So I've been a professional photographer for nearly 10 years now and when I got here with my wife she got me a little netbook so I didn't have to fire up my workstation all the time. Well needless to say running around Japan and taking pictures I got lazy and didn't want to always use my workstation to just upload some images to facebook for my friends and family. But I didn't want to go and load my whole suite of image editing software (photoshop, lightroom, etc etc) on this little netbook. So...

http://www.pixlr.com/

Here is an online application you can use for free to do quite a bit of image editing. It has alot of the same type features you can find in photoshop and you can edit and save images on your computer with it. This is also useful if you don't want to spend the $$$ for expensive photo editing software. They have the more robust Editor and Express which is a bit more lightweight and simplified.

Hope this is of use to everyone!

pretty cool, thanks for the tip.

On a related question, my wife's laptop is coming to an end. She says she wants to replace it with a netbook, but my feeling is that a netbook as a primary machine might be too small & underpowered. She is a professional writer so is typing all the time, plus she does photo editing with Photoshop as a hobbiest. Would you recommend a netbook for her primary machine, or should she get a full-featured laptop? I know you can get external keyboard & monitor to replicate the desktop experience, but she likes to work in bed a lot so a plug-in keyboard wouldn't work. I think she would be dissatisfied trying to work solely on a netbook. Thanks!

Well to be honest for writing a netbook would probably be fine. I would just look up reviews on which netbooks have a good keyboard typing feel. Some of the key shapes, spacing, springiness and even organization is drastically different from each other and/or a regular keyboard.

As for photo editing it can be done with the littl cat pad but is much more difficult. I use a thumb trackball mouse or tablet. But the problem with a netbook is two things.
1) screen size. Having your palettes open and being able to see what your working on is a royal pain on the netbook. The resolution on my netbook is 1024x600 versus 1600x1024 on my 17" widescreen laptop or even 2400x1600 on my workstation. The images that come out of one my cameras is 4200x2500 I believe. So the small netbook screen really makes it difficult to do anything image editing wise.
2) sheer power. My netbook is a brand new model but it chokes quite a bit with any sort of processing or mutiple layers in Photoshop. My laptop which is a powerhouse still has issues when I try to do too much. And forget trying to listen to music or mutlitask. Everything just grinds to a halt.

But I would say a netbook is still really convient to have. I'd say couple that with a desktop machine and you will have a great pair.

Have you ever tried Gimp? I use to use it exclusively on machines I was running Linux on, but have a version for other OSs now. It's completely free and works well for about 90% of the things I would use Photoshop for.

What OS are you running on your netbook?

GIMP is cool, in fact there is a program called GIMPshop to run gimp in a photoshop like menuing system.
Gimp was pretty good but the problem is it's a resource beast.  For a netbook running WinXP you might want to look a program called paint.net. 

Netbooks have their niche - highly portable, lightweight, long battery but very casual use (email, web surfing, blogging, etc) niche. And that's where they excel.  But it's also their limitation.   And with competitive pressure causing the prices of regular laptops to be slashed it almost doesn't make sense - if you are doing photo editing - to run a netbook.

Of course, I've learned long ago that technical specs be dammed if the end user has already _decided_ that item X (whatever X may be) is the only item that fills the need.  If that's the case, then she (and you) will only be happy with a netbook.  If that's the case, the RAM and processor upgrades will probably be worth it.  It's been a few months since I looked at prices but the extra power usually took the price from $300 or so to around $450

Another possibility to offset the disadvantages would be to hook up an external VGA monitor, a USB keyboard, a USB mouse, and possibly also a USB hub, for a workstation like setup at the house.  Ballpark... $125?  Most of that in the monitor. 


Of course if the root desire is really that most insidious of justifications to make a tech purchase, CLOTP syndrome. (aka the user must have the coolest-lunchbox-on-the-playground).  Then you might want to bypass the inevitable waning of interest and just pick up (gods help me) an IPad (snicker) when it becomes available. 
Note:  I'm not making a judgment on the matter.  I'm just saying that I've seen CLOTP a lot with whatever is the hot item year - Ipods, netbooks, Iphones, IPads (snicker), Tickle-me-elmo, etc.