I often find myself in need of some pretty basic image editing functionality, and I am either on a computer with just Microsoft Paint, which really does suck, or one with a fully fledged piece of editing software like Adobe Photoshop, and it takes too much time to find the right buttons to even bother. Then I discovered online image editors - apps that run from within your browser, ranging from simple drawing apps to fully fledged photo editing systems.

If you are just looking to re-size an image, change file format or other simple tasks such as this then you would probably be pretty happy with the Online Image Editor, imageeditor.net or myImager.com. The last of those has a few more functions, notably a bunch of different effects, such as the staple blurs, edge detect, charcoal/oil painting and swirl/wave effects etc.

For more powerful capabilities, try out Pixlr and Splashup for editing and creating graphics. These are both surprisingly powerful image editors, with advanced functionality, and both a pretty user friendly too. Of course you have to bear with the loading and processing times, which can feel annoying. However, it is easy to forget that processing times for graphical work is not exactly quick on even a traditional, locally installed graphics editor. FotoFlexer is specifically designed for editing and touching up photos. What is helpful about FotoFlexer is being able to edit photos directly from Flickr, Picasa, Myspace, Facebook etc. Last but not least, Aviary is an interesting and different suite of applications, which will described more fully in an upcoming post. For now I will say that there is an image editor, a vector editor (the first online one), a self proclaimed 'visual laboratory', and loads more forthcoming stuff like an audio editor, video editor, music generator...very exciting.

No graphic designer is going to give up using Photoshop CS3 just yet, but I have knocked up and edited corporate logos and advertising banners in online editors successfully in the past, and that was before some of these newer and slicker sites were online.