Program presented by Bob Warwick at the 12/20/10 LPCUG meeting.
Picasa is Google's Swiss Army Knife of digital photography processing. Picasa does everything from downloading pictures from your camera, to organizing all of the pictures on your hard drive. It can do basic photo editing, make collages and publish your pictures on the web, or email them to friends and relatives. New functions are added with each new version. Because Picasa does so many things, it is a bit overwhelming to learn the whole program at once.
Tonight we have an hour to get you started on this fantastic digital photo management program. We will do this with links to video tutorials and other materials that will be available for you to study at home. Within a few hours, you will have multiplied the usefulness of your digital camera by many fold. Basically at the end of the evening, you will have enough familiarity with Picasa to use the tools in the "neat website" link below to teach yourself how to use Picasa to meet your digital photography needs.
1. Lets take a quick overview of some of the basic functions of Picasa.
2. Now let's see how to download and install the software. You can download the latest Version 3.8 here.
3. Now let's look at some of the features in more detail. Part 1 of this tutorial demonstrates how Picasa finds photos on your computer and how you can choose which photos you want to work on. The original pictures will not be changed, Picasa makes a copy of the picture to avoid a disaster should your editing get out of control. It will also make slide shows, gift CDs. Part 2 will go on to show you how some more features of the program do their job. While these two tutorials are about Version 2 of Picasa, later versions just add more neat features.
4. Lets take a quick look at what's new in later versions of Version 3.0, Version 3.5 and Version 3.8. Version 3.8 is a real tour de force. It uses face recognition to allow you to make a slide show movie of the same person in many different photos. The video shows the change from a child to a young adult, set to music.
5. At this point, you are probably wondering "How am I ever going to remember this stuff?". Well fear not, I found a neat website that has little tutorials that work through most of the basic functions, step by step. Again, these tutorials are for Picasa 2, but once you get the hang of the software, the later versions just improve upon the basic functions. For example, to remove red eye from photos, you used to have to draw little boxes around each eye, then hit the Red Eye button. Later versions recognize the eyes in the photo and put the boxes where they belong.