DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY DAILY

A Lot of Fun Functionality in a Free Image Editor and File Organizer

Lets face it. Most of you reading this article are using Adobe Photoshop or Photoshop Elements for your image editing. If you want to take a break and have some fun, you should try out Picasa 3.6. Its a free download from Google. I personally think Picasa is one of the digital photography world’s best kept secret.

It’s been a few years since I’ve used Picasa, so I wanted to download it to my new laptop just to check out the new features Google is offering in version 3.6.  I spent about 1/2 hour this morning downloading the new version, adding a few folders to an image library, editing a few images for fun, and creating a movie to upload to YouTube. I love my job!

Before diving further into features, lets first clarify where I think Picasa is positioned in the photo imaging world. This software is for the beginner who is just getting into photography,  as well as the rest of us. Personally, I recommend Picasa to friends and family who are asking me what they should be using to organize and edit their digital images (they call them “digital camera pictures”).  If they are a newbie, I recommend Picasa as an intermediate step before upgrading to Photoshop Elements. I think its great for any photographer, its easy to use, it can do more than  you’d think for a freebie, and best of all it’s free.

Picasa 3 Intro Video:

For the more advanced photographer,  if you stick with me here and view the video above, you’ll find a few ways to apply Picasa features to some of your own work. Personally, I am impressed with the new features, including compatibility with RAW files, healing brush, and the movie maker that now includes automatic upload to YouTube.  Of course, Picasa has been a decent photo editor for making quick color and tonal adjustments to your images. If you’re looking into full functionality that you would get with Photoshop, this isn’t it. If you’re looking for a lightweight software utility to do some quick editing, special effects, slideshows, movies while you’re on the run, this is a cool little package.

What you get with Picasa 3.6:

• A great little photo organizer. Like the Photoshop Elements Organizer, you can use Picasa to both import images fromdevices such as memory cards and direct-USB plug in devices. You can create albums and apply tags to images. Best of all,  Picasa does not store the photos on your computer. When you open Picasa, it simply looks at the folders on your computer and displays the photos it finds. It displays the file types that you tell it to find, in the folders that you tell it to search. Additionally, your original photos are always preserved.

• Editing: When using editing tools in Picasa, your original files are never touched. The photo edits you make are only viewable in Picasa until you decide to save your changes. Even then, Picasa creates a new version of the photo with your edits applied, leaving the original file totally preserved. As a tip, always use the “Save As” function in the file menu, and save your edited images to another folder.  There are 3 different sets of edits you can make in Picasa, Basic Fixes, Tuning, and Effects. Basic Fixes are a collection of commonly used utilities photographers need. Red Eye fixes, cropping (which is improved), Auto Color, Auto Contrast and a neat little healing brush. In Tuning, you can make overall color and tone corrections using the Fill Light, Highlight, Shadow and Color Temperature sliders.  Finally, the Effects are a really cool “finishing touches” collection. Convert to black & white, Sharpen, Saturation and Soft Focus are among the 12 effects you can add to any photo.
• Upload to the Web using Picasa Web Albums. Picasa Web Albums gives you 1GIG of web space to store and show off your photos and videos. Nice touch!
• Movie Maker: This one is worth the price (remember, its free). You can quickly create a musical slideshow by selecting a number of images and background .mp3 file and upload directly to YouTube, or save to your computer. This was fun for me. In about 5 minutes, I created a video and had it uploaded to YouTube, and embedded the video right inside this article. See the movie below here.

Advantages for the Digital Photographer

• Traveling with a netbook. If you’re taking a trip, and you can’t lug your desktop computer or large laptop with you that has your photo editing collection, you can always use a lightweight netbook and load Picasa on it. While traveling, you can do some quick edits, upload images from your trip to Picasa Web, or create a quick movie with music and get that on YouTube. I wouldn’t try running Photoshop or Elements on a Netbook, but I sure would run Picasa on one.
• Load It To Your Work Computer. Depending who your IT folks are, you might be able to download Picasa to your work computer for fun time-wasting activity on your boss’s dime. This way, you don’t have to load a licensed copy of Photoshop or Elements on your work computer, which you don’t want to do anyway. If you’re bored at the office, bring in some images on your USB drive, plug it into your computer, and import the images to Picasa and have some fun.
• Compatible with RAW files: I tested Picasa for both RAW files from Nikon and Canon DSLRs, and I was able to view and edit them all. With Picasa, you don’t have separate RAW converter software to make adjustments before editing, its all in one process. Kinda like using Lightroom, only its free.

Editing Raw files in Picasa is seemless

• Picasa Web Albums: Trying this out, I found it was intuitive and easy to upload an entire folder or individual images to the web. I easily created my Picasa Web site, and uploaded a quick portfolio: http://picasaweb.google.com/DigitalPhotographyDaily

• Email Photos: Click the Email button in Picasa to quickly send all selected photos to friends and family, using the email provider of your choice. Keep in mind that email doesn’t accommodate a large number of photos, so if you want to share a lot of photos, consider uploading them to Picasa Web Albums, where you can take advantage of the free one GB of storage that’s available.

Picasa automatically looks for faces

• The Names Album. I wasn’t expecting this one. I know this feature is new in Elements 8, but didn’t know this was added to Picasa 3.6. When you load up Picasa, it searches your hard disk for faces. Yep, it looks for human faces. I was suprised that Picasa did this in background mode, and presented me with a new Picasa Album called Unamed People. Yes, it worked, it picked up the faces of family photos I had on my hard drive!

If you’re sitting at the office or at home and looking for something constructive to do (especially on your boss’s dime), download Picasa 3.6 and have some fun. I sure did this morning.  If you have a netbook, this is a good software addition for your travels, a lot better than sclepping a larger laptop around the world and through airports.

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