After downloading Picasa2 , you are asked whether or not you want the entire computer searched for pictures, or just the Desktop, My Pictures and My Documents. The scan of the entire computer is good if you have pictures scattered throughout your C drive or if you have multiple drives. Otherwise it is unnecessary to scan the entire computer. Using picasa2 by Google you can easily get your pictures up on the web.
Talk about customer delight. Picasa2, as well as it being free has Photoshop beat in the intuitive features department!! The double clicked on features do not float around in little boxes above the application, they become the application. For example, you select a picture, right click on it and choose edit. Now the selected picture is 5 times its size and is the focus in a seemingly new application, all dedicated to modifying the picture selected. There are 3 tabs to choose from. The first tab called Basic Fixes allows you to Crop, Straighten, get rid of Redeye, do Auto Contrast and Auto Color. For darker pictures, the I’m Feeling Lucky and Fill Light features are superb. The horse picture was too dark to see. When I used the slider to adjust Fill Light, it was hard to decide which was too light and what was just right as it was obvious that this picture was going to turn into a painting, due to the extreme darkness in the picture. Here is where I’m Feeling Lucky came in and saved the day. One press of the button, and my painting was right, and done and delivered with optimum colors, optimum light and optimum dark in the horse to make it seem real.
The Tuning tab, also, has a Fill Light slider, and in addition Highlights, Shadows, and Color Temperature sliders as well. Don’t forget the Neutral Color Picker at the bottom of this tab page. For all of my sun-washed photos, the Shadows slider was able to restore a lot of the original color to the photo. Simply amazing!
Finally for all those extremely washed out human pictures, the Effects tab is so very helpful. After Shadowing a washed out photo, you will find Warmifying will add some yellow into it and help the skintone come out better. There are a total of 12 special Effects: B&W, Filtered B&W, and Focal B&W; Sharpen, Sepia (Pinkish), Film Grain, Tint (Bluish), Soft Focus (one point is focused, while the rest is in a slight blur), Glow and Graduated Tint. It is evident that you have many buttons to select from. There is yet another feature that allows you to pick a point on the picture and Zoom in on it at 100 per cent. Also don’t forget that you can Add a Caption to any picture you are editing. Just don’t depend on the cut and paste feature, because it isn‘t there.
In all three tabs, whatever you pick you can go to the lower left hand corner and undo whatever you did. Photoshop was notorious for not being able to undo what you did. Sometimes pictures in Photoshop would be so far from pretty, that the best you could do was delete that one, and grab a fresh copy from the original to start over. I see that as such a timewaster. Here the Undo button allows one to experiment and if it is not favorable, the picture is restored back to normal.
Don’t forget the slide show feature in the View Edit mode. At the uppermost section above the picture being edited is a tiny Thumbprint strip. The picture edited is in the middle of 3 successive pictures to its left and to its right. This is very useful if you have a large photo album of over 50 pictured or more. You just click once on the picture you want to edit, and it appears in the large picture display below. This is so Ajax. These features actually make this application fun and I can envision myself using Picasa2 for many years to come.
Now you want to publish your pictures in a Web Photo Gallery for all to see. What do you do? Click on the Web Album button on the bottom of the page. You will need to tell whether you want to Create a new web album or Add to an existing one. Here you can modify the Album’s title and set the Upload setting to Optimized (Fastest), Medium or Slowest uploading of the photos.
Once you click OK , the Upload Manager takes over. With DSL it can take as long as one hour to upload 100 pictures. However, if you selected Optimized, it could take less than that.
After you have the pictures on the Web, you can select Edit Album Properties where you can choose to make your Album private or public and you can even choose an Album cover. If private, you are given a authorization key that you give to those few you want to view your album. If public then the url above where you are at will do just fine.
Ease is speed and with our life crammed with interesting adventures, who wants to spend a lifetime organizing pictures in a Web Gallery. Ease of use is the key here. Picassa is so intuitve and has so many features that it is a dream to use. The fact that it has a brand new feature--- the Web Album ---that allows you to seamlessly upload your pictures from Picasa into a Google Web Album is like frosting on the cake. That cake seems to get better and better.
