Here are some great photo / image editing options that will works traight out of the browser. Students will find some cool effects and tricks within these I am sure. Be sure to take a look at webification if you would like to know some more great online photo editing tools.
Picnik allows you to edit things in a variety of ways. You can crop, rotate, resize, edit exposure, edit colors, sharpen, fix red eye, and auto fix. The auto-fix tool is cool, because it will take inconsistencies in the photo, and spruce them up a little big. But all of the other tools are pretty much self explanatory. Picnik has many tools found in full-fledged image editing programs such as adjusting exposure, contrast and shadows and highlights. Picnik offers all the basic tools to crop, resize, rotate, sharpen and fix red-eye. It also has plenty of special effects and filters and other advanced controls to fine-tune photos.Whatever tool or feature you use, instructions are provided in pop-up windows at the time you access them.
Aviary’s mission statement is to “Make the world’s creation accessible.” Although their mission is a little vague, their free image editing application is surprisingly robust for tools you can access completely for free. Aviary is a free, online digital editing software application to manipulate photos and images, or create your own. This tool is best suited for people who already have some knowledge of digital image manipulation. If you are a novice or cannot afford to purchase high-end software – the tools are great and worth mastering but expect a fairly intense learning curve.
Pixlr stands out for the depth and breadth of its image design and editing tools and features, combining many of the tried and true tools available in most Paint programs with high-quality features that have become ubiquitous in image editing programs, software-based or not. Pixlr also includes basic layer canvas tools and features, letting users free-hand crop, move, super-impose and interpolate images and rotate and remove entire canvases, all important tools for true image editing.
Photoshop.com is the latest offering for web-based photo sharing and editing. As long standing major players in the imaging software industry for graphics and video professionals, Adobe (US) have now launched an easy to use and free online version of their popular photo editing package, Photoshop. While not attempting to provide all the features of the desktop version of Photoshop, it certainly has a good selection of quality image editing tools for the more common tasks. Including a generous 2 Gigabytes (2000 Megabytes) of space for storing your photos in the free version, you can perform a range of edits including cropping, resizing, adjusting colors and removing that annoying red-eye effect.
flauntR is a privately funded, online photo and effect editor. Their goal is simple, provide an easy to use interface to manage, modify and enhance images without any outside software. They do this with and Adobe Flash driven interface that allows a user to use editR, stylR, textR, mobilR, picasR, and profilR — all flauntR specific enhancements. While the interface of flauntR can be a bit confusing at first (with six different categories of modifications), after a quick 5 minute lesson, most users are good to go. Through a series of questions and answers, the application can transform the images that are put into it into works of art (or whatever the uploader’s heart desires).
Monday, February 13, 2012 at 10:38PM 
It is coming up to the festive season and no doubt your students will be writing and sending some Christmas Cards. Microsoft Publisher has some great options for creating cards for all occasions and this lesson plan will really give your students a great starting point for creating cards in Publisher. Download the lesson plan here.
