Picasa
Picasa helps you organize your photographs the way you want to. You can create groups of photos as albums. When the photographs are initially imported it is saved in the same structure as in your hard disk or digital camera. Once you create albums, you can play around with the photos without affecting the original photos. It simply means even if you delete an album your original photos remain intact.
Labeling and Grading Photographs
You can create sects and sub-sects of photographs. In simple words you can label your photographs without changing the original folders. You can also grade your photographs according to any criteria that you assign. The grading is based on the number of stars.
Editing the Photographs
For beginners this tool is a blessing.Basic editing functions include cropping, coloring, filling and auto coloring the photographs. You can also create effects in a photograph like sharpening or brightening.
Another feature under the edit tool is tuning of photographs which allows you to work around with adjusting the contrast or removing unwanted colors. It also has an I am feeling lucky button similar to the parent Google page which simply edits the photographs what it thinks is the best. Probably the best feature of Picasa is that any changes you make to a photograph with the editing tool are saved in a reversible format. This allows you to keep editing without saving different files.
Picasa utilizes a simple folder system to organize photographs. The editing features, though good for amateurs is limited. It does not allow you to do much. The biggest disadvantage in the editing tool is that there is no way you can edit the date on a photograph if there is one. The best features of Picasa include the easy and almost automatic digital storage and the ability to share photos with friends without exposing your photos to the entire world!
RESOURCES
Organizing and Editing Your Photos with Picasa: Visual QuickProject Guide
Digital Photography: Top 100 Simplified Tips & Tricks
Googlepedia: The Ultimate Google Resource (3rd Edition)
Picasa is amazing for beinners. I am a beginner photgrapher and it is so user friendly. I recently created a website and wanted to feature some of my photographs. Picasa helps you create different web albums so you can create a slide show on your site. At least thats what I did.
I resisted using any of the online photo services such as Picasa, but then had to find an easy way to give my assistant access to all my photos. Picasa makes it so easy for both of us. We know where to find the photos and they are so easy to browse through online. Yeah Picasa!
Being a high school student from a small town, I’ve got a low income of money and a high need for photography. Editing my pictures is relatively hard when I’ve got no software to edit them with. But with this program, I’ve been able to enhance my pictures, if only a little. By the time I finish with it, the picture looks so much better!
Matt, Have I ever got something for you!! There is a TOTALLY FREE photo editing software that is supposed to be as powerful and as good (some people swear it is better) than PhotoShop. Now the problem with totally free is that it does not come with an awful lot of instructions. However, there are books and websites devoted to telling you how to use GIMP. Check it out: http://www.gimp.org/
picasa is a great way to manage your photo’s. i use it myself as a beginner for any of my photos, its good for editing photos nice and easy to use. you can do alot with it very easily.
When I first started taking photographs, I was intimidated by Photoshop. I was introduced to Picasa and it was simple and easy to use. It is the perfect way to start working with creative ways to manipulate and showcase your photography.
I’ve actually never heard of Picasa, but after reading this I think it would be a great program for a beginning photographer such as myself.
I’ve been using it for quite awhile ago. And it turns out to be so useful. Well done!