Best web find this year

I have just discovered the most amazing resource for bloggers. It's called Picnik.

I use a variety of applications to manage the visuals that I like adding to my posts. I use a screen capture utility to capture the part of the image in my browser window that I want to use for my blog post. Then I use Irfanview and/or Paint to edit the image, resize it and save it as a high quality .jpg file.

With Pickik, you don't need any of that, you just need your browser. You go to the Picnik site, upload a photo from your PC (if it's already there) or dig right into your Facebook, flickr or Picasa account for a photo. If the photo you need is on a website, just enter the URL of the page into Picnik and it will deliver the images (or whole web page) up for you to capture and edit. Once you have the image in your focus, you can resize it, crop it, fix the exposure, colour, remove red eye, sharpen. If you feel even more creative, you can add effects like Sepia, Vignette, etc.

You can even add an extension to Firefox to add right clicking into Picnik right from your web page. Awesome!

Once it's out of beta, the advanced features will only be part of their premium offering, but for now, it's all free. Maybe the best new web application released this year.