Aviary, the company that makes it easy for mobile developers to integrate image editing into their apps, has a major launch today: they’re introducing an overhauled version of their mobile SDK that’s both more powerful and significantly better looking than the previous one, which launched in September.

You may associate Aviary with the startup’s advanced suite of web-based image editing apps, which is what it focused on for years. But last year it shifted toward this developer-facing mobile SDK, which allows third-party developers to quickly integrate photo editing, filters, virtual stickers, and other related features into their applications. It’s essentially a drop-in photo editor, and given how popular image sharing apps like Instagram are these days, it’s no surprise that plenty of mobile developers are baking it into their apps.

Today’s update, which is available for both Android, iOS, and web apps includes additional image effects and a refreshed UI. It also paves the way for Aviary’s monetization plans: developers will be able to sell special filters and stickers via in-app purchases, and Aviary will take a cut of these transactions. These monetization features aren’t available broadly yet — Aviary is currently rolling them out to select partners. The first application to include the SDK (which will let you try it out for yourself) will be Pic Stitch (the updated version of their app is currently pending approval from Apple and should be up soon).

Alongside the update, Aviary is also sharing some stats: usage of the SDK is growing 50% a month (measured based on how many users are accessing the editor and editing images). And across the 300 partner web and mobile apps to have integrated the SDK, users are editing over 10 million photos each month. Aviary says that a lot of this growth is concentrated among its top applications (it grows as they grow), but says that it’s seeing a nice long-tail in usage too.

To help reduce confusion over the mobile SDK and their old suite of image editing tools, Aviary recently revamped its homepage at Aviary.com which now focuses on the developer-facing SDK. If you’re looking for the old, consumer-facing image editors, you’ll need to head to advanced.aviary.com.

If apps like Instagram have proven one thing, it’s that photos and mobile phones are an extremely popular (and powerful) combination. And photos on the web are obviously immensely popular as well.

A year ago NYC-based startup Aviary decided to capitalize on these trends by launching developer-facing APIs, which allow third-party apps to bake in image editing with a minimal amount of work required. Today, the company is announcing some stats that indicate that its strategy is working: it’s now powering image editing in some 300+ websites and mobile applications, and over one million photos are being edited per week on mobile alone.

For most of its history Aviary has offered a suite of web-based image editing tools — if you want to edit an image but don’t have Photoshop handy, for example, it’s a great free alternative. Then last year, it opened the doors to third-party developers with a new HTML5-based web API, and it followed that up with its iOS and Android SDKs this past September. Aviary says that on average, it takes a mobile developer only fifteen minutes to bake this functionality into their apps.

The company is also reporting some strong engagement stats. Users are working with the editor for an average of 90 seconds, and 80% of users that launch the editor wind up editing and saving a photo (in other words, they aren’t accidentally entering it and immediately leaving).

Among the applications that have recently integrated Aviary are Friendcaster for Facebook (a third-party Facebook app for iOS and Android), stock photography site Bigstock, Halftone, social browser RockMelt, and Alt12.

Aviary has made a name for itself over the years with its powerful photo editing – and other tools – and API for the Web and mobile.

Today, they’re somewhat changing course, business-wise, henceforth focusing primarily on serving the broad developer community with software development kits (SDKs).

Using their SDKs, iOS and Android app developers can add photo editing features such as cropping, sharpening, red-eye removal, filters and effects and whatnot to their applications. Aviary says support for the iPad is underway, and that its SDK is 100% compatible with the forthcoming iOS 5.

Both the iPhone and the Android SDK are free to use and implement. Developers have the ability to customize the photo editing functionality so it fits their apps’ look and feel.

Aviary is launching its new SDKs with 30+ partners in tow. The company has also made a significant hire, attracting former Microsoft Chief of Staff Paul Murphy to head up its partnership efforts as their new VP of Business Development.

Launch partners include picplz, Minus, Snapr, Fashism, Getaround, Pixable and Fotobabble.

It’s an established fact that tweeting about your breakfast is a serious faux pas, on par with ‘Liking’ your own Facebook status update. However, recent trends indicate that tweeting a photo of your breakfast is perfectly acceptable, and in some cases, even encouraged. Your friends don’t want to read about your oatmeal — but they’d love to see it with their own eyes, preferably after it’s been passed through a ‘Sutro’ filter.

