I love Picnik, the online image editor.  I’ve said so in the past, mostly because it is so slick, smooth and user-friendly. Therefore, it made my day to hear that Picnik has, in fact, gone Free!  Waved its premium membership, so that average (read: thrifty) folks can use their advanced editing features that were initially closed to them.  If you’ve waited to use Picnik, now’s the time to try it out!*

*Spending 5 more minutes trying things out / finishing the announcement, I realized that there is *still* a premium membership, and everything that *was* premium before is now available to all, and what they’ve done is made *another* set of features “premium” (including exclusive fonts and an unlimited “undo” history).  Second of all, they’ve opted to pay for these changes by going to an ad-supported model (which they can probably afford to do now that Picnik has an ‘arrangement’ with Flickr that probably pads the bottom line enough to move to this kind of revenue model).  I should warn you, if you hate ads, these ones are as intrusive as heck — they shrink your editing space by taking up real estate to the right and bottom of your screen.  On the other hand, if you hate ads and you’re using Firefox, you’re probably using no-script anyway, in which case the effects of these changes are to merely shrink your usable area.  Is it still “worth” it?  I’d still give it a “hell yea”, as some of these effects are still very slick, and very smooth.  And to be honest, probably worth the extra $25 to get rid of.