Picasa from Google

May 24, 2006

Today while I was browsing some Google tools for my blog, I noticed this photo organizing software Picasa. It offers a wide range of nifty features such as creating slide shows, collage pictures and photo editing abilities.

I like the collage feature the most, as it lets you create some pretty impressive photos. Your pictures will appear as real photos that pile up, giving a real photo album like feel. Before this I have seen some bloggers who had this type of pictures showing in their photo blogs. Initially I thought they were creating these images using Photoshop, only to find out they are actually done using Picasa.

A collage made using KLCC park pictures, the whole process takes no longer than 2 seconds!
Collage of Bak Kut Teh. Instead of using a picture itself as the background, it can be white/gray/black color. The photos can be arranged to grid, contact sheet or multi-exposure, according to your liking and creativity!

As you can see from the photos above, they are very nicely done, got that random feel Imagine you have a whole bunch of gathering photos and don’t know which ones to publish, Picasa comes in handy

The photo editing tools can be categorized into Basic Fixes (Crop, Straighten, Redeye etc) Tuning (Fill Light, Shadows etc) and Effects (Glow, Sepia, Tint etc) It even has this “I’m feeling lucky” feature that automatically fixes your photos with.. luck? Those who constantly use Google will know this is some sort of their trademark thing

The user interface design is beautiful and sleek. Nice and worthy program to have if you constantly take and store photos. Picasa is certainly not a tool for bloggers only. Best of all, it’s free and provides almost all your photo editing needs. No need to use Photoshop (which is a resource hog anyway) anymore for basic fix