Picasa Reviewer's Comments

Picasa by Google is one of the easier programs we reviewed: it’s intuitive and well designed. Picasa also has the best price tag: FREE. Download from your camera or browse folders from the hard drive or a removable device. View thumbnails of your images. In full view, add captions, remove red–eye, crop, rotate and enhance.

Picasa Screenshots. Click for more
   


Editing:  

There are three convenient tabs for editing:

1. Basic Fixes: These are buttons that work in one to two clicks to remove red-eye, crop, auto color, auto contrast, straighten and fill light photos.
2. Effects: Designed to help you turn a gray sky blue, brighten colors and add photographic filters. There are 12 effects to choose from in Picasa including Sharpen, Sepia, Black and White, Warmify, Film Grain, Tint, Saturation, Soft Focus, Glow, Filtered B&W, Focal B&W, and Graduated Tint.
3. Tuning: Here are the most advanced editing features to fix contrast and remove color cast. Select from Fill Light, Highlight, Shadows, Color Temperature, and the Neutral Color Picker.

Bonus Features

• "I'm Feeling Lucky": Takes the guesswork out and enhances photos automatically
• Geotagging: Tell Picasa where you shot each photo, and view them on a 3-D globe in Google Earth

 

Organizing:  

Assign keywords to your photos and then use Albums to organize just the way you want to. Albums are virtual groupings of photos that only exist in the Picasa software. Like a playlist, you can create combinations of any photos in an album or use a single image in multiple albums without taking up extra space on your hard drive. If you delete photos in albums, or whole albums, the original picture files will be untouched. 

Help/Support:  

Picasa has a brief online tutorial, an online user forum, and technical support by email.

Summary:  

For a basic photo editing package, Picasa is a useful tool. And, it’s free … we like that, and so will you.