Behold, the power of the photograph.

These days you can’t navigate a popular app without bumping into a feature that lets you swap or edit photos, and it seems a new photo service is cropping up every week. Which is why Aviary, the company that produces a suite of powerful web-based image editors, has decided to help coordinate a Photo Hack Day that’s dedicated to building photo apps. And they’ve managed to land a sponsorship from NASDAQ to pull it off.

Photo Hack Day will be from August 20-21 and is being held at NYC’s General Assembly (which is also very involved in putting the event on). Tickets are free of charge to participating developers. You can sign up right here.

Aviary’s Alex Taub, who heads the company’s business development and partnership efforts, says that this will be the biggest photo hackathon ever organized. And, assuming things go well, the company intends to launch a global hack day this winter that will simultaneously take place in NYC, SF, Israel, and cities in Europe.

Of course, it’s hard not to notice the big sponsor for the event: NASDAQ. This is slightly surprising (it isn’t often you hear about stock exchanges getting involved with startups, unless it’s to help them IPO), but we’re told NASDAQ will have more to share on this front in the near future. NASDAQ is also coordinating a very cool prize for the top three apps built during the hackathon: they’ll be showcased on the NASDAQ screen in Times Square.

Here’s a quote NASDAQ had for today’s announcement:

“NASDAQ has driven grassroots innovation since it created the world’s first electronic stock exchange 40 years ago,” said NASDAQ OMX Senior Vice President, Corporate Communications, Frank De Maria. “NASDAQ is excited to sponsor the 2011 Photo Hack Day at General Assembly and support the start-up community in New York in their pursuit of innovation. We can’t wait to see the results.”

Update/Disclosure: A few days after this was published Aviary asked if I’d like to be a judge. So, see you there!

Throughout the course of the event companies will be presenting details about their  photo-based APIs to developers, in the hopes that they’ll use them for their projects. Here’s a list of companies participating so far:

• Aviary
• Appstores
• Canvas

• Etsy
• Face.com
• Foursquare
• Pixable
• Shutterstock and Bigstock
• Smugmug
• Openphoto.me
• PicStory
• Twitpic
• Launchrock
• Imgur
• Instagram

Mobile apps like Instagram and PicPlz made photo filters popular, and now every photo app needs to have filters and effects. But not every developer wants to spend the time and resources to come up with his own effects. Online image-editing service Aviary hopes to fill that need with a new photo effects API it is launching today. Alex Taub, head of business development for Aviary, took me through a demo of the new APIs and what they can do in the video above.

Developers can choose from a variety of effects and filters—everything from red-eye reduction to “Bad Ass” (which makes photos look like Andy Warhol prints). There are also effects like Toy Camera, black and white, or adding a logo. watermark. Aviary hopes to become the Twilio of photo effects for developers (much like Twilio gave rise to apps like GroupMe through its SMS and telephony APIs). Aviary will be at the Disrupt NYC Hackathon this year showcasing this new API.

The API is free now during a beta period. Aviary will eventually implement a tiered pricing plan. Aviary also revamped its homepage to better highlight its different products.

Close your eyes and picture Times Square in New York City. What do you see? Probably an insane amount of ads. Sadly, that’s the defining characteristic. But what would it look like without ads? A few groups have teamed up to create a web app to find out.

No Ad – NY is a collaboration between Aviary, The Barbarian Group, and Morgan Spurlock’s Warrior Poets. The idea is simple: take a 360-degree picture of Time Square, and use an online picture editor to remove all the ads, the re-upload the edited picture to show the world what a Times Square without ads would look like.

Specifically, the image has been cut up into 100 smaller images that users are asked to click on to edit in Aviary to remove the ads in their frame. Currently, five of the frames are done, and at this rate, the hope is that all of them will be done in a couple of weeks (though it could be sooner).

So why do this? As the site states, Spurlock was inspired by Sao Paolo, Brazil. That city has banned all outdoor advertisements since 2007 in an effort to clean up “visual pollution”. (Check out the video below.) So Spurlock called upon The Barbarian Group and Aviary to create a virtual way to do the same thing.

