Aviary, the folks that already have a powerful free suite of online graphic tools, has added very fast screen capture and online image markup tools.

The new tools are Falcon and Talon – Talon is a Firefox browser plugin for capturing images, and Falcon is the image markup tool that lets you add shapes, lines, arrows and crop, resize and flip images.  If you’re not using Firefox, you can open Talon by either using an image from  your computer or take one from the web.  If you want to capture an entire web page just put aviary.com before the web page’s URL and the entire web page is scraped into Falcon.

Aviary’s claim of being fast was well justified in our testing.  After clipping an image with the Talon extension, it immediately opened in Falcon for editing.  You can also store the image directly on your desktop or host it on their servers.

It’s a very slick tool and can be useful if you want to capture images from the web and then either scale the image or markup it up for clarification.  I normally use and like Snagit, a $49.95 screen capture and manipulation tool, but for simple captures in the future, I expect to be using Falcon.  The plugin for capture is  especially useful if Firefox is one of the browsers you use.

The other tools in the Aviary suite include an image editor, a color editor, an effects editor and a vector editor.

Visit aviary.com to try it out.