Aviary, the creators of a huge suite of online editing and creation tools, has just launched a rather suave HTML5 photo editor.
Like Aviary’s other apps, the HTML5 photo editor — code named Feather — is easy to use and surprisingly powerful. Beyond its use of HTML5 (as opposed to Flash, Silverlight or other RIA frameworks), what sets this app apart is that it’s designed to be portable and embeddable.
Citing its super-simplicity and embeddableness, Aviary seems to be rather proud of its new creation — and justifiably so. The editor, no doubt because of its slim feature set, is very quick to load. The interface is snappy, and none of the manipulations or photo filters seem to create any kind of ‘lag’. There aren’t many functions, mind you (but Aviary says more are coming).
While the HTML5 editor doesn’t have all the fancy bells and whistles of Aviary’s impressive Phoenix Flash-based editor (it’s missing layers, for example), it does have all the features that you need for basic photo editing:
- Rotate
- Flip
- Crop
- Redeye reduction
- Blemish removal
- Color and saturation adjustment
- Brightness and contrast tools
- Drawing and text tools.
The tools are all easy to use and worked well in Firefox, Chrome and on Mac; there are “Undo” and “Redo” buttons available if you make a mistake.
Adding the editor to your own site is simply a matter of selecting some options, grabbing an embed code and pasting it into your code. If you like you can customize the functionality that’s available in the editor; Aviary is planning on adding skinning and CSS options for further customization of the widget in the future.
All in all, the Aviary HTML5 photo editor is nothing short of excellent. If you need to do a quick bit of editing and don’t want to play with a Flash editor that’s larger and more cumbersome than a rusty forklift truck, try out Aviary’s HTML5 editor
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