Something tells me that Spurlock, best known for his extreme documentaries like Super Size Me, also has another documentary in mind here. So get to work and clean up Times Square — just like New York did in the 90s, but this time you get to remove ads instead of strippers.

Aviary is very good at what they do. That is, offering relatively powerful tools for amateur artists to edit content online. But all of those tools are Flash-based. And some of Aviary’s partners didn’t like that too much, feeling they were too cumbersome. And some users were interested in the tools, but also wanted something more lightweight. So Aviary went to work, and came up with a new editor built entirely with HTML5.

The project, which they codenamed “Feather”, is an HTML5 photo editor that resides on both Aviary’s site, and can be easily integrated with any third party site. The tool, which appears as a small square widget overlay, allows people to quickly edit photos without Flash. And it gives third-party sites an option for a light tool that their users can use right on the site.

The tool has the core functionality that Aviary felt users and partners would want. These include the standard: Rotate, Flip, Resize, Crop, Redeye, Blemish, Colors, and Saturation. And Aviary threw in a couple of fun ones as well: Instant, Toy Camera, Old Photo, and Retro. These effects give photos looks similar to those found on some of the currently popular mobile photo apps.

But this is just step one for the editor. Aviary plans to add the ability to customize the editor’s theme, add more editing tools, and they’re even going to open source all the code for the tool. Plus they plan to give partners usage statistics.

And the plan is to get the tool working well on mobile devices too. Currently, it works on some but they’re working on making the experience better, Aviary co-founder Michael Galpert tells us. This tool will allow Aviary to build for every platform, he says.

Aviary has lined up some launch partners for the new tool. They include: Digital Youth Network, Everloop, Fashism, HowMutch, Market Publique, Rrripple, Saw You At Sinai, and Shopify.

Aviary is offering the tool for free for anyone to use and/or embed on their site. You can create and customize your own widget here. They will also have some premium features (new effects and functionality) down the road, Galpert says.

Since March, Google has been steadily adding additional apps to the store, including Bantam Live and Bill.com, and now counts more than 200 installable apps available in the Marketplace. Google says that there are 4 million Google Apps users (out of over 25 million users) with Marketplace apps installed on their domain. The Marketplace itself is a big venture for Google; not only is it a way to provide more functionality for Apps (and draw more users) but it’s also a monetization channel (Google takes a 20 percent cut of each sale). Google has been actively trying to get more developers to add their apps to the platform, even posting glowing testimonials from developers who offer apps on the marketplace. To see how representative these testimonials are, we decided to speak with a number of developers to see how their apps are actually performing on the Marketplace.

Socialwok, a collaboration product that adds a social layer to Google products and Microsoft Outlook, launched as a pilot partner for the Google Apps marketplace in March. Socialwok’s founder Ming Yong says that the startup was able to sign up 4,000 businesses in the two weeks following the launch of their app. After this huge spike, says Yong, downloads of the app went down by half. Socialwok, which is the third top rated app in the store, is now seeing 600 to 800 businesses adding the app per week.

Yong pointed out that via the App Marketplace, the startup was able to sign a big deal with a hotel chain to use Socialwok as a separate application across its business (not just within Google Apps). Apparently, the company saw Socialwok on the App Marketplace and became interested in using the full platform.

But one drawback, says Ming, is the vast amount of noise on the Marketplace and that it can be difficult for users to separate the wheat from the chafe. “There are some developers who just want to have a little Google dust on their brands and have zero-integration with Google’s actual product,” he explains. “There seems to be a more the merrier attitude when it comes to accepting apps in the Marketplace; Google needs to do a better job with regard to discriminating which apps are integrated.”

Currently, Google lists the top five rated apps, the top five downloaded apps, suggestions of popular and notable apps, and a few featured apps on the front page of the Marketplace. You can also search for apps generally by functionality (i.e. accounting, workflow) or by name.

Productivity suite Zoho (which actually competes against Google on a number of products) launched two apps, CRM (which is the fifth top installed app on the marketplace) and Projects, in March and added two other apps, Invoice and Helpdesk, a few months later. Zoho evangelist Raju Vegesna tells me that shortly following the launch of the Marketplace, Zoho saw a few hundred downloads a day, but growth leveled off within a month, and now the company sees less than 500 installs total of its apps per week.

