How to Use the Fill Light Correction in Google's Picasa
Picasa is an application from Google that can be downloaded for free (see link below). It is a very popular application and many users are enamored by the ability to upload their images and share their photo albums online. The Fill Light Option is a truly unique feature. Many photographers will use a fill flash when taking portraits or scenes where the object has sky or a bright background. What happens when you don't use a fill light? The detail in the subject is compromised. You can edit this by adjusting brightness, contrast and color. However, these functions apply to the whole image, unless you do masking or complicated selections. The fill light feature allows the user to brighten a dark photo while not compromising the details in lighter areas of the photo.
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Instructions
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This is a picture of the "Flat Iron" Building in New York City. It would be impossible to use fill light on this picture and maintain the perspective, yet the detail of the building is lost in shadow. If we use the highlights function, we can lighten the building, but the image will become washed out or too light.
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Open Picasa and scroll to find a suitable photograph. Double click on the Photo to select the editing mode. From the main editing screen select the TUNING tab.
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First we will adjust the FILL LIGHT slider. Notice all the sliders are at the left, except for the COLOR TEMPERATURE slider which is always in the middle. Adjust the FILL LIGHT slider until you can see the detail in the building. The highlights are slightly changed after making this adjustment, but not as much as they would be if you made a highlight adjustment.
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The building looks good, but we need to make an adjustment to make the sky bluer as it was before the correction. A shadow adjustment would change the sky, but cause us to lose shadow detail that we gained with the fill light correction. In this case, we will move the color temperature slider to the left. Now we have the detail in the shadow and a blue sky. The color change also causes red brick in the far building to stand out more, providing a contrast to the Flat Iron Building.
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To save the file, use the EXPORT feature which will allow making quality and sizing corrections while keeping your original unchanged.
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Tips & Warnings
Use and experiment with all the TUNING controls to get experience in editing images, but make sure you always save to a different file name to maintain your image archive.
Picasa will work with most image files including NEF and RAW files, but you can only save or export images to JPEG formats.
Deleting an image from Picasa deletes the image from your system.
