webware list that should have? Which apps do you think were worthy winners?

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