One feature that is missing from the Marketplace, says Vegesna, is the ability to test out apps before installing them (Vegesna didn’t know the exact uninstall rate but we heard from one developer who preferred to remain anonymous that the uninstall rate of Apps on the Marketplace is around 20 percent). Vegesna agreed with Yong that there is a lot of noise on the marketplace but said that it’s not nearly as tough to differentiate as it is on Apple’s App Store.

Aviary, which offers a suite of design tools within an App on the Marketplace, also launched as a pilot partner in March and has risen to the second most installed app on the platform. Aviary founder Avi Muchnick declined to give us specific numbers but said right after launch there was a huge insurgence of traffic, but downloads have since dropped to a steady pace.

Aviary is not seeing a large amount of web referrals to its site from the marketplace. But one of the major benefits of being on the App marketplace, rather than downloads, he says, is brand awareness of being associated with Google. Echoing Yong and Vesegna’s criticisms, Muchnik adds that the app marketplace is not ideal for users to discover applications

It’s important to note that Aviary, Socialwok and Zoho all debuted their apps at the launch of the Marketplace, when buzz and downloads were high. I bet that apps that launched a few months after March aren’t seeing nearly as much traffic as these apps did in March. Bantam Live’s CEO John Rourke, who launched his CRM app in the Marketplace in June, said he’s pleased with the performance of his app (he declined to give us numbers). Google says that CRM is a top search term for the Marketplace, so it seems that those types of apps are seeing success on the Marketplace (Bantam Live is currently a featured app).

Even looking from the testimonials Google has published, as a whole developers seem to be pleased with the traffic post launch. For example, productivity and task management app Manymoon claims that it is adding 1,000 new sign-ups per week. And it is the top installed app on the marketplace so that should probably give developers a benchmark of how the most popular app in the marketplace is faring.

Of course, Manymoon is also free, which probably makes it more appealing than some of its paid competitors. In fact, all the top five installed apps are completely free for users except for Zoho, which is free for only three users.

One well-known technology company (which asked to be anonymous), which launched its app on in conjunction with the roll out of the marketplace in March, said that while the number of apps being downloaded is lower than they initially expected. But the app has been able to draw a wide variety of customers, including educational institutions and local and state governments.

The complaint this particular company had was around the marketing of the service to the millions of Google Apps domain administrators. According to the startup, Google seems to be marketing the platform mainly to new companies that join Google Apps. Another way the service could improve, says this company, is to provide a way for Apps administrators to notify users that a new App has been deployed.

As a company spokesperson says, “We understand that Google wants to be sure to protect businesses from having their employees heavily marketed to, and that’s the dilemma of a marketplace like this – it’s massive, but you have to exercise restraint in how you market to it. There’s no easy answer, but anything that helps apps raise awareness among end users in a tactful, responsible way, would be very helpful.”

Another issue that I heard from a number of developers was how Google will integrate its other marketplaces (Android, Chrome) into the App Store. Many of the developers who offer apps in the Marketplace also have Chrome plug-ins and Android apps. Socialwok’s Yong pointed out that it would be helpful to be able to cross-promote apps from each Marketplace.

One developer I spoke to was concerned over the upcoming change in the payment structure for App developers. Currently, users who download apps pay the developers directly. He says that by the end of the year Google plans to take over the payments process and will collect all the payments from users and will distribute payments to developers accordingly. He says that not only will this new payments integration will involve an adjustment of his product but he hopes that Google will offer a payment system that can be integrated in the same way for the Chrome web store and the Android Marketplace (he thinks that each integration will have to be separate and won’t be unified).

As you can see from these anecdotes, developers and startups seem generally happy with their app’s performance on the Marketplace. But clearly Google has some improvements to make, particularly in the area of filtering out apps, marketing and app discovery. Another observation—if all of the most popular apps are free, I am left wondering how many of the 4 million users who use apps are actually paying for their apps.

It seems more likely that for now, the Google Apps Marketplace is good exposure for business apps, as Muchnick says. It can only help to be associated with Google Apps, a product that Google has very high hopes for as a viable cloud-based alternative to Microsoft Office.

