Home » Visual & Performing Arts » Digital Photography » Google's Picture Perfect Picasa, Part 2 - How to use Google Picasa & Basics, e.g. Removing Red Eyes, Correcting Colors, etc.

Google's Picture Perfect Picasa, Part 2 - How to use Google Picasa & Basics, e.g. Removing Red Eyes, Correcting Colors, etc.

© Karin Rex

As mentioned in last month's column, I am fast becoming a fan of Google's new photo editing and organizing software Picasa.

Picasa 2 (available for free at http://google.picasa.com ) will help you quickly locate, organize, edit, and share every all of the pictures on your Windows PC. (Sorry Mac users, it's still not for you yet.) As I mentioned last month, when you open the Picasa program it automatically searches your hard drive for pictures and sorts them by date into collections and folders. You can, of course, rearrange and rename these collections and folders to make your own logical groupings if desired.

Picasa also gives you some nice digital editing tools that are easy to use (and considering the price, these are an amazing alternative to some of the digital photo editing programs on the market). Granted, the tools won't be enough for those who need to go beyond basic editing and quick fixes, but for the average digital shutterbug, they are more then adequate.

Picasa also gives you tools for sharing your pictures: via e-mail, posting them on a blog, making CDs, and sharing instantly via Hello.com.

Last month's article discussed the basics of importing and organizing pictures in Picasa. This month I will cover Picasa's editing and collage tools. Next month I will review sharing.

Simple Solutions for Common Problems

Picasa 2 offers a number of simple tools that will help you fix some of the most common problems with digital photographs: red eye, color correction, contrast, leveling, and cropping. All of these editing options are available on the Basic Fixes tab when you are in the editing screen.

To access the editing screen, double click on the picture you want to work with, or right-click on the picture and choose View and Edit. The picture will open on the right side of the screen and the Basic Fixes tab will be on the left side of the screen.

There are three very useful tips to note before actually testing out these editing tool, and they all have to do with preventing mistakes:

• If you don't like a change you just made, click on the Reset button.
• If you made several changes and don't like ANY of them, click on the Cancel button to exit that repair within applying any of the changes.
• To delete ALL edits you made to the original picture, right-click on the picture and choose Undo all Edits.

Removing Red Eye

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