How to Edit Photos in Picasa
Editing photos in Picasa is pain free. The program is free to download, can be synchronized to your online Picasa web albums, and contains a large number of quick-to-learn features. The editing features in Picasa are somewhat limited, but there is plenty to play with, and the features chosen for the program are useful and a lot of fun. What's more, every change you make is simply undone, no matter how long it has been since you made the changes.
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Instructions
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Download and register with Picasa. It is free to do so. The program only takes up about half a megabyte of hard drive space, and operates pretty lightly on your RAM.
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Open up the Picasa program. It will automatically import all the photos and images you have on your hard drive.
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Use the left menu bar to choose a folder containing a photo you want to edit. Scroll through the thumbnails until you find the photo you want. Double-click it to open it up for viewing and editing.
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Click an edit button at left. You can choose crop, straighten, red-eye, I'm feeling lucky, auto contrast, or auto color, or you can slide the fill light toggle left and right. Notice what happens when you do any of these. To undo, just hit "Undo". You can undo an infinite amount of edits, even if you have saved your edits.
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Select the Tuning menu item at upper left. From there you can adjust fill light, highlights, shadows or color temperature.
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Select the Effects menu item at upper left. From there you can select sharpen, sepia, and ten other one-click effects.
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Experiment with all of the above editing functions within the program. Picasa will automatically store the changes to your photos but it will not change the image as it appears in your hard drive. To change the image as it appears in the hard drive, go to File and select Save. You will be given the option to retain a backup file of the original image, which will be neatly placed in the same folder in which the changed photo appears.
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Tips & Warnings
You can also change the way your photos are organized, so that your photos appear in a manner which makes sense.
One of the coolest features in Picasa is the ability to view only those photos which contain the color green in the image, or the word "green" in the file name. Simply type a color name in the search bar!
Picasa is owned by Google, which means it is integrated into all of Google's other services. A handy thing to know, especially if you have a Blogger account, a Gmail account, or anything else Google owns or operates.
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Comments
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eeknothow
Jul 08, 2009
warning: don't invest tons of time tagging- or rating photos if you ever plan to upgrade to lightroom. It's a b|tch to get the photos out, and you lose all your tags and ratings effectively.