Photo credit/IMDB

Cofounder Michael Galpert says that Aviary has been popular at schools for quite a while. The appeal of Aviary’s apps are obvious — they’re free, and they offer more than enough functionality for most common media creation tasks. But Aviary.com has a few features that aren’t ideal for students. For example, it offers a section for popular creations made with its products, and some of these user-submitted contributions aren’t exactly ‘G’ rated. Likewise, students will occasionally craft an image that contains their photo, which wouldn’t really be appropriate to share publically (the default option is ‘private’, but students could activate public sharing when they shouldn’t). That’s where Aviary for Education comes in.

The new product allows teachers to create walled off Aviary ecosystems, where students can upload their projects and collaborate without worrying about having their work shared with the web at large (and they won’t be able to see Aviary projects that were done by users outside of the classroom). Teachers are given control over these virtual classrooms, and can use the system to assign projects, messages all students at once, and to introduce students to Aviary’s tutorials.

Aviary for education gives students access to Aviary’s image, vector, audio, and music editors. The product is free for now and Aviary will be rolling out its pricing plans this fall (premium options will include the ability to manage multiple classes, and more advanced tutorials and lesson plans).

While there has always been a free version of the service, you could not do some of the more advanced things without this subscription. But now you get access to things such as saving private files on Aviary’s servers, adding your own watermarks or go watermark-free, and access to all of their nice tutorials.

So why go free? Well, Aviary always wanted the product to be free, but they previously couldn’t justify it. But now, “our recent round of funding (by Spark Capital, Bezos Expeditions & others) enables us to finally achieve this goal as we shift revenues to other areas that don’t limit individuals in any way,” co-founder Michael Galpert tells us. He goes on to note that the focus is on building an app marketplace where people can buy and sell goods and services which Aviary would take a cut of. So really, this is a shift in strategy to a new type of model.

Existing paying customers will no longer be billed, and those that signed up in the last 30 days will get a full refund.

Aviary competes with Adobe’s online version of Photoshop which is also free, but requires you to pay if you go over their 2GB limit.

While people have been developing extensions for Chrome for a little while now, none were officially supported. But now that Google is reaching out to developers to start making these for real, we’re already hearing about some good ones. One such one was sent to us tonight by Aviary, makers of browser-based creativity tools.

Aviary’s new Chrome extension is simple, but very useful. Once you install it, it adds a little icon to the right side of the URL bar. Clicking on this icon gives you a drop down menu of options. Most give you easy access to Aviary’s suite of tools, but the first option is key. It’s the one that allows you to capture the visible portion of any web page you are on with one click. From there, the image is loaded into whichever Aviary tool you set as the default editor.

So, for example, if I use the Aviary Image Markup tool as my editor, I’ll capture the web page, and be moved into the editor in seconds. From here I can manipulate the screenshot and easily save it to Aviary. More importantly, I can save it to my desktop without having to save it to Aviary at all. This makes for one extremely fast and easy screen capture tool.

But the best part of Aviary’s extension is that it doesn’t slow down Chrome. While the actual Aviary editor takes up some of your CPU, the extension itself ads no bloat to the regular browsing experience. I actually have three extension installed right now and none are slowing Chrome (Chromium) at all. This gives me great hope.

A few notes about Aviary’s plug-in: First, it’s not available yet only because Google has yet to launch its Extension Gallery. Supposedly, that’s coming soon for end-users but for now extension support is limited to developers being able to upload their creations. Second, the extension works fine in Chrome for Windows (and I believe Linux), but to use it on the Mac you have to be using the latest build of Chromium (the newest dev build of Chrome for Mac doesn’t support it yet).

Aviary also makes a similar extension for Firefox, that has seen over 100,000 installs, we’re told. That version also features two features the Chrome extension doesn’t yet: Full page captures (not just the visible part of the page) and Flash capture support. We’re told both will be coming in an update to the extension.

If you haven’t checked out Myna yet, you should. Aviary released it the other day, and it’s really impressive for software that is fully contained in the browser. It’s not quite as powerful as GarageBand, but most casual users probably don’t need all the bells and whistles that GarageBand provides. Most users will find Myna more than powerful enough, and actually, it seems quite a bit easier to get the hang of as a result of being slightly less complex.

