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Picnik has just rolled out some neat new features for casual photo editing enthusiasts. Now found on the bottom of the editing environment is something called a “photo basket” which is a pool of photos from both cloud services like Facebook, Flickr, Photobucket, and the latest shots uploaded from your hard drive. It also doubles as the new multi-photo uploader for those looking to unload the entirety of their memory card.

Switching between your photo sources in the basket is nearly instantaneous, and more importantly, it doesn’t take you away from what you’re working on. The photo basket is more than just a productivity booster though, it’s the home of a new feature that lets users create works of art using individual photographs as layers. Sure it’s missing the other 80 percent of what’s found on something like Adobe Photoshop, but with the use of transparency, text, and the myriad of filter effects you can create some truly good looking creations with a very minimal amount of effort.

Picnik now lets you put together multi-photo creations using layers. Like advanced photo editing applications each layer can be given different blend modes, transparencies, and color masks. Seen here is a collection of four photos stacked on top of one another with varying effects added on top of one another.

(Credit: CNET Networks )

When Picnik CEO Jonathan Sposato demoed this for me a few months back he insisted this wasn’t the first step in making Picnik compete with tools like Scrapblog or Glogster. Instead it was in response to users, who had been requesting support for layers since launch. Part of that request included contextual menu support, so if you’re working with more than a few layers you can simply right click to manage what order they appear in.

As a treat for Webware readers Picnik has given us 30 free 90-day premium upgrades to give out. The premium membership will take away the ads and give you advanced access to some of the more advanced features like the extra filters and a fonts. To get yours just enter your contact information on this form (note: this link opens as a pop-up). We’ll pick the 30 winners randomly, and you have until midnight (PST) on Sunday to enter. We’ll send the winners their prizes on Monday.

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Picnik adds support for layering, mass uploading