Aviary, the startup that makes photo tools for developers, has just released a new version of Peacock, its formerly retired suite of tools for advanced image editing.

Over on the company blog, we read that Aviary gave the guy who originally created Peacock, one Mario Klingemann, permission to continue working on Peacock after it was retired as an official product.

Klingemann now calls the suite Nodewerk; it’s an Air app you can download and run sans web connection.

The name comes from the app’s node-based editing — different from layer-based editing in Photoshop and other image editors. It’s less a challenger to established tools and more of a paradigm shift for thinking about digitally created and manipulated images.

Here are a couple screenshots and a Peacock demo video to give you an idea of what node-based image editing looks like in practice:

“On a personal note, I can’t tell you how happy I am to be able to see an incredible piece of software like this rise from the ashes,” wrote Aviary co-founder Avi Muchnick, referencing yet another kind of bird.

“Mario and the team that worked on Aviary’s advanced flash suite worked so hard on Peacock, and it’s great to know that a true gem like this will be out there in the world helping to make the world a better looking place once more.”

Aviary’s become rather hot of late, with its impressive new CEO hire and its well-timed partnership with Twitter. The developer-oriented company also just launched its own mobile apps over the summer.

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Taking photos with your iPhone or simple point-and-shoot camera is one thing, but upping the ante by going all in on a DSLR camera is something entirely different. When you finally pull the trigger and go DSLR, you’re going to want to take full advantage of everything it can offer you, and the latest VentureBeat Store offering has got something that’ll help take your skills to the next level.

With The DSLR Camera Course Bundle, you’ll be able to master your DSLR camera and digital photography skills at the same time…and for just $39!

Between these two video courses you’re going to receive over 11 hours of instruction that will show you how to master the capabilities of your DSLR camera and will help take your skills from good to great.

Let’s look at what you’ll get in this bundle…

Digital Photography Course for Beginners (regularly $39)

Most new DSLR camera owners use very little of the potential of their cameras. (DSLR = Digital Single Lens Reflex). The thought of moving off “auto” can be daunting but to really get creative control over your photos you need to grasp some basic photography principles. This course is designed to fill that gap in knowledge so you can get into the more creative modes of your camera and start taking better photos.

What You’ll Learn:

• What Essential Items you need in your DSLR Kit
• The Photo Triangle – secret weapon to explaining the Basics
• Compose better Photos using the same Principles DaVinci, Botticelli, Van Gogh and many more used
• Exposure and ISO and why it matters
• Creative use of Shutter Speed
• …and much more!

Advanced Digital Photography Course (regularly $49)

This course will take the basics you learn from the beginner course above and will explore more creative scenarios, including: Better Portraits, Night Photos, Nature (including Sunsets), Macro Photos, HDR (High Dynamic Range) Imaging, and Time Lapse (those cool videos where 12 hours happens over a few seconds). It also includes chapters on image editing and DSLR Video.

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• Key Elements to getting Better Portraits
• The most important setting in Night Photos and How to use it
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• How to set up a Time Lapse sequence
• Basic Image Editing using Photoshop and free software
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However you feel about the trend of airbrushed and Photoshopped magazine covers, sometimes we’d all like to make a few tweaks to our own portraits.

Up until now, making realistic photo edits was something only digital imaging professionals were meant to do. ArcSoft’s newest product, Perfect365, changes that by bringing intelligent and powerful portrait editing to the masses.

The software isn’t a traditional photo editor — instead it automatically detects faces in images and lets you make cosmetic changes, like removing a blemish or fading dark circles under your eyes. It also lets you add makeup, which could make it useful for testing out new looks. Perfect365 is cloud-based, so the more people use it, the better the software will get at detecting faces (this also means that offline, the software needs a bit more hand-holding).

ArcSoft has some 15 years of digital imaging experience, with its software helping to power editing tools in many digital cameras on the market. With Perfect365, the company wanted to deliver to consumers an easy to way touch up photos without much expertise, CEO Michael Deng told VentureBeat in an interview last week.

I took a look at both the iPad and Mac versions of Perfect 365, and both worked as advertised. While the interface is a bit rough, the software could end up being a very useful tool for those who don’t normally like having their picture taken. At the moment, the mobile version of Perfect365 can only detect a single face, but the company says it’s working on improving that.

I suspect the software will be particularly popular on smartphones, where consumers are taking plenty of self-portraits and snapshots, as well as on Facebook, which is now the largest photo sharing site on the web. The company says the Mac and Facebook versions of Perfect365 will be available before the end of the year.

The free Windows version of Perfect365 is available today, though it can only output lower quality photos. For higher resolution photos, you’ll have to pay $29.99 for the premium Windows version. iPhone and iPad apps are scheduled to be released later this month.

Existing beta Canv.as users can link to threads within Canv.as and show threads of images created within the image-sharing site. The site is designed to streamline the content creation process by making it easy to “remix” images with additional pieces of content or create animated images. Canv.as beta users can simply link to a thread within the image-sharing site, and external visitors can view the entire thread — but cannot remix images or post new images. Users will still require a beta invite to get a chance to remix images.

Canv.as is basically a descendant of 4chan, a lightly-moderated imageboard that has become the font of most memes in the modern era. Poole’s project is worth watching closely, since a lot of sites have tried to replicate the same community energy that 4chan seems to have — for example, the comment streams in news aggregators like Reddit.com — but the 4chan magic just doesn’t seem to pop up anywhere else.

The site has more moderation than 4chan has in order to attract advertisers. 4chan was originally a tough sell because it was inadvertently host to racist or illegal content. The site lets users moderate content by voting up original and popular submissions with “stickers” and quickly reporting offensive content — and down-vote unpopular content with stickers as well.

4chan has 4 million monthly visitors in the U.S. and 8 million globally — many of whom are tech-savvy and know their way around image-editing programs like Photoshop. The site has basically no rules, and that has become part of the appeal. But it also has a number of barriers to entry, such as requiring a few technical skills like Photoshop mastery to fit into the somewhat haphazard community.

Canv.as is trying to remove that technical barrier to entry by making it simple to edit images. Each image thread has a “remix” option that makes it easy for users to quickly add their own flair to the image with brush-strokes or additional images. It doesn’t require users to purchase (or pirate) larger image-editing programs like Photoshop. And so far it seems like a pretty vibrant community, with hundreds of original images appearing on the site daily. It hasn’t quite reached 4chan standards yet, but it looks like it is on track.