Wednesday, November 20, 2013

Edit Facebook Photos In Chrome With The Aviary-Based ‘Photon’

Aviary is a popular cross-platform photo editing suite, offering free image editing apps for desktop, mobile and the web. Previously, we’ve extensively talked about its wealth of features when we reviewed Aviary’s official apps for Windows 8, Android and Windows Phone. Besides official clients, there are also many third-party image editing tools that are powered by Aviary’s engine such as Photo Genius for iOS. Photon is yet another new Aviary-based image editing tool designed to work in Google Chrome to let you edit photos from Facebook right in your web browser. You can adjust various parameters of the images, and save edited copies to your computer. The extension is fairly feature-laden, thanks to Aviary’s powerful image manipulation tools.

To launch Photon, first open any of the uploaded photo on Facebook and when opened, hover the mouse over the image to reveal a minuscule Photon icon. Clicking it will launch the Photon editor in another tab.
Photon_Edit
If you’ve ever used Aviary or any other app powered by it before, you won’t have a hard time using the image editing features provided by Photon. The various self-explanatory editing options are displayed at the top, with the main image preview area taking the rest of the space.
Photon_Main
For those unfamiliar with Aviary’s editing features, you can pick from multiple image effects and filters, rotate, flip and crop the image, adjust your its brightness, contrast, saturation, sharpness and RGB levels, add stickers and text, draw over the image, rotate and resize your drawings, and reduce red-eye effect. Photon also enables you to add frame overlays to your image, and offers quite a variety of styles for the purpose.
Photon_Aviary
Further annotations can be done via text captions and stickers. The stickers department is rather funky, and can be a good way to add humor to your images. After making any change or addition to the image, you’ll need to hit Apply for the changes to come into effect. To revert back any accidental changes, you can always make use of the Undo button located at the bottom. Once you’re satisfied with your desired look, click Save and Photon will allow you to save the image locally to your computer.
Photon Stickers
It would have been nice to have an option of directly uploading the edited image back to your Facebook account, as that seems to be the only missing feature from the mix at the moment. I hope the developer will add this feature in a future update.
Photon_Output
Overall, it’s a great tool for casual photo editing and comes packaged with basic and advanced filters to quickly fine-tune Facebook photos.
If you’re looking for a similar Aviary-powered extension that uploads edited images to Facebook, check out Fly Photo Editor For Facebook. It uploads the images to the source album after you’re done editing.
Install Photon from Chrome Web Store