Photo help.....

I know that we scrapbookers are ever so slightly obsessed with photos, seriously that is not just me right??? lol.
Now i pride myself on getting the best out of my computer to help me in the scrapbooking world, but there is one thing that i cannot get to grips with and that is 'photoshop' Seriously i cannot get my head round it and to be honest it is a huge amount of money.

So i am here to tell you about a piece of software that is FREE yep you read that right FREE that will help you make the most of your photos.

It is called Picasa. Now i know alot of people know about this but i also know there are a lot of people who dont so i thought i would give you a heads up and an idea of what you can do with it.

First of let me tell you this photo editing software is easy. And i mean really easy. You want to lighten something you just click on the lighten button and move it up and down to make things lighter. You want things turned to black and white you just click a button and then it is done.

Here are some of the things that you can do with this software...

Lighten - I know that some of my photos are taken in the wrong light no matter how knowledgeable i am about my camera, like this one for example ( please excuse the mad photo of my son lol)

too dark so i lightened it and got this....

as you can see you can see the parts of the forest behind him now.

You want something changed to black and white? no problem it can change this...

to this, with a click of the button...

you can change how light you want it to be in black and white as well just by sliding the lighten button up and down...

Sepia...

you can also...

sharpen your photos, really good if they are ever so slightly out of focus, but also just to give you a clearer image.

warmify
tint
soft focus
filtered black and white
focal black and white - not the best as you can only focus on one part not on a specific item
graduated tilt.I tend to use photobuckets editing program for that.

Here is a photo before and after i fiddled with it in Picasca..

Before...

and after...



i know which one i prefer!!!
THey have also just updated Picasca 2 to Picasa 3. It has added a few more options that i love...

You can add text to your photos... anywhere you want on your photo as well, which is fantastic...
As you can see i added a note that i took this photo on the bottom lefthand side of the photo above. It is as easy as write your text select the colour, font , size and move it to where you want it to be on your photo.

One of my favourite things that i like to do is to use the straighten button. You can straighten your photo to make things straight, but what i like to do with this button is this you can tilt things as well, which happens to be one of my photo ways to use a photo...


i ran this though the sharpen, add colour, contrast and un straightended it ( all of which are done with just pulling the buttons up and down sooooooo easy) and ended up with this...

There are more things you can do using this program but i will let you find out those yourself.

How to get Picasa?

Type into Goggle the word Picasa and it will come up in the search. You have to download it to your computer.

The program then takes all your photos that are on you computer and puts them into a program where you can just scroll up and down and chose which one you want to work with. To get them into your 'my pictures' folder on your computer all you have to do is then click on the export button and it will transfer it back to where you keep them.

I print out my own photos so this program helps me a lot, but if i want to get any printed i still put all my photos though this before i download them onto a cd and get them printed.

I hope you found this useful and give it a try.