You can now edit your Flickr photos using the Picnik photo editing app, without leaving flickr.com ((Via Daring Fireball.)). For those who haven’t seen Picnik yet, it’s a brilliant comeback to all those who said web applications could never do photo editing well. To those who saw Picnik a year or two ago and dismissed it, it’s gotten a lot better. It won’t replace Photoshop, but it goes beyond iPhoto by integrating with the online photo apps, including Facebook. With two clicks you can be editing your Facebook photos in Picnik, albeit at the cruddy low resolution that Facebook stores.
From a product design perspective, the way their $25/year “pro” features are set up is very slick. All the basics work for free, but if you start digging and apply some local contrast, blemish fixing, or their liquefy tool, the Apply button becomes an Upgrade button. So, you can try out the pro features and see exactly what they’d do, but they’re well marked so you can avoid them if you like. All in all, one of the best things Flash ever enabled.