Blog posted on: 08 July 2009, by tim

picnik.com is a great way to create artwork for print if you're away from your desk, using a netbook, or don't have any dedicated design software. It's primarily a photo editing application, but additional features such as the text tool make it an easy way to design basic stickers and posters. There's even a photo montage feature which is great for fun posters and prints.

The premium version has the most versatility, but I thought I'd have a play using the basic free features.

I'm going to make a poster design using a photo from my flickr page. You can integrate directly with your flickr.com account, but on this occasion I'm simply going to download the image and then place in in picnik.com using the basic photo upload feature:

Once the image has uploaded you can adjust the image contrast, colours etc. You can also crop and resize the image - I want to print my poster at 30cm x 42.84cm so I'll resize image to 3000 x 4284; beware though - if you enlarge the image too much you'll lose quality so it's best to start with as large an image as possible:

I'm going to add a little simple text to my poster - you can do this in the 'Create' tab:

There's loads more you can do in the way of manipulating and enhancing your image, but I'm going to let my E-Type speak for itself. All I need to is hit the 'Save & Share' tab, and I can download the finished artwork to my computer:

The resultant file is ready to upload as a poster for printing on diginate.com.

picnik.com is a useful tool with suprising flexibility - we'll explore more ways to use it in accompaniment with diginate.com in the future!