Google+ Adds Creative Kit Photo Fun and What’s Hot [HANDS-ON]

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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 Picnik, Google’s stand-alone online photo-editing service. My guess is it’s all Picnik's photo-editing engine underneath.

Check out the gallery to see what I did with Google’s Halloween photo filters.

Google also unveiled “What’s 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 feature’s designed to help Google+ users weed through the “billions” of posts added to the service each day. Google promised that What’s Hot “isn’t 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 Google’s own Natalie Villalobos.

The third item on Google’s 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 couldn’t get it working on my Google+ account.