Editing your digital photos with Picasa
By Scott Nesbitt - Sunday, March 09, 2008
Digital cameras are wonderful devices. They're portable, relatively inexpensive, and fairly easy to use. They let you capture that special moment at a family gathering or that sight that astonishes you while on vacation. And unlike traditional cameras, you don't have to worry about wasting film on a bad shot; you can take as many pictures as 
you need (within reason) to get the photo that you want.
Invariably, though, there's always a flaw or two in that special photo. It could be red eye, the lighting isn't quite bright or warm enough, or the photo might be slightly off kilter. Getting rid of those flaws is well within the reach of the casual photographer. That's where decent photo editing software comes in handy. For the casual photographer, though, software like Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, or The GIMP is overkill -- they have far more features than many of us will ever use.
Why not use Picasa? It's free, packs some great photo editing features, and is easy to use. A previous TechTip looked at using Picasa in conjunction with Google's Picasa Web Albums service. This time around, we'll look at some of the Picasa software's photo editing tool
Getting started
Obviously, the first thing to do is download Picasa. You can get versions for Windows and Linux; Mac OS isn't supported, unless you use something like Parallels Desktop or CrossOver Mac.
When you start up Picasa for the first time, it scans your hard drive for all graphics. If you have a lot of them, you can go into Picasa's options and tell it where to look for images -- for example, only the My Pictures folder in Windows. Every time you start Picasa up after that, a little program called Media Detector runs in the background and checks your drive or folders for new photos.
When you want to edit a photo, just find it in the main window and double click on it. The photo opens in a new view, and all of Picasa's editing tools are available with a click or two.
The most commonly used photo editing tools are available when you open a photo in the Editing view, including:
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Crop
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Straighten
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Redeye removal
Cropping a photo
One common photo editing task is cropping (cutting elements out of a photo). With Picasa, cropping is easy. In the editing view, click Crop. Picasa has three default sizes -- 10 x 15, 13 x 18, and 20 x 25. The fourth option, which is the default setting, is the one you'll use most: Manual.
To crop the photo, click a point in the shot and the drag the mouse pointer to selection the portion that you want to crop. The rest of the photo will go gray. Click Preview to see the crop. If you like it, click Apply; otherwise click Reset and try again.
Straightening a photo
Have you ever taken a really good photo, and later found that it's slightly (but-oh-so-
noticeably) crooked? That's really annoying. Picasa has a nice little tool for fixing that problem, though.
In the editing view, click Straighten. Your photo is overlaid with a grid. Click the slider that appears and drag it left or right to straighten out the photo. Use the grid to help align the main element in the photo. When you're satisfied, click Apply.
Getting rid of redeye
Redeye is something that's been plaguing amateur photographers since the early days of flash photography. You've probably seen it in countless photos: a perfectly good picture spoiled by a scary-looking redness where someone's pupils should be.
While many newer digital cameras have functions that do a pretty good job of getting rid of redeye, it can still creep in. And it's a problem if you've scanned prints. Picasa does a very good job of removing redeye. In fact, it does as good a job (if not better) than some of the photo editing tools that I've used.
To get rid of redeye, load a photo in the editing view and then click the Redeye button. Next, drag your mouse pointer over one of the eyes. After a few seconds, Picasa displays the photo with the redeye removed. Click Apply to make the changes permanent.
Other editing tools
In addition to the most commonly used editing tools, Picasa has an additional set of tools that you may not use frequently, but which may come in handy. In the editing view, these are on the Tuning and Effects tabs.
The tools on these tabs that you'll probably use most are:
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Adjusting the lighting
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Adding highlights
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Sharpening a photo
A few of the other, more interesting tools are ones to sepia tint photos, to convert them to black and white, and to make the colors in the photo warmer and cooler. However, these tools won't be discussed in this TechTip.
Adjusting the lighting
On a trip about two years ago, I took a picture of my daughter at an airport early one morning. The background was bright, but where my daughter was standing was dark. Obviously, I wanted to balance the light and the darkness. I was able to do that using the Fill Light tool.
To use this tool, load the photo into the Editing view. Then, click the Tuning tab. Click and drag the Fill Light slider until you get the balance between the light and the darkness that you want.
Adding highlights
If you have photos with some dark areas, you can blend those dark areas in with the surroundings by adding highlights. Highlights are softer than the results that you get from Picasa's Fill Light tool, and can be a bit more pleasing to the eye.
With the photo to which you want to add highlights loaded in the Editing view, click the Tuning tab. Then, click and drag the Highlights slider to get the effect that you want. You can also click the magic wand icon to allow Picasa to determine and add what it believes to be the best highlighting effect. Surprisingly, the results of this are generally quite good.
Sharpening a photo
Some photos that you take may be a bit fuzzy. This could be due to less-than-adequate lighting, or the fact that the photo was saved as a JPEG file with a lot of compression. Sharpening a photo can get rid of some or quite a bit of the fuzziness. But it can't get rid of all of it. Sometimes, sharpening a photo washes our some of the color and makes the edges of objects in a photo fuzzier. Still, sharpening is worth a try.
To sharpen a photo in Picasa, load it into the Editing view. Then, click the Effects tab and click Sharpen. Picasa will try to remove as much of the fuzziness and distortion as it can. However, unlike some other photo editing tools, Picasa's sharpening function is all or nothing. You can't specify the amount that you want to sharpen an image.
Taking a chance
On the Google search page you've probably seen the I'm Feeling Lucky button. Clicking this button takes you to the page that Google thinks is the best match for your search criteria. Sometimes it works out sometimes it doesn't. Picasa has something similar.
When you click the I'm Feeling Lucky button in the Editing view, Picasa analyzes your photo and tries to apply the best edits (aside from cropping, of course) to the photo. The results will vary. Usually, though, they're nothing great. Luckily, you can back out of the changes by clicking the Undo button.
What if I make a mistake?
Let's say that you make a change to a photo and save the changes. Then, you mutter "Uh, oh. I shouldn't have done that!" Not all is lost. Picasa saves backups of your photos in a folder called Originals. As the name implies, it contains a copy of the photo before you applied any changes to it.
You can find this folder in the folder where you store your photos. So, if you store your photos in My Documents>My Photos on a computer running Windows, the Originals folder will be under My Photos.
Conclusion
Picasa is a simple, easy to use piece of photo software the packs some very good photo editing and touch-up tools. While it can't compete with the features of a fully-fledged photo editing package, and it doesn't offer a lot of fine control with some of its tools, Picasa is more than good enough for casual photographers to fix any basic flaws in their photos.
Tags: Geeks Picasa Made Easy
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