But the really cool potential for Myna lies in using its API and getting some partnerships with bands to do remixes on the web. The first such partnership is with the band Major Lazer. They’re currently holding a contest between now and October 1 for whichever fan does the best remix. There will be one grand prize winner (who gets $500 among a bunch of other stuff) and five runners-up.

In a time when everyone is talking about falling music sales, and wonder if the recording industry as it’s currently constituted can survive, this sounds like a great way for bands to create a more interactive experience with their fans.

Again, Aviary makes this very simple to do. You load up the Myna app from Major Lazer’s website and it’s pre-populated with various musical elements of three tracks that you can remix. From there, it’s simply a matter of dragging and dropping elements to get the mix you want. Cool stuff.

Update: Here’s the link for the API information.

Aviary, the small New York-based startup with the ambitions of recreating Adobe Photoshop’s most popular design tools in the browser, has launched a simple, free tool, called Falcon, that lets you quickly grab and edit images within the browser. Falcon, since it is web-based and works in any browser, can be used on a Mac or PC. Skitch, another similar fast, simple editing tool, is a desktop app that only works on Macs. Both Skitch and Falcon offer a simple subset of tools which was previously only available in Photoshop. As we’ve said in the past, these simple tools are especially useful to bloggers and others who spend a lot of time manipulating and editing images on the fly.

The beauty of Aviary is in its Firefox plugin, called Talon, which let’s you grab a screen shot or portion of a screen at any time and automatically imports the image into Aviary’s browser-based editing platform. When you click on the icon on your browser when you are on a page you want to capture, you are given the choice of capturing a portion of the screen, the entire viewed screen, or the entire page (below the fold). The option of capturing the entire page is a useful; and a feature that Skitch currently doesn’t allow. Once you capture the image, Falcon gives you the option of editing the image on Aviary.com, saving the image to your desktop, copying it to your clipboard or hosting the image at Aviary.com.

Aviary’s in-browser editing platform is similar to Skitch’s desktop app and adds much of the same functionality. You can add arrows and text to an image, as well as crop, rotate, and resize your image. Falcon also has a built-in color picker tool to extract web color values from images and screenshots. For more design power, you can port your image into 4 different powerful Aviary tools, including color editor, advanced image editor, effects editor and vector editor.

Once you are finished with editing your image, you can save the image as a PNG or JPG either on your desktop or host it on Aviary. Aviary Pro members can gain additional storage options like privacy and watermark control for $24.99 per year. Like with Skitch, images that are uploaded to your Aviary account can be commented by other users, and there are a number of options to embed that image in other websites or link to an image from other sites, like Twitter or Facebook. Aviary has also released the API for Falcon, so that any website can integrate the tool. The drawback of Falcon is that if you don’t use Firefox, the tool isn’t as simple as with the plug-in. You have to import a image into Aviary’s browser editing platform or or you can paste link into the platform to get the entire page imported in, which you can then edit.

Since we first covered the company, Aviary had kept most of its tools in private beta. Only four have become publicly available: Phoenix, an image editor along the lines of Photoshop; Peacock, a so-called “visual laboratory” for pixel-based images; Toucan, a color palette tool; and Raven, a vector-based image editor that mimics (and therefore competes with) Adobe Illustrator.

Adobe also released a simple, browser-based photo editing tool at Photoshop.com, but it is designed more as an application to edit photos as opposed to grabbing and editing items and screenshots from websites .

Aviary is a small New York startup with the ambitious goal of recreating (and expanding upon) Adobe’s most popular design tools in the browser.

Since we first covered the company about a year and a half ago, Aviary has kept most of its 15 planned tools (at least those that have seen development at all so far) in private beta. Only three have become publicly available: Phoenix, an image editor along the lines of Photoshop; Peacock, a so-called “visual laboratory” for pixel-based images; and Toucan, a color palette tool.

