New York’s Aviary has built a suite of creative tools for digital artists, but is increasingly looking to expand its footprint among big businesses and average consumers.
Aviary rolled out the Beta of its new site today in an effort to become more of a portal for users that aren’t experienced with online editing tools.
It’s in keeping with Feather, the light weight HTML5 editor that Aviary introduced a few months back. The photo editor is now right at the top of the homepage, meaning a new visitor is prompted to jump right into creating something. I gave Spark Capital’s Mo Koyfman a new look in under 20 seconds.
The bigger story is the API, which CEO Avi Muchnik teases in the blog post:
“The next step in our goal of powering the world’s creativity, is to fully open up the powerful bulk Effects API that helps run Feather’s filters behind the scenes. This API will enable web and mobile apps to batch process photos and improve them in three major areas without any needed user interaction:
* Auto-correction (i.e. remove red-eye, fix lighting, fix blurriness, contrast and color levels)
* Apply stylistic filters (i.e. retro, polaroid-like, frames, comic book, etc..)
* Utility operations (i.e. smart-crop a photo to a person’s face, rotate a photo, make thumbnails, etc…)
If Aviary can find some big commercial partners, like social networks or mobile photo apps, that are dealing with loads of user generated content, their tools would suddenly have a lot more visibility. Keep an eye out for some big announcements when that API is ready to go public.
