Picasa - Google's FREE photo editing software

Picasa, Google's FREE photo editing software, is a great way to help you organize your photos, fix them up (if they need slight tweaks here and there) and edit them to get them ready for print. And since it's FREE, even if you have another photo editor software, it still makes sense to download Picasa anyway!

Download it at www.google.com/picasa !

Picasa the Photo Organizer
One of the great things about Picasa is that it's also a photo organizer. When you run Picasa for the first time, it will actually look through your computer and find all your photos. It then allows you to browse through the photos either by folder / location, by date -- or by person!

Picasa has face recognition built-in so that it organizes your pictures by "who" is in them as well. There's also a cool "face movie" feature that makes a movie of all the pictures of one person, with each picture slowly appearing, but super imposed so that that person's face lines up with each picture. It's so cool! Ok. It's hard to explain, just go check it out.

Picasa the Photo Saver
Although Picasa lacks pixel level editing (like Adobe's Photoshop), it has a menu of common "tuning" controls that let you lighten up the picture, lighten up just the highlights, darken the shadows and change the colour temperature (which I find really comes in handy.) And there are various "effects" that let you convert your picture to black and white, sepia, tint, etc. And one of my favourites is the "sharpen" effect that actually lets you make pictures seem a little sharper.

Picasa the Photo Editor
Now, Picasa itself doesn't have pixel level editing, so you can't move things around in the picture, or add text or things like that. But Picasa now has a built-in button to be able to edit your pictures through http://www.picnik.com/. PicNik expands what you can do through Picasa to do things like . . .

• Convert your picture to black and white, sepia, tint, invert, duo-tone
• Give your pictures a stylized look by applying different filters or actions such as soften, vignette, infrared film, lomo-ish, holga-ish, cross process, etc.
• Add text (and there are a lot of fonts to choose from)
• Apply "digital" stickers
• Touch-up your pictures with Blemish fix, shine-be-gone, airbrush, wrinkle remover, sunless tan, dodging, burning, clone, etc.
• Add a frame

Picasa the Collage Maker
Another really neat feature of Picasa is the ability to make photo collages. Pick a bunch of photos that you want to print out on a single sheet. Select one of Picasa's Collage templates and Picasa will automatically place your photo in the collage. Don't like the layout? Then swap pictures around until you are happy.
Picasa the Movie Maker
And Picasa can make a movie / slide show from pictures that you pick. And it does it in Picasa-easy fashion as well.

Go ahead! Download Picasa and have some fun!

Take care,
Glen -- DigicamJunkie.com