How do you get the best out of your photos? I have a few tools that I use that make it easy to take my photos from ordinary to great. And in a series of posts, I’ll be telling you about them and how to use them.
(I guess I need to say right here that I have not been paid by any of these companies to say the following.)
The first tool is Picasa. It is a great photo editing tool. It is quick and easy for anyone to use.
You have the basic fixes that includes straightening out of a picture, cropping, correcting red eyes, auto contrast, auto color, and fill lighting. There is a separate tuning tab for more options.
Under the effects tab there are great features like:
- Sharpen – sharpen an image
- one button sepia and black and white
- Warmify – add some warmth to a picture
- Saturation – add or remove saturation
- Soft Focus – this is my favorite, add a blurred edge around your photos (great for removing unwanted backgrounds)
- Focal B&W – Make one part of the picture colored while the rest of the picture is black and white
I’ll show you an example of what you can do with Picasa. Here’s the original picture:
Isn’t this picture cute?! It was taken by my friend Jenn Walters.
After a series of changes made to the photo, you can have a great looking photo.
Here’s the final picture:
And then there are all the sharing options. If you have the Picasa online albums you photos can be uploaded to them easily. Or you can make a collage of the pictures in the album. You can even add captions to the pictures.
My favorite option is the star. I use this feature to make a concise album of all the million of pictures I take. As I go through an album, I just”star” a picture I like and then move all of the starred pictures into a sub folder.
There is a new feature in Picasa where you can tag people and then the program will use face recognition to tag new photos as they are added.
So I’ hope I’ve helped a little in editing your pictures. Next will be organizing and sharing.
-ASH
