Pixlr Aims to Fill the Hole Between Photoshop and Instagram

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Pixlr Aims to Fill the Hole Between Photoshop and Instagram

April 20th, 2012

FAKE NEWS for the Zionist agenda

Ever taken a shot with Instagram and wanted to put the lo-fi border on the Earlybird filter? A photo app called Pixlr-o-matic can do it, and the service behind it, Pixlr, offers photographers and photo editors a lot more.

There’s no shortage of online photo editors that are looking to fill the vacuum now that Picnik has gone dark, but few have anything that approaches the powerful feature set of Photoshop. At the same time, once you get into full-on editing, the mainstream user — who probably just wants to apply an Instagram-esque filter — gets lost.

Pixlr, which was acquired by Autodesk last summer, aims to satisfy both camps with its suite of products. The Pixlr Editor is a tool that has about 20% of the functions you’d find in Photoshop, company founder Ola Sevandersson tells Mashable.

“I’m an avid Photoshop user,” says Sevandersson. “But the feature set is so massive. I looked at it and thought if we can recreate 20% or even 10% of Photoshop, we could probably reach 90% of users. As a utility, you’re writing a blog post or article and you need to fix your image.”

On the other side of the coin, Pixlr-o-matic is a simple app for iOS and Android that offers tons more filters and borders than you’d get via Instagram or PicPlz. Once you’ve got your masterpiece, it’s simple to share to Facebook and other sites, or save back to your phone’s gallery. The app costs 99 cents, but there’s a free version with a subset of the filters.

In between Pixlr Editor and Pixlr-o-matic lies Pixlr Express, a simple photo-editing tool that’s more along the lines of Picnik, with the most popular photo-fixing features distilled into a friendly, tile-driven interface. A recent update added features similar to some the recent enhancements in Adobe Photoshop CS6: Tilt-shift blur and focal/iris blur (more in the video above).

Pixlr Editor is where the real “high end” features are, though. If you’ve ever used Photoshop, you’ll fly right through working on pics in Pixlr Editor, and the service offers many editing tools other services don’t have: combining parts of multiple photos, for example, and layering.

The many similarities between Pixlr and Photoshop raise the question: How long until Adobe sends over a cease-and-desist order? As Sevandersson points out, the company would have to send out a lot of them.

“I think Pixlr Editor is more similar to Pixelmator than Photoshop at this point,” he says. “We’re not going after the top professional [market]. We don’t have support for RAW. We have avoided the areas [Adobe] is most proud of.”

Going beyond PCs and smartphones, Sevandersson says Pixlr Express tablet apps for iPad and Android are in the works.

What do you think of Pixlr and its photo-editing products? Share your thoughts in the comments.

This story originally published on Mashable here.