The continuing trend of web-based apps moving in on territory traditionally the domain of the desktop is not strictly limited to business applications. Thanks to advances in Technologies such as Adobe Flash, There are some very capable online image editors. Currently it’s unlikely that designers will abandon Photoshop, but for home users, there are online editors which offer a reasonable amount of functionality for (if not free) a fraction of the price.

Full Featured Editors

• Photoshop Express Adobe’s online version of Photoshop is a little light on features but gradually improving.
• Aviary This site has an entire suite of tools in development, The image editor is just one of these with a pattern generator, colour swatch designer and a new vector editing tool currently available.
• Pixlr is a competent image editor, interestingly exposes an API allowing application builders to integrate the image editor into their own apps. 
• Splashup
• Picnik
• FotoFlexer
• Snipshot
• Dr. Pic

Favicon generators

For website builders, creating a favicon sometimes isn’t worth firing up an image editor for. These tools will convert an uploaded image into a favicon file.

• http://www.favicongenerator.com/
• http://www.favicon.co.uk/
• http://tools.dynamicdrive.com/favicon/
• http://antifavicon.com/
• http://www.genfavicon.com/

Comic Strip Generators

My enjoyment of webcomics has already featured in this blog but if you have comic ideas but insufficient skill to draw the panels, you could use one of the online comic creator tools.

• Stripgenerator
• Comiqs
• Rok Comics
• ToonDoo

Other stuff

Other image generators for those less serious moments.

• LolBuilder – the LOLCats captioning tool on the ever-popular icanhazcheezburger.com.
• roflbot Similar to LolBuilder
• signgeneratormaker.com a list of generators for fake signage.