Your photos liberated
Amazing photos are created in Picnik so we have launched a new feature, Picnik Takeout, that easily downloads your photos to your desktop in convenient zip files. You may also elect to copy your photos to
Google+ where you can store and share your creations. You may request your photos at any time and use this handy tool as many times as you like until our closing date of April 19, 2012. Learn More.

Premium Refunds
To our primo Picnik Premium members, we’ll begin processing a full refund of your current membership fee within a week of this announcement. By “full” we mean the whole darn thing. Yep, this means even if you are on your very last day of an annual membership, we will refund you the entire $24.95. Just because we want to say thanks.

Now the Good News – Free Premium for ALL!
To express our gratitude for your support over the past 5 years, Picnik Premium is free for everyone! Use Picnik in all of its premium glory, for free, from now until our actual closing day. Touch-up, Textures, Advanced, and more are all free for you to use!

We have been incredibly proud of building a product that is used and beloved by so many of you. We continue to be amazed and humbled by the photos you create and we are immensely grateful for all of your support, creativity, and passion.

We are excited by the photo-editing fun we have already brought to Google products, like Google+, where you can find many of your favorite Picnik effects in Creative Kit. We encourage you to visit Google+ and give it a whirl.

Please visit the Help Hub for more information on our wind down. Check the Picnik blog for updated information on our April closure.

It’s been awesome,
Team Picnik

Add some festivities to the family holiday card with snowflakes, a candy cane, or a dreidel. Or spruce up your profile picture with a white beard and jolly red nose, some antlers, or a spring mistletoe.

We are tickled to bring you a holiday set chock-full of cheer, so be artistic, be silly or somewhere in between just make sure to be merry!

A few of our very own Team Picniker’s joined men from around the world in recognizing Movember.   Movember is the dedication of the month of November to raise awareness, research dollars and support for men’s health and prostate cancer.

To participate in Movember men start out clean shaven on November 1st and then proceed to grow spectacular variations of mustaches for the remainder of the month.

If you are late to the party or follically challenged finish the month strong by adding a little scruff to your photos or profile pictures with our Premium Beard tool or free beard stickers.  Nothing says you are committed to a good cause like drawing some scruffy attention to it.

Channel your inner Dr. Frankenstein with creepy textures, spooky ghost stickers, or a flash of lightning. As you venture into our mad scientist laboratory, investigate past favorites such as Vampire eyes, Zombify, and last year’s runaway hit – Blood Splatters.

If you wander into our Picnik house of horrors looking for tamer Halloween fun, try costume masks, a candy corn frame, jack-o’-lantern stickers, or gobs of other fun ideas.

Before you depart, zombie lurch over to Fancy Collages to feast your eyes on custom made delights by our very own ghoul – Kelcey. Slide one of your creations into a Halloween collage template for an instant eerie touch.

We think this will make it even easier to add extra awesomeness to your photos, without having to switch tabs or go digging around to get those pictures perfect.

There are a few additional changes. Remember Local Contrast? It’s a fancy term for a feature that adds definition to your photos by enhancing contrast with advanced levels of detail and control. Now it’s called Clarity, and can be found in Sharpen, in the Edit section.

Highlights and Shadows are now easier to find in the Edit section’s Exposure tool. Use these sliders to fix photos that have been over- or under-exposed.

Do you recall that cryptic Advanced button in Sharpen? Now we’ve called it what it is: Unsharp Mask! Use this advanced Edit tool for finer control while sharpening blurry or featureless photos.

And Red-Eye (and that all-essential Pet-Eye)? It seemed strange to have them so far away from the other eye-themed fixes, so now they’re both in Touch-Ups next to Eye Color, Eye Bright, and Mascara.

We hope you enjoy these changes and find that they make it easier to make your photos wonderful as the memories they represent.

Happy Picniking from all of us on Team Picnik!
- Jonathan, Brian, Justin, Steve, Charlie, Michael, Brenda, Sonia, Lisa, Kelcey, MB, Mark, Anthony, Sky, Ziling, Ben, Nigel, Jen, Peter, Adam, Brian, Jenny, Andy, and Virginia

Now, at a glance, you can see your membership info. If you have a Premium account, you can see what length of membership you purchased and when your next billing cycle begins. You can also confirm that your credit card’s details are up to date, so your Premium membership never accidentally lapses. If you don’t have Premium, you can upgrade!

You can also use this page to easily manage your account’s password (remember, it’s a good idea to change all your passwords every once in a while), plus change your image quality settings, and even, if you really wanted to (and we hope you never would), delete your account (caution: this cannot be undone!).

We’ve been working hard to make this small but essential page more useful for all our users. You can find your My Account page if you’re logged into your account on the last section of the Home Tab, or at any time from the Help drop down at the top of the page.

Happy Picniking!

For those of us in the US, this is the 4th of July long weekend. To celebrate, we have every kind of stars and stripes for your photos: Bokeh Stars, Red White & Blue color effects, flags and fireworks stickers, and more! And don’t forget to put those photos in one of our Independence Day themed Fancy Collages.

Today is Canada Day! Canadians: Check out our collection of Canadian flags, bunting and that essential Maple Leaf in the Seasonal Stickers section!

And on July 14, the French celebrate Bastille Day. We’ve got everything French in the Seasonal Stickers section: Le drapeau de la France, la Tour Eiffel, du café, des baguettes, des croissants, and more!

