I find Picasa very useful in organizing photos and it provides a very complete suite of basic editing tools. Picasa consists of three sections for photo editing:- Basic Editing
- Tuning
- Effects
Basic Editing
The basic features are very useful for red eye correction, cropping, straighten and simple adjustment to lighting, contrast and color. I never thought of 'straighten' until I try it on few pictures and I learn that a perspective can be created with an adjusted angle and more often than not, we don't line up the camera straight and Picasa can come in very handy.
Tuning
The next suite of tool set comes into the 'Tuning' section that is more of a life saver especially for 'Fill light' when my pictures are purposely taken in the dark without the flash. I went wild in a series of pictures taken in the mall knowing that the small flash in a point & shoot will definietly ruins a picture with not enough light 
for the dark background. I have a very bad picture that is out of focus and very shaky due to long shutter speed and a lot of distractions that the picture is close to be placed in my trash folder but Picasa comes in for the rescue. Though it is still a bad picture, I can salvage it for blogging with a black and white tuning with high saturation for a contrasty look.Effects
The third editing section in Picasa is the superb special effects -- it is plain sweet for a tool that is free and yet it is so rich in features from basic editing to some special effects that add
variations -- be it on a good or bad picture. The original picture on the Gymboree poster is not too bad but it is boring to take picture on someone else's great photographic work -- I don't want to clone on other's work and hence I change it the way I want it. It may not come out nicely as the original but that is not the purpose as I want it to be different and Picasa 'Effects' allow that with 'Focal B&W' and I am pretty happy with the alternation.For comparison with the original pictures, I have the photoset for Picasa Review uploaded in Flickr. Please write me a comment if you are interested in seeing a more thorough tutorial on Picasa.
Recommended Site on Picasa
Follow up
1 comments:
Nice review of Picasa. It is an extremely good piece of free software.
Post a Comment