Sumo Paint: Photoshop Your Images For Free

(A picture of me in Alaska that I just modified using Sumo Paint. See the original photo here.)

Sumo Paint: A free Photoshop replacement that you can run from your web browser:

I am far from a photoshop expert, but I do need to use it on a pretty regular basis. Touchups, resizing, cropping, layers. These are all basic things that you would use photoshop for, but if you are not working with high quality digital photography or are a web designer dealing with graphics, then the $700 price tag could be considered more than it is worth. With so many applications now moving to "the cloud", things such as Google calendar and docs, I was pleasantly surprised to see Sumo Paint as the cloud based version of photoshop. Best of all, it's totally free.



I played around with Sumo Paint a little bit and must say that I like what I saw. Being mobile, and sometimes blogging from other locations or other machines means that I don't always have access to Photoshop. Sumo Paint now eliminates that problem. One nice little feature that I noticed is that you can open an image file directly from a URL. No need to save to your machine then re-open from your hard drive. The image can stay in the cloud until you are done editing it. Quick and easy.

I just gave it a try as you can see from the Alaskan image above. Sumo Paint looks like a great program. It seems a little buggy at first and a takes a little getting used to, but is definitely workable -- particularly at the price. It works especially nicely with the pen input on my tablet PC. You do have to sign-up for an account in order to save images.

Give it a try yourself here.

Or, if you'd rather have a similar program you can run off of your USB drive, try GIMP Portable which just came out with a Photoshop layout plug-in.