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I went to London this summer to study abroad. It was incredible. Unfortunately though, my digital camera was on its last leg when it crossed the sea and didn’t last more than a week abroad. Not wanting to let all the sights and people go unremembered, I snapped as many pictures as I could with my iPhone. Although a capable phone and internet browser, the iPhone only has a 2-megapixel (680x400) camera in it. For quick reference, most digital cameras have at least 6.
I was browsing online this week for a free photo utility to touch up these photos when I happened upon Picasa, Google’s software for manipulating and organizing digital photos. It does for pictures what iTunes does for music.
I was pleasantly surprised at how capable this program is at altering images and digital pictures. After installing the program, a prompt appears which offers to archive and organize your images, which it does by the date they were added to your computer, effectively sorting them chronologically.
After your images are sorted and archived, double click the thumbnail to alter the photo. The picture appears full size in the center of the screen with a toolbar to the left with tabs for basic fixes, such as redeye remove, auto color/contrast, retouch and text, as well as Google’s infamous ‘I’m feeling lucky’ option, which auto-corrects as much as possible. The tuning tab offers more flexibility and control in the image manipulation with sliding bars to affect highlights, shadows and color temperature. Finally, the effects tab offers the option of sharpening the image, adding a sepia tone, painting the whole image in a black and white filter and so on. I recommend playing with all of the options as all changes can be undone.
Once all of your images are altered the way you like, Picasa offers a wealth of options which are accessed from the photo library screen. Users can select an image or an album to upload to a web album (such as Flickr) or a blog. Images can also be Geo-Tagged using Google Earth to place the images on a digital globe.
Albums can also be condensed into collages, which make incredible backgrounds for your desktop. For the purposes of this article I created one out of my favorite pubs and clubs from England and Ireland.
Powerful image manipulation capabilities and an efficient photo library make this Google program essential for your computer.
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