Google+ Adds Creative Kit Photo Fun and Whats Hot [HANDS-ON]

Edit with Google Plus Creative Kit

Google has been busy (and a little scary) today. Its unveiled a host of new Google+ features, including enhanced photo editing tools, a new Whats Hot area and a viral visualization for posts. Plus, Google is finally making its upstart social network Google+ available to Google Apps users.

Photo editing in Google+ is not new, but the Creative Kit, which adds a wide range of pre-made and fairly powerful photo-editing filters is. Google also used the opportunity ! to add a special set of Halloween filters. The search giant snuck out the news this morning by letting some of its execs and a select group of celebrities Halloween-ize their own profile pictures prior to the announcement. These limited edition effects are now available to all Google+ members as part of the Creative Kit. I gave them a test drive and found them intuitive and fun to use. They do not auto-transform your photos into scary Halloween surprises, but offer enough pre-sets and controls, like Draculan Dermis and Vampire Eyes, to help you apply some pretty entertaining effects to some of the 3.4 billion photos Google+ members have already reportedly posted on the service.

Eagle-eyed users will recognize controls from Googles stand-alone online photo editing service: Picnik. My guess is its all Picniks photo-editing engine underneath.

Check out the gallery to see what I did with Googles Halloween photo filters.

Google also unveiled Whats Hot, a new area that appears just below your new posts in Google+ and a new menu item on the right side of the interface. I had to sign in and out to finally see the Hot stuff. The features designed to help Google+ users weed through the billions of posts added to the service each day. Google promised that Whats Hot isnt just the same old faces, we do our best to provide a variety of posts. Fair enough, but we did notice posts from Google+ heavyweights and industry notables Mike Elgan, Chris Brogan and Googles own Natalie Villalobos.

The third item on Googles list is Ripples, a new post visualization tool that should help Google+ users understand how posts spread among their contacts and beyond. Sadly, this feature may be rolling out slowly because I couldnt get it working on my! Google+ account.


Accessing Creative Kit




You access Google+'s Creative Kit by selecting a photo from your photo albums and then choosing Edit. Creative Kit is a selection under there.

Click here to view this gallery.

More About: Google, photo editing, picnik



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