Walter Higgins put out a call for tyre kickers for Pixenate and I figured seen as I got the photo blog back in some kind of structured form that I would lash into Pixenate to resize the photos a bit before uploading them to the blog.

Impressive stuff. The K800 delivers a 2048*1536 shot at around 800kb average, upload was relatively quick and playing around with the basic tools was a breeze. Slight bit of cropping, cropped well. Slight bit of resizing, nice to maintain the aspect ratio. Honestly it was the first time I went to PXN8 with the intention of using the finished photo online as opposed to toying with photos there to see what can be done.

Knowing that, and also knowing that I’m extremely particular about photographs and quality I’ll say that I was impressed when working in colour but a little disappointed in the grayscale and sepia conversion as the image seemed to lose quality around areas close in colour (become very pixelated, grained out). The preview window works really well though Walter, fair play. Good to be able to check everything out without having to do the whole “apply and undo if unhappy” trick.

The final image was cropped at a width of 470px and when saved to disk clocked in at 160kb. One thing I would like to see, unless I missed it, is the ability to compress the photo further. 160kb isn’t ideal if you’re looking at ten posts on a blog homepage, each with a minimum of one image so I’ll confess that I brought the two photos back into Photoshop to drop the size to about 40kb.

Honestly, if I wasn’t a stickler for well compressed web images and I didn’t have access to Photoshop, I think I’d find PXN8 ideal, particularly if you’re blogging your photos and want to make a few adjustments to them. Usability is great, no problem doing anything, uploads well, saves back to disk well plus, the fun effects are actually fun 🙂 Let me compress those photos even more and I’d be real happy with it…

See the finished post (contains two images), here on the photo blog.