Now, Aviary has taken the lid off a tool called Raven as well. Raven is a vector-based image editor that mimics (and therefore competes with) Adobe Illustrator, a popular desktop application among digital artists whose work often makes it onto real paper. Like Phoenix, Raven doesn’t match its Adobe counterpart feature-by-feature but it does recreate Illustrator’s most essential functionality. And the results are pretty impressive; the pen tool and gradients in particular work just as they should, and the tool overall reaffirms Flex’s reputation as a suitable platform for desktop-like applications.

Is it good enough to convince veteran Illustrator users to switch? Probably not. But it may be enough to convince new designers to forgo buying Illustrator and try out Raven first. After all, Adobe charges a pretty penny for its creativity software and not everyone’s inclined to pirate it.

CEO Avi Muchnick seems keenly aware of the imprudence of calling Raven (or any of his other products) real competition for Adobe just yet, preferring to describe Raven as “the web app counterpart to Adobe Illustrator”. The thinking is that Illustrator users may want to load their files into Raven using its SVG import feature, after which they can make modifications and then release their work into Aviary’s online community. And the community does appear to be Aviary’s biggest selling point, at least until its productivity tools evolve. Artists can easily browse and modify each others’ work, and they can retain control over copyrights and sell their work online, if so desired.

Almost a year ago Adobe started making its own inroads into online creativity tools, releasing a photo editing tool at photoshop.com. Surprisingly, Adobe chose not to recreate Photoshop in the browser but rather to design a new tool with broader consumer appeal. This suggests that Adobe may leave the field open for Aviary to produce online products that are robust enough to entice creative professionals.

Aviary is still working to improve font support, bitmap-to-vector tracing, and support for export file types in Raven. An API will also be released next month that makes it possible to embed any of Aviary’s applications across the web. Interested parties can email this address.

Check out a video demonstration of Raven below.

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=2451721&server=vimeo.com&show_title=1&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=&fullscreen=1

Whether you realize it or not, you’ve probably come across the handiwork of Worth1000, a site that invites readers to use their image-editing skills to do everything from crafting new logos, to creating vintage ads for modern products or adding monsters to otherwise tame photos. The site has run over 200,000 contests since its inception in 2002, and now has galleries teeming with hundreds of thousands of user-created images.

Now Aviary, the company behind Worth1000, is looking to give site owners a chance to run their own image-design competitions. The company has built a powerful suite of browser-based imaged editing tools, and is now launching a new site called w1k.com that helps users easily create their own online photo-editing contests. These contests can consist of anything from crowdsourced logo-design competitions to humorous celebrity-morphs (and everything in between), and could appeal to a broad range of publishers.

Users will be able to submit their entries either using Aviary’s online photo-editing software (which should be suitable for most people), or they can upload images from their desktop if they’d rather use software like Photoshop or Gimp. Users will be able to stir up interest in their submissions by sharing links through Email, Twitter, Facebook and other services, though contest administrators will be able to restrict these options. The Aviary team is also implementing the anti-cheating system it has developed for Worth1000, so the contests should be more accurate than a homegrown image-upload and voting system.

Aviary is offering a basic template for free that will be more than enough for most users. To generate revenue, it will also offer a premium option that allows website publishers to create customized templates and also includes a robust interface for stat-tracking and demographic information. For an example of how customizable these contest sites are, check out this fake contest, which shows off a TechCrunch-themed design along with some interesting ideas for alternate Crunchies statue designs (we like the real guy just fine, though). Other examples include a competition sponsored by EA for MirrorsEdge and this Dark Theme, which will be available to free users.

Aviary’s w1k.com contest creator seems poised to do well. Companies like EA benefit from the contests because they help generate user-interest while simultaneously getting what amounts to free image design, while smaller sites can use the competitions to increase engagement. The basic technology behind running one of these competitions may not be too difficult to reproduce, but Aviary also has its browser-based image editor, which makes the contests accessible to a much broader audience.

A video demo is below. You upload an image to the service and it will “age” it based on user input. An example: upload a picture of yourself, tell it how many years out you want it to age you, tell it how much you drink and smoke, and not any planned plastic surgery. It will then show you what it thinks you’ll look like down the road.

Aviary says the tool isn’t just for fun – that it may also be useful for “tracking down long missing children,” and “determining if a girlfriend will end up looking like her mother.” Demo video below.

What’s the technology behind it? Well, it’s pretty close to magic. Anything is possible in early April, it seems.

