There’s an abundance of applications you can buy to edit your photos. At the top of the heap is Adobe’s Photoshop, which weighs in as the $600 gorilla.

When it comes to photographs, you can pretty much do it all with Photoshop. Adobe even makes a scaled-down version called Elements for around $99. It uses the same Photoshop “engine” but is more consumer- friendly, in that you don’t have to be a photo-manipulative expert to productively use it.

But if you don’t have the time to learn or the money to spend on these or any of the other fine photo-manipulative products out there, check out a Web site that lets you do a variety of those photo-enhancing manipulations.

Yes, it’s a Web site and not a product you buy or a service to which you have to subscribe. In fact, it’s completely free, so now is certainly a good time to check out picnik.com.

Picnik.com uses a Web browser such as Firefox or Internet Explorer to do its thing. You just log onto the Picnik Web site and begin. When I surfed on over, I began by clicking on the “Upload Photo” button. A dialog box appeared on my computer, and I selected one of the photos I had on my computer’s hard drive. Picnik. com uploaded the image to the Picnik Web site and I was presented with an editing screen that displayed my photo.

A series of tabs above the image let me select from a variety of features. The “Edit” tab offers actions such as rotate, crop, resize, exposure, colors, sharpen and red-eye. All of these abilities are fairly self-explanatory, but picnik.com let me easily experiment without the worry of corrupting my original photo, which remained safely stored on my computer.

Clicking on the “Exposure” button, for example, brought up two sliders: one for brightness and the other for contrast. As with everything on picnik.com, sliding either of them instantly reflects the changes to the image. An auto-fix feature lets picnik. com do the adjustments for you. In fact, there’s an auto-fix for colors as well as a master auto-fix that does a really good job of making your original photo look its very best.

With every adjustment is an “Undo” and “Redo” button as well. In no way, shape or form are you burning any bridges. Besides, you still have your original photo safely on your computer. Remember that everything you are doing on picnik.com is with a copy you uploaded to the Web site.

The “Creative Tools” tab offers additional special effects like converting the photo to black and white. Others are sepia, boost, soften, border, tint and many more.

The last tab is “Save&Share.” This lets you take your adjusted photo, define its size and file type (jpeg, TIFF, etc.) and save it back onto your computer’s hard drive. Other options let you save the photo to Flickr, Picasa or Facebook, e-mail it or send it directly to your computer’s printer.

If you want even more features, Picnik Premium offers added effects such as “Beauty Tools,” which gets rid of facial blemishes; additional fonts; layers and more. Check the picnik. com Web site for further details and charges. And by the way, picnik. com truly epitomizes the concept of the Internet being platform-independent, as all of this works on computers running Windows, Macintosh and, yes, even Linux.