Web-based image editing software

As part of our assignments for the week, we were asked to review web-based image editing software.  Although we had a few recommendations from our instructor, I went with a recommendation from a co-worker who told me about Aviary.

The first thing that you'll notice if you go to Aviary's website is that they offer an app for mobile devices and web browsers which will quickly add effects, crop, resize, reorient, recolor, etc. images.  If you notice on the upper left there's a blue banner, you can see that Aviary is more than a simple image editing app.  The advanced portion of Aviary's site hosts an entire creative suite that is free and web-based.  The Phoenix image editor has similar features to Adobe Photoshop including layers, masks, and filters.  Raven is a vector editor that similarly can boast some of the features of Adobe Illustrator.  There's also Talon, a screen capture tool, Peacock, an effects tool, Falcon, an image mark-up tool, Toucan, a color editing tool, and Roc and Myna spurn the visual arts entirely to focus on audio!  Lots of fun and interesting effects and creative efforts can be made using these tools.

However, it is a web-based software suite, and as such, the functionality is not nearly as high as a resource intensive program running on your computer like, well, any Adobe Creative Suite program.  As a place for experimentation, Aviary is great.  If you have any professional use for Adobe CS programs, it would probably be best to get Adobe CS programs.  Once you see the pricetag on them compared to the pricetag of free, you might realize that your "professional" use isn't that professional after all and check out the Aviary Suite after all.