Drawing software can be expensive! Why pay for what you can get for free? Pixlr is a free online drawing and photo editing tool that’s similar to Photoshop. With Pixlr, you can either draw freehand or import a photo to edit.

There is a decent range of freehand drawing tools, although more shapes and brushes would be welcome.  The interface is easy to figure out, and will look pretty familiar to anyone who has used Photoshop in the past. There’s a nifty selection of general photo editing tools, including a red eye reducer. You can draw, paint and insert objects into photos, and there is a decent selection of filters, as well.  In the screenshot above, I used the “Kaleidoscope” filter to create a trippy, hall-of-mirrors effect.

I also liked how Pixlr saves  the history of what you’ve done to your image. You can see everything that’s happened since you opened the session, and you can undo (or redo) several steps at a time, just by clicking on the step you’d like to go back to.

You can upload photos from your hard drive or grab them from the Internet-for Firefox users, Pixlr has an add-on that makes it easy to grab pictures as you browse.

The only minor problem I experienced was an occasional sluggish response from Pixlr when I tried to apply filters to my photo. However, this could have been due to the size of the image I was working with, or my PC.

All in all, if you need a free image editing tool, it’s worth giving Pixlr a try. I had a lot of fun playing around with it, and although I will probably still use Picnik for simple resizing, I’ll probably come back to Pixlr if I have more robust image editing needs…or maybe just to play!

What do you think of Pixlr? And what are your favorite free online image editing tools?

Our Rating of Pixlr

Tags: Photos

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