Picasa - some tutorials

Ever since doing a talk to Cambs PAC about photography, I've been looking harder and harder at Picasa - Google's free imaging software.

The more I look, the more impressed I am and I thought it might be useful to people on the forum to have a brief introduction to Picasa and, over the next few months, explain some of its features.

In the first place, Picasa achieves the Holy Grail - it's VERY powerful software that hides its complexity so you can use it very easily. It's quite lightweight in terms of coding, but does almost everything even a keen photographer like me could want. I use Photoshop for my professional images but I would have no hesitation at all in using Picasa for all my family snaps. And more.

So download a copy. I have always found software will be more robust on any Windows PC (and there are Mac and Linux versions) if it's installed after a reboot. So download it, reboot, and before launching any other software, install it. Then reboot again before using it for the first time.

On starting Picasa, it asks if you'd like it to search for pictures and catalogue them for you. As this is one of the best features of the program, give it access to all your drives and leave it for 30 minutes to find everything. And it WILL find everything, including any cached pictures. Very useful if, somehow, some, er, dodgy pictures remain on your computer.

The home screen is a list of folders down the left and a scrolling display of all the images on your machine. You can double-click the folder menu or just scroll the main window to see everything. Double-clicking on any image will open it.

It will find all your RAW files, too, and export them to jpegs with a 'Save as' command, if you want to send them to online photo printers.

After you've opened a picture, you will see three adjustment menus under tabs on the left. The Basic Fixes which appear by default are all good. In 8 out of 10 pictures, hitting the does-everything I'm Feeling Lucky button will do a great job, especially if you're preparing pictures for printing.

But have a fiddle with bthe rest. The Straighten tool is the best I have ever seen. It lays a grid over the picture and you level the horizon by dragging the slider underneath. It performs the crop (which is manual even in PS) automatically.

The Red Eye tool is incredible, finding the problem and fixing it automatically, though you can use it manually. Incidentally, whichever tool you are using, you can zoom the image using the zoon slider, then move the area selected around in the tiny zoom box which pops up on the right.

I'll explain the other tools on this menu on request. Have a fiddle, and if there's anything you don't understand or are having difficulty with, post to this thread.

But if you are fed up with your existing imaging software, try Picasa. Even as a pro photographer, I would have no hesitation in recommending it.

Thanks Mark. As a very amateur snapper I'm very happy to use whatever technology I can find to improve the end product of my images.

I've used the Canon packaged software that came with a decent compact for a while now and it does some of the jobs very well. I'll download Picasa and give it a try.

Looking forward to some more tips and hints.

You're very welcome, Neil. I have been aware for some time that many people are using Photoshop when they'd get much better results with simpler software. The problem is, much simple software is poorly thought through, heavy-handed in what it does, clunky to use and poses as many problems as PS.

But Picasa does avoid much of this nonsense. It's quite intuitive, and very powerful. That's what makes it so impressive.

But it's quite a package. I will attempt to run through the menus a bit at a time, but many of them are self-explanatory. It would be really useful if users could let me know anything they don't understand, and I'll tackle that.

Away shooting pictures for a few days from tomorrow, but I'll respond to any questions when I get back.

Here's a bloke trying to teach us about manipulating images who doesn't even know where he gave his talk!!!:wh:wh

Mark, it wasn't Cambridge, it was at Biggleswade for the Herts/Chiltern region of the PAC

Mind you it was a good talk!! Begrudging praise indeed

So if any clubs want a talk on Photography, ask Mark. I'm reliably informed he's cheap

Colin

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I've used Picasa in the past but found it duplicated all my images?
Now whether this meant the images really had been duplicated or just shown in the folders I was never sure?? So do the images take up any more HD space?

If they are just shown as being in the folders I might give it another try, but I'll stick with Photoshop for the moment.

Very good right up Mark.
For a quick fix from my little finepix J27 I use the windows live photo gallery fix on window 7. Simple and red eye removal is great.
For my better camera I use PS7.
I'm tempted to have a look at Picasa but I'll hang on for the mo.

How about a course for beginners wanting to learn more about white balance, shutter speed, aperture, etc etc etc.
Blimey, I'm starting to talk the talk

There's a very good 3 part guide to "Fishing Photography" on the "other" forum, see below:

A Fisherman's Guide to Fishing Photography - Fly Fishing Forums

When my old pc died the first time a pal re-installed Windows on it from the ground up.

I couldn't find how to import pictures from the first to the second installation and thought I'd lost over 400 angling photos.


Then I installed Picasa and let it have a look, just as Mark suggests.


