What Does Airbrush on Picnik Mean?
Picnik is an online image editor which lets you crop, resize and touch up your photos over the Internet. You can upload photos from your computer or grab photos from elsewhere online, such as your Facebook photo album, your Picasa album or your Flickr account. Picnik provides a number of effects to improve your photos, including the Airbrush tool. Available only to premium users, Airbrush smooths images and helps reduce lines and blemishes.
Other People Are Reading
-
Picnik
-
To use Picnik all you have to do is navigate to the website (picnik.com) and upload the image you want to work on. You can also work on images you've already uploaded to any of the online photo-sharing sites supported by Picnik. Picnik's free tools include a blemish fix and red-eye remover. Premium users can access more tools, such as a teeth-whitener and the airbrush tool.
Airbrushing in Photography
-
In the real world, an airbrush is a tool that sprays a fine mist of pigment, creating very smooth, uniform areas of color with a soft, diffuse outline. Traditionally, photographs were retouched using a real airbrush -- flaws in the image were covered up using a little paint in the same color as the area that needed to be smoothed over. With the advent of digital photo editing, real-life airbrushes were largely supplanted by the digital tool of the same name.
-
Digital Airbrushing
-
The airbrush tool in a digital photography editing suite such as Picnik simulates the effect of a real airbrush. Instead of a light spray of paint, a virtual spray of pixels is applied over an area. Sometimes a digital airbrush applies a single color over an area; other versions of the airbrush simply blur the existing colors in an area slightly so that the dominant color is spread over part of any imperfections and the imperfections themselves are softened.
Airbrush in Picnik
-
The airbrush in Picnik works in a similar way to airbrushes in other digital editing suites. You can adjust the size of the brush and the speed of the flow -- how fast the image changes as you move the brush over it -- as well as choosing between "Natural" and "Strong" brushes. Premium subscribers can use Picnik's airbrush tool to fix blemishes and wrinkles in portraits, or to remove creases and small areas of damage in scanned photos.
-
References
Resources
- Photo Credit Goodshoot/Goodshoot/Getty Images
