Online photo editors are making fine-tuning photos possible without any software at all.

Adobe Photoshop isn’t the only option for every photographer in every situation. With licenses running hundreds of dollars, Photoshop is an expensive investment for nearly any photographer, and sometimes all a photo needs is a few tweaks.

Enter the online photo editors. Over the past year, a number of different tools have popped up online, offering convenience and a surprisingly rich feature set without costing a dime. With online photo editors, uploading, editing and saving are all handled through a browser, eliminating the need for any downloads. Can these online photo editors match the power of Photoshop? No, and they don’t try. But they do what they are meant to do - offer photographers the means to perform a few common tweaks to a batch of photos from any computer anywhere in the world. And some have convinient options that the Photoshop jockey can only dream of.

Here are the top three online photo editors that I’ve used in the past.

fauxto - online image editing en masse
www.fauxto.com

Fauxto is the poor man’s Photoshop of online photo editors. One look at the program’s interface should show why, but Fauxto also offers the most potential for serious editing of any of the online options. It is one of the only online photo editors that support both layers and layer effects, and also one of the few programs capable of zooming in to a specific area of the photo. Fauxto also includes an eyedropper, selection and smudge tool among the more common set of brush and pencil tools — all capabilities that are difficult to find in any other online photo editor.

While Fauxto does include some filters, there’s no set of quick fixes like in other online photo editors. Fixing red eye, for example, would be much more of a challenge in Fauxto than with other online photo editors. Fauxto seems designed primarily for people who want to do something to their photos, rather than simply correct a few common problems in a set of photos. Fauxto is the most advanced online photo editor by far, but it is missing some of the ease of the other options.

picnik - edit photos the easy way
www.picnik.com

Picnik is probably the most popular online photo editor at the moment, bolstered by close integration with both Facebook, Picasa and Flickr. This is probably the coolest feature in Picnik - the ability to both edit and save photos directly to a Facebook profile or a Flickr/Picasa account. It’s a one-step process that can make sharing your photos a lot easier.

In terms of editing, Picnik offers a fine set of corrective tools, certainly more than the typical online photo editor. The edit tab within the online interface allows you to adjust exposure, color, red eye, as well as sharpen, resize and crop. Many of the choices also include an autofix option, which lets Picnik decide the optimal settings for your image. Picnik also includes a creative zone where photographers can add vignetting, borders, selective coloring or other cool effects to their photos.

Picnik doesn’t offer the depth of editing control that other online photo editors do, but its collection of quick fixes make most common adjustments a breeze. The feature to save to Facebook and photo sharing websites is something that even Photoshop users will be jealous of.

phixr online photo editor
www.phixr.com

Phixr’s online interface is by far the least elegant of the three online photo editors presented here, but it does get a mention for the sheer number of sites it is capable of saving to. Photographers can save directly from Phixr to one of 12 different sites, including Imagebucket, Livejournal and - uniquely - Costco, making ordering prints that much easier.

While the site’s design is clunky and often painful to use, Phixr does have a good compliment of tools, including some fun effects that will make a photo look like a lomograph or a Polaroid. I wouldn’t recommend it over either of the other online photo editors, but users who will be doing a lot of saving to the web should give it some consideration.

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