It found the whole lot in 3 minutes ! Respect!

And that straightening tool has saved dozens of dodgy fishing shots !!


Sadly the pc died again and I have yet to take it to the doctors to get the files copied, but at least they are only mislaid, not lost.

The Straighten tool is excellent and easy to use. I'm suprised at how many of my so called "good" images need to be straightened! It does make a noticable difference.

I'm playing around with some of the Tuning and Effects and finding them pretty useful.

I've got Picasa loaded on my netbook and it's a cracking photo editor for general adjustment and fixes. It has its quirks (resizing as part of the Export command is one), but once you're used to it it's better than the Windows photo editor

Or to be more accurate, it offers the option of resizing for export, but I happen to think that's a 'plus' not a 'minus' Sean.

Also in the export dialogue is a very useful feature; you can 'watermark' your picture so anyone nicking it knows who they are stealing it from!

But enough. Here's some tutorial. One of the most useful features it has is the Effect call Graduated Tint, which will help you 'rescue' skies that have bleached out. Select a picture on which this is an issue, then the Effects tab.

Start like this. Push the Feather slider to the extreme left and the Shade slider to the right. You will then see the edge of the graduated filter clearly.

Now move the cursor over the picture and you will see it becomes a cross. Use this cross to drag the edge of the graduated filter so it sits just above the horizon of your picture. If you drag the edge at either end, the edge is tilted. Drag in the dead centre, and it stays horizontal.

When you have the edge of the filter where you want it, use the Feather slider to smooth the edge of the filter, and the Shade slider to get the desired depth of colour in the sky.

One particularly powerful aspect of Picasa is that it doesn't save edits but stores them, and with one click on the Undo All Edits button (under the Picture menu at the top) you can return everything to the starting point.

That's when the Export command comes in; to permanently save edits, use this feature and save a new copy.

---------- Post added at 15:40 ---------- Previous post was at 15:14 ----------

Incidentally, there was a question earlier about white balance. Now, I don't want to go too deeply into this subject but suffice to say that - as a prism proves - there is no such thing as 'white' light.

If you've taken pictures in artificially-lit rooms you will know this; the old incandescent bulbs gave a yellow colour cast and fluorescent tubes a greenish cast. The same is true of daylight.

During the course of day, and in varying weather, the colour temperature changes. A typical evening is a 'warm' colour and a grey day a 'cold' colour.

Adjust colour temperature in Picasa in the Tuning dialogue. You will see there is also a neutral colour picker to automate this for you. In the good ol' days we carried around a greycard (18% black on pure white paper) and metred off that to find the colour temperature. This is a similar process.

To use the Neutral Colour picker, click on the pipette symbol then move the pipette on to an area of your image you know was white, grey or black, with no colour cast. Click on that part of the image, and all the other colours in the picture are corrected by the same amount.

One of Picasa's most impressive features is that it doesn't actually adjust your picture when you adjust it; it remembers the adjustments and applies them to the image you see, but the original image is unchanged until you 'export' it to a printer or to another folder. In other words, to make your changes you have to do something with the original image.

Incidentally, all those people who would love to shoot RAW files - the camera's unchanged output, which gives you a very much truer image - are usually stumped when they use the camera software supplied; it's complex and actually isn't a patch on the top pro RAW processing software.

Good ol' Picasa solves this problem. It can work with most cameras' RAW images but outputs in more familiar file formats. Because the camera's built-in software hasn't worked on the images first, in theory at least you should get better images.

One other little feature I've been messing around with is the software's ability to link directly to photo printing websites. I always implore people to get prints of their pictures because the home truth is that, otherwise, we never show them to anyone. You can carry a few prints in your pocket. You can't stuff a laptop into your pocket.

To use this feature, simply create an account at a photo lab; I use Snapfish because it's probably the best. Also, when you join, you get 20 free prints. Even when you pay, they're just 9p each, so don't leave your pictures redundant on your hard drive; process them with Picasa, then find the button at the bottom of the Picasa window which says 'Shop' and you bring up a window asking you to choose your print provider. Do that, and fill in your logon name and password, and you have a direct link to the photo lab website.

Snapfish supplies a photo uploader but, take it from me, it's rubbish and 'hangs' every now and then. The Picasa uploader is much better. Just upload the pictures and order the relevant prints from the album you've created.

And don't tell me you can do prints from your bubblejet printer; you can, but compared to professional prints they're very average, and not as durable.

If anyone wants to know anything about the other Picasa tools, let me know. Probably best to PM me as I don't have post notification on every thread.