Picasa-The “Everymans” Solution To Digital Photography Post & Managment
More: Picasa
that’s your link to get Picasa, which is a Google product. Relax it’s much better than Google plus, aka where bloggers go to be alone.
Picasa is a brilliant photography management system for regular folks with pics from cell phones, small cameras or even the big boy high $$ pro models. It will preview just about any image file, including some obscure RAW formats and even video that might be in some odd H264 wrapper around an mp4 file like what DSLR cameras generate.
It will let you do all the basic processes to the images. So far it’s much more powerful than the little lightweight photo apps that come on cell phones. It is certainly more powerful than the software provided by the camera makers.
Import from the camera, crop, enlarge or reduce size, color, contrast, limited spot removal, and an excellent export function that will add your watermark or copyright if you wish.
it even has easy to use filters for a special look like sepia, cross process, black and white or “holga-ish”. styles. As a guy that came up in film, I just love how the old film stock looks are popular today. Many folks don’t realize those looks came from quirky or specially processed films originally.
What it will not do is layers or more than basic retouching. Let’s face it most of us don’t need Photoshop for images from our cell phones. And hey, it’s free.
What my Picasa library screen looks like.
So I selected the one to work on and the control panels come in order in tabs at the top left of your screen. Cropped for clarity.
let’s show the process. I’ll use one of my torch and silver fire shots taken on my Canon EOS 7D.
Here are the control panels. Pretty self explanatory, but feel free to play with all the controls and filters. It’s all digital so you can just keep making copies to experiment on. Just export your resulting image.
This image needed no cropping or straightening.
But it did need the following
And finally some sharpening a very good tool.
Done, watermark and all.