So we’d like to wish everyone a joyous 4th of July, a carefree Canada Day, and a fabulous Fête Nationale. Happy Picniking!

If you’re a fan of one of the qualified teams (or if you’re just now choosing one), come to Picnik to dress your photos in your national colors. There are scarves, face paint, flags, and everything else you’d need to show your support for Australia, Brazil, Canada, Columbia, England, Equatorial Guinea, France, Germany, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, Nigeria, North Korea, Norway, Sweden, and the United States.

Now is the time to make a personalized card for all the dads in your life: Your father, your grandfather, your uncle, your mentors, new dads, and anyone else with an especially paternal streak. Choose a photo, make a Collage, apply an Effect or two (like Comic Book in the Father’s Day Featured section), decorate it with Stickers and your very own Father’s Day message, then email it, upload it to one of your favorite photo sharing sites, print it out as a card or get it printed (for instance, on a mug!) with plenty of time to spare before Sunday. That way you’ll have all that extra time this weekend to spend with dad.

Happy Father’s Day, and Happy Picniking!

A prolific photographer and editor, she has a Facebook fan site devoted to her photography, called Berre’s Creation. Her number one rule in life is to choose a job which really makes you happy, so it won’t feel like a job anymore. Through photography, she found a job she loved, and Picnik made her photography happen. Therefore, she adds, history starts at zero, if the zero is in the right place. And her history started with Picnik.

Picnik: How did you first hear about Picnik, and when was that?
Nagehan: Tuesday, 2 November, 2010, at 7:58 am. It all seems like yesterday! I was surfing the net to find a program to make me feel relaxed and busy with my photos when I saw Picnik’s link. When I first entered [the app], I’ll never forgot that I felt like Alice in Wonderland. Because some of sides of my moods can be bloody, the original reason to stick with Picnik was the Halloween effects. I have never seen such original effects before. So, I spent all my time making scary photos. Then, of course, day by day, I met all the colors and smells of Picnik’s wonderful world. I laid a blanket and started Picniking.

How has Picnik changed your life?
I have never thought that a program can change your perspective to life before I met Picnik. It has given me a priceless aspect towards human beings and creatures. When you decide to retouch a photo, you can easily realize what’s wrong, and after fixing it, you get learn that nothing is perfect, except with your care and painstaking attention.

All people tend to like and adore aesthetic images, faces, bodies, arts etc… When you have the power of touch of aesthetic, you feel self-confident. Picnik has given me more courage for life. Because I have found what I am. I love photography and I have a channel when I am home alone with Picnik.

What did you like most about Picnik when you first started using it, and what do you like the most about it now?
I admired Halloween effects. I spent all my nights making scary photos. At those times, I was impressed with a vampire film, so seeing the Halloween effects made me feel like I’d discovered a treasure island. But nowadays, after getting better acquainted with Picnik, I like the Advanced settings, mostly Curves. Some of the time Cross Process sits well on my photo, another time I’m tempted by Polaroid, sometimes Dramatic Sepia cleans all dust :) So I use them as a trilogy: Dramatic-Polora-Xpro :)

One of the most striking features of your photos are the eyes in your portraits. What is the best feature in Picnik for bringing out the personality of your subject?
Eyes are the crucial part of the body language. Facial expression always completes its meaning with eyes. So I give special time to the eyes. When I want to bring out the personality of my subject, I always dress the photo with Cross Process. So with this feature, it makes it feel as if you have eye contact!

What do you use to shoot with?
When I read the question, a quote has come to my head: “When you photograph people in colour you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in B&W, you photograph their souls!” ~Ted Grant

I think your best feature that reflects the spirit of the photos is Dramatic Sepia! I always want to use this feature to put an end to express the meaning. But I have never used this feature on a photo except one which my shoulder and peace hand necklace placed in it… I believe in using Dramatic Sepia on nude photos is the best use of it.

Some of your most interesting photos have been taken by friends and retouched by you. What do you look for when you look for photos to edit?
This is the most sensitive spot of the interview. When I look at a photo, something terrific happens in my mind. As if, a Picnik simulation is working in my mind: Advanced, curves, custom, decrease RGB, put cross process, a little touch up, blazing the eyes…

Some points such as eyes, air, a good color arrangement, historical places arouse the desire to make photo retouching… But, the most important one is, a photo should be photographed by me or I should be the one being photographed. I couldn’t retouch a photo found on internet if it is not a request. Nowadays, because of needing a higher resolution camera, current photos arouse less desire to retouch a photo, because, I think all Picnikers know that if they are not changed, current photos starts to be boring. So, I should photograph all the time, and it should be higher resolution. Now I am a retoucher but I suppose Picnik will turn me into a real photographer.

What inspires you to pull out your camera?
I like objects as tennis ball, poker chips, chess pieces, necklaces…etc. I generally put an object that belongs to me in my photo that has been either photographed by me or my friend. So when I see an interesting object that inspires me to pull out my camera. Sometimes, when I realize a good color arrangement on myself between nail polish, lipstick and necklace, I want to photograph it with a great excitement.

If any feature of Picnik were to be named after you, which would it be?
It would be a great honor ;) Polaroid.

What’s one new feature you wish Picnik could have?
I wish there could be spotlights effect, stencil graffiti, (color) charcoal sketch, burnt paper, vintage, water drops, linocut, cartoon features. There may be some ways to reach some effects I mentioned by using advance tab, but I wish there could be some specific buttons for spotlight effect, linocut and cartoon feature.