Aviary, the small New York-based startup with the ambitions of recreating Adobe Photoshop’s most popular design tools in the browser, has launched a simple, free tool, called Falcon, that lets you quickly grab and edit images within the browser. Falcon, since it is web-based and works in any browser, can be used on a Mac or PC. Skitch, another similar fast, simple editing tool, is a desktop app that only works on Macs. Both Skitch and Falcon offer a simple subset of tools which was previously only available in Photoshop. As we’ve said in the past, these simple tools are especially useful to bloggers and others who spend a lot of time manipulating and editing images on the fly.
The beauty of Aviary is in its Firefox plugin, called Talon, which let’s you grab a screen shot or portion of a screen at any time and automatically imports the image into Aviary’s browser-based editing platform. When you click on the icon on your browser when you are on a page you want to capture, you are given the choice of capturing a portion of the screen, the entire viewed screen, or the entire page (below the fold). The option of capturing the entire page is a useful; and a feature that Skitch currently doesn’t allow. Once you capture the image, Falcon gives you the option of editing the image on Aviary.com, saving the image to your desktop, copying it to your clipboard or hosting the image at Aviary.com.
Aviary’s in-browser editing platform is similar to Skitch’s desktop app and adds much of the same functionality. You can add arrows and text to an image, as well as crop, rotate, and resize your image. Falcon also has a built-in color picker tool to extract web color values from images and screenshots. For more design power, you can port your image into 4 different powerful Aviary tools, including color editor, advanced image editor, effects editor and vector editor.
Once you are finished with editing your image, you can save the image as a PNG or JPG either on your desktop or host it on Aviary. Aviary Pro members can gain additional storage options like privacy and watermark control for $24.99 per year. Like with Skitch, images that are uploaded to your Aviary account can be commented by other users, and there are a number of options to embed that image in other websites or link to an image from other sites, like Twitter or Facebook. Aviary has also released the API for Falcon, so that any website can integrate the tool. The drawback of Falcon is that if you don’t use Firefox, the tool isn’t as simple as with the plug-in. You have to import a image into Aviary’s browser editing platform or or you can paste link into the platform to get the entire page imported in, which you can then edit.
Since we first covered the company, Aviary had kept most of its tools in private beta. Only four have become publicly available: Phoenix, an image editor along the lines of Photoshop; Peacock, a so-called “visual laboratory” for pixel-based images; Toucan, a color palette tool; and Raven, a vector-based image editor that mimics (and therefore competes with) Adobe Illustrator.
Adobe also released a simple, browser-based photo editing tool at Photoshop.com, but it is designed more as an application to edit photos as opposed to grabbing and editing items and screenshots from websites .
Wow….just…wow…
Tried it for a quick sec and even the filters are pretty spiffy! Good work!
Looks awesome !!
“the small New York-based startup with the ambitions of recreating Adobe Photoshop’s most popular design tools in the browser, ”
I think you mean Adobe Systems’.
Awesome.
That’s exactly the level of PS and AI that intermediary user (as most of us) needs. It’s not enough for a pro, but for 90% of the people who just need to draw a thing or two – it’s just what the doctor ordered.
Keep going, guys!
Super cool. This is heading straight to my bookmarks.
Just hate it when I have to load up Photoshop just to crop and add a title to an image. Such a fuckin resource hog that..
And yes, bloggers will TOTALLY love it.
Very nice. I’ll be using it starting now!
If you don’t use Firefox, you can still import images from your browser or URLs directly.
They should include an easier way to get images from Flickr but otherwise a cool set of tools. I wonder if they’ll offer a desktop app that integrated with the online offering.
Who cares about your lousy Fire F…ks? It works in Chrome (at home) and in IE (at work).
Oh yeah… Chrome and IE… the fantastic add-on-less browsers.
Just installed Talon for Firefox and this is awesome.
Ha… that is great. And to think I “needed” to upgrade my Photoshop from 5.5.
Not anymore, thanks bird people.
http://pixlr.com/editor/
The Aviary team is a bunch of geniuses. I’ve been following their progress for a while.
The flash platform has some pretty powerful API’s. It’s amusing that people think HTML 5 can replace all this functionality.
This is spiffy.
Looks pretty ..i will try it now .and see what they are .
Will try now but will it provide? the cool features like Adobe do?
And online will not be slow? to do this? as on internet it requires High bandwidth may be will try and post here.
This looks like a quite powerful application and seems to do more than most people ever need to edit their images. Still, if you need a screwdriver often you will have one next to you, so anybody who´s dealing with photos daily will probably be more comfortable with an installed standard set of software for quite a while longer.
Dudes … PIXLR!
Faster, more like Photoshop, better and released almost a year ago.
http://www.pixlr.com
PIXLR seems nice too. Thanks for the link!
Click the “image editor” button at the top of Falcon and it transforms into an advanced photoshop-like editor.
Glad to see Techcrunch covering really good startups instead of the usual twitter/apple/facebook spam. Good work Leena!
This is going into my bookmarks, and I’ll definitely recommend Aviary to my friends…