What's Up Wednesday - easy, peasy photo editting!

Maybe you have such a fabulous camera that 100% of your photos look absolutely flawless 100% of the time. Or maybe, you have a less than fabulous camera, that takes flawed photos, and because you're not a computer wizard, or a graphic designer, you think you have to just settle for this mediocrity!

Not true!

If you are taking the time to document your family's life through photos, then you really must give Picasa, a free download from Google, a try! This may be really old news to some of our blog readers. If so, you can quit reading and just head to the store to see what new goodies Karen and Kristi have to compliment your fabulous and flawless photos.

Or, take a look at this quick tutorial and testimonial, then head over to Picasa.com, then over to Paper Pals once you are really inspired by your awesome photos!

Once you are at Picasa.com (which looks like this), you can watch a couple of tutorials (which are not really necessary, this software is soooooooooo easy to use). Follow the steps to install Picasa. Be patient, this may take a few minutes while Picasa finds all the photos on your computer and sorts a copy of them into the program. Don't panic, it sorts by date, and is really easy to re-sort into other folders/groupings if you want to later.



In literally a few clicks, you can adjust almost everything in your photos!



Admit it, you're not happy with mediocre photos. You do your best, and still get average results, and sometimes even worse results when you hand your camera to someone with less experience behind the lens than you. Fear not...here are two examples of what you can do in Picasa in under 60 seconds per photo:




Edits: red eye corrected, color adjusted (from very "yellow" to a cooler shade).




Edits: cropped to a more flattering landscape view, soft focus (to blur the background distractions), retouch tool (used to remove the piano lamp that was coming out of my head in the first photo), fill light, and slight adjustment to color saturation.

You can do so much more than simple editing in Picasa. You can upload photos to web albums or to order them from print labs. You can create collages* and many other sizes of photos for printing or web posting purposes. Basically, you can enjoy your photos more than ever before!

Enjoy!
Anita

*Visit my personal blog and you'll see how handy collages can be!