Deck Out Your Google+ Photos for Halloween with the New Creative Kit

The Google+ photos section is particularly powerful, while it does aim to provide the simplest experience possible, stressing the social features rather than technical capabilities, the interface and the simple sharing features make it a rather fun tool.

And now it's gotten a lot more fun with the addition of the Google+ Creative Kit, a series of filters and fun editing tools to liven up your Google+ photos.

"Nothing tells a story like the perfect picture, so it’s only natural to want to make yours really, really, really, ridiculously good-looking. Unfortunately, photo editing is too often a chore, requiring specialized software and lots of patience," Google's Vic Gundotra explained.

"We want to help everyone put their best photo forward, so today we’re introducing the Google+ Creative Kit, a fast and friendly way to make powerful edits to your photos," he announced.

There are several ways you can improve a photo with the Creative Kit, you can do basic edits, like crop, rotate, adjust the colors and so on, but you can also apply one or more of the myriad of effects available.

There is even a special Halloween section with specific effects and themed stickers to get your pics ready for the scary holiday.

Google fans will find this all very familiar. That's because there's nothing really new here, Google has integrated Picnik, the photo-editing tool it acquired a while back with Google+.

The interface has been updated, to match the Google+ look, but all of the tools come from Picnik. It's interesting that it took so long since Picasa has had Picnik integration for quite a while now.

And, of course, Google+ Photos is actually built on Picasa, the images themselves are stored in Picasa Web Albums. This is a perfect example of how Google's various products and expertise can come together in a single service.