Like this:

I’m getting better at this blogging stuff… I loaded my icon today. But we digress… our purpose here is to help new digital photographers get better results.

I mentioned that my wife and I had gotten frustrated with the interaction of iPhoto with a Canon Selphy photo printer. Both are good at what they do but they did not interact cleanly together. I went originally to my default artistic software provider and was not pleased when Photoshop Elements (That is the sub $100) software did not live up to my experience with it in a Windows Environment. In looking for something better we came across Google’s Picasa. The price was right… Free. It is available on Mac, Windows and Linux so what is not to like. I’m learning it along with you, so if any of you have more experience or suggestions (or questions) please send them to me via the comments. I’ve got Picasa open in a second “Space” which for the Mac is a virtual window. It allows me to zoom back and forth from Picasa to the web browser.

I selected a photo of the family at the Georgia Aquarium. It needs work. It was shot with the Nikon S60.

Original photo

It is a bit dark and the faces are in shadow. I think a bit of flash would have helped…

What other software calls “Automatic” adjustments, Picasa calls “I feel lucky” It usually does OK so lets try it.

Original photo

I’m feeling Lucky

Manual Edits

That didn’t help… So lets try some other items…

 

Manual Edits

That isn’t award winning… but it is much better. So lets describe How I got there… Look on the upper left. There are 3 tabs. I’m starting with the Basic Fixes tab.

I did not see the need to crop, straighten or fix red eye. So we bypassed those.

1. I un-did the “I’m feeling Lucky” change.

2. I tried auto Contrast and auto Color And the color got rid of some of the green.  We still had too much shadow on faces. And after all with good looking relatives like these that is what we are here to photograph.  It would have been better with flash but we are home in front of the computer looking at our handiwork and now we need to recover.

3. Next was “Fill Light”  This will brighten the dark areas and try and leave the light ones alone. It brightened everything here but more changes to the dark shadows than the lighter fish tank behind.  But I’m not happy yet.

4. When easy doesn’t work you do the next steps. Selecting the tuning tab on the upper left. I used the “Color Picker” (eye dropper) to click on Marilyn’s white shirt. Grey works and so would a pure black… This will adjust the color. It did a better job of getting rid of the color cast caused by daylight through the fish tank and with the artificial lights in the viewing areas.

5. Staying with the “Tuning tab” I played with the Shadows, Highlight and Fill light. It’s like cooking. Season to taste.

6. I wasn’t happy with a “neutral color so I used the color temperature slider with a slight touch to the right to make it warmer.

7. Just for grins I tried the effects tab and sharpened the photograph just a bit.  Most cameras keep the focus just a bit soft and almost all photo benefit from a bit of sharpening.

And that was it. Grandpa, Grandma, David and Dad in the Atlanta Aquarium.  And this time David is not making a silly face.

Getting the photos smaller for Email or the blog was done by exporting to a folder on the desktop. It give you the option of scaling down and this keeps the size reasonable. Export is the manilla envelope on the bottom of the page.

Later this week I’ll tackle more extreme changes using other software and we will see if we can make it better still.

Download Picasa http://picasa.google.com/  let it find your photos and try one of your own.

Enjoy.

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