Everyone, this is Picnik. It’s free photo editing that works on Flickr, Facebook, Picasa, Photobucket, and Webshots, or you can pull a photo off of wherever you store them on your computer and edit them on the Picnik site. Observe:

Here’s a photo of my kids, and all I did is resize it to 800 x 600, the standard size for Flickr.

I clicked the Auto-fix button, and then cropped out the feet showing on either side of the kids and also cropped out most of the tree, so that the kids became the focal point of the photo. Next, I worked on the exposure:

I applied color correction and sharpening, then went to the Create tab and chose a matte effect in green, changing the width and intensity of the color until it was just what I wanted. I had some fun with the editing tools, giving Nathan a Santa hat, adding text and a cluster of bells at the top. This will be an excellent way to make next year’s Christmas card photo!