Digital Photo Tips

Do you find photo editing software too confusing for you? Words like rasterized, layers, curves, saturation, RGB and etc may not be in every one vocab. Does the your digital camera comes with its own photo editing software CD-rom? I have two cameras which provide their own photo-editing softwares. However it was the camera shop’s sales personnel who highly recommended Picasa from Google to me.

Though I do know how to play around with Adobe Photoshop CS2, Paintshop Pro and also Picture It! (original, licensed software that comes with my original, licensed Microsoft Office Suite ) and other freeware like Irfan View, Photostylist etc etc, I still love Picasa because it is kids’ friendly. All my children, including my three years old toddler know how to manipulate photos with it.

Let’s see what we can do with the crop button. Cropping a photo means trimming it, sort of like take a scissors and cut the part you do not like. Snip, snip off the edges a bit and voila, your photo looks less cluttered and there aren’t ugly objects to distract.

Before cropping with Picasa

I snapped this random photo this morning while my toddler and I were waiting for my husband to bring the car. We were at the EPF (Employees Provident Fund) office tower. It is located by the sea and my son was standing there along the esplanade.

I like the curves of the and the way my toddler was leaning against them. So, snap, snap like every proud mom would do. But I notice that the proportion isn’t right and the background with the hydrant and the coconut tree trunks plus the lam-posts don’t match the mood.

So, one click with Picasa crop button and I get this.

After cropping with Picasa

I read about this 1/3 rule in photos. It means, try to form your photo in the proportion of 1/3. Eg. 1/3 of the sea, 2/3 of the sky. Avoid the 50/50 proportion which is too mundane. Over here, it is one third of the grass (because I can’t go back any further as I want to avoid the stiff, steely, lamp posts) and two third of the pavement which have some nice shadows of coconut leaves.

So, enjoy cropping your photos. With Picasa, you don’t have to worry about making mistakes because you can always “Un-do’ and get back the original picture. What are you waiting for? Go enjoy playing the maestro in the darkroom with Picasa. Errm…you can just download it from the link on my right side bar. Free!

When I look back at my photos taken back in year 2003 until today, I must say that I had improved somewhat in my skills.  Sometimes, I myself marvel at some of the shots I took.  Most of the time, these photos are unadulterated, pure luck plus a little skill beauty.

However, there are some photos which are below par and needed a little tweaking.  I used to spend endless hours tweaking them with other softwares, some free, legal softwares and some errmmm…you know la.  Some took up too much time whilst others are easy-peasy but produce bad filters, hence making my already not-so-nice photos even more awful.

Now, I solely use Picasa unless I have to add some thought bubbles in my photos.  Go get Picasa and organise your photos.  Only Picasa provides me the complete collection of my thousands and thousands of photos with just one view.

And you know what?  Even my three years old toddler can play around with the software because.  He would turn his face green and giggles.  He would turn his own photo upside down, making him standing on his head and more giggles.

Picasa also plays all the video I took of him and his brothers.  It is that easy to operate Picasa.

Find the pictures you forgot you had.

Picasa organises your entire collection while you watch, scanning the images on your computer and automatically sorting them by date.

And you know what?  You can even hide some of those photos you do not want others to see with password protect.

Password-protect collections.

Have photos you want to keep to yourself? You can add passwords to any of your Picasa collections (this does not affect which pictures you and others can see on your computer’s hard drive).

Check my right bar for the download button.  Picasa is from Google. 

Picasa – The bestest, free  photo editing software highly recommended by Digital Photo Tips!