For the suite, the New York based team of 12 has been developing over 14 graphics tools ranging from pattern generators to vector based graphic editors. They’ve now put the finishing touches on two of their main programs (image editor Phoenix and pattern maker Peacock) and are letting in TechCrunch readers in to play around with them.

I’ve been really impressed after playing around with the tools. While by no means a Photoshop master, the image editor Pheonix has all the functionality I’ve come to expect from Adobe’s image editor (drawing, smudging, layers, filters, etc.). Founder Avi Muchnick says it has the most important functionality of Photoshop 6 and is not meant to be a total replacement (see other online photo editors as well and even Adobe’s soon).

Instead it’s meant to do the majority of what you want to do with an image editor, but also benefit from easy integration with the other online tools. For instance, you can use their pattern generator, Peacock, to make textures for an image you’re editing in Phoenix. If you share the pattern publicly anyone else can do it too (eventually you’ll be able to sell it).

Public files can also be commented on by other users, and preserve a version history that lets anyone to go back and branch your work in a different direction. All the files generated with the tools are saved as .egg files on Aviary’s servers, making them easy to share and track the intellectual property rights of files generated from scratch or uploaded to the system.

Here’s a link to what people have already created on the platform. Here’s an example of the many directions one image can be edited. Below is an example of the suite in action.

Aviary is giving away 100 invites to TechCrunch readers who sign up for an early bird invite here. They’ll be handing them out by tracking referrals, so you need to click through the link. You can also share/put your name down on a waiting list for invites at InviteShare.

The obvious question is “why both tools and a marketplace?” As founder Avi Muchnick believes, both are needed for the other to be successful. They need a marketplace for creators to sell their works and encourage use of the tools. They need tools so they can confirm and maintain the copyright of the works created on the platform.

The lingering question is whether online tools will be of a high enough caliber to produce marketable content. So far, signs are pointing to yes.

When completed, Aviary will consist of 14 online tools of varying complexity: an image editor, color swatch generator, pattern generator, vector-based editor, 3D modeler, audio editor, music generator, video editor, desktop publishing tool, word processor, painting simulator, custom image product creator, photo analyzer, and file system to store it all on. Each of the applications is programmed in Flex, making them ready to meld with your desktop upon Adobe AIR’s public release. Adding an artsy twist, each tool will be named after a different bird.

All items created in these programs will be stored on their own file system called Rookry. From there, artists will be able to sell their creations on the open market. Even small pieces, such as patterns or sound effects will be marketable. If the works are made within Aviary, buyers will have the security of knowing they are buying an original work. If they incorporate outside content, they will be flagged as such. From within Aviary’s platform artists will also be able also create derivative works while maintaining attribution and royalty rights upon sale.

The team will be releasing the tools as they’re completed. They’re already showing some pretty serious results with their image editor (Phoenix), Vector Editor (Raven), and 3D editor (Hummingbird) outlined below:

Phoenix

Phoenix is like Photoshop without trying to replace it. You get a lot of the familiar features such as brushes, patterns, stamps, smudging, shapes, blending options, and more.

The Aviary team decided on a core feature set by polling their band of PhotoShop fanatics using Worth1000 to find Photoshop’s most frequently used features. The editor can work on an image of max dimensions of 2880 by 2880 pixels.

The editor does support importing and exporting images of familiar formats, but any Aviary work that includes an imported image not created in the suite will be marked as such in the marketplace. This will help alert buyers to the possibility that the creator doesn’t have full copyright over the work.

Raven

Raven is their vector based drawing program. It’s based on a lot of the design from Phoenix, but allows artists the flexibility of vector based drawing (e.g. easy scaling/rotation without losing quality). Raven will connect with Phoenix, allowing illustrations created in Raven to be rasterized and edited in Phoenix.

Click on the image to the right for a larger view.

Hummingbird

Hummingbird is their 3D editor designed completely in Flex. Right now they’ve just got a 3D model renderer along with some basic editing tools (element selection/deletion), but are working on a more robust UI for creating new models from scratch.

The hummingbird on the right was rendered with the engine in real time with a metallic gold skin.

Click on the image for a real time demo of the 3D rendering engine.