You may not want to hear this but your little digital camera has a faster computer than those in the Apollo space craft that went to the moon. So some of the terminology of computers has leaked over into the digital photography world. In the early days the first floppy disks came blank. Not just empty but really blank with no structure. Before you could use them you had to structure the disk by adding headers and control tracks and other messy details.  This process was called formatting. The structure that eventually took over the world was the DOS FAT format. And now even Unix and Apple Mac machines must be able to read this now universal format.  And so while your solid state memory card is radically different than a floppy disk. It too has a DOS file structure imposed on it.

Most floppy disks (are they used anymore? ) and FLASH memory devices come pre-formatted these days. So you can likely just plug them in and use them. HOWEVER, cameras tend to be a bit finicky. They want things just so.  And it has been my experience that if the first time you put a card into a camera you go to the menu, find the setup portion of the menu, select format card and press OK and OK to the warning that all images on the card will be lost.  The resulting format will make the card EXACTLY what the camera expects and it will be very happy.  In other words, Less chance of it going wack-o later while taking pictures.  The issue is, did the engineers writing the software in the camera anticipate all the odd combinations of files structure that the card could have if you DON’T format it?  And the answer is usually, no. They do a pretty good job most of the time, but we want it to work ALL the time.  So formatting forces the card to look like what the camera expects.  You have found the camera’s comfort zone. We all work best if we are in familiar territory.

What about Deleting photos. There is a “Directory” of where the photos are early in the memory card. Deleting simply changes the first character of the file name to a special character that means “This file is deleted”  but it is not. Some software programs can still read these files very easily. So deleting doesn’t really change the card much at all. Some programs might do more.  Again, MY EXPERIENCE is… when I let the computer software delete the files… It makes the camera unhappy at least some of the time. And from the photographers I speak with. and articles I read this is a common experience.

Say you mess up and let the computer delete your photos…. you were in a hurry and you clicked “OK” one too many times… No Worries. Put the card in the camera and format it.  There it is, all new.  No problems.  Formatting the card fixes many evils.

The most common way that cards get corrupted is pulling them from the computer or camera while they are being written.  In the camera always turn the camera off and wait for the LED to go dark before pulling the card.  In the computer always eject the card first.  In Macs just push the little triangle in the finder. On Windows you need to find the “Safely eject removable media” in the tray on the bottom right.  If you do corrupt a card, before you throw it away, there are programs that can recover you photos. Well, some of your photos.

OK, I’m off on my trip. See you soon!

Have fun taking better pictures.

The camera is taking in only what is in front of it. It doesn’t know the intent. It is not aware of its environment. And the camera engineers have figured out a way for you to give it a hint with out a 4 year degree in photography and physics with a 20 year apprenticeship to a famous National Geographic photographer… it is called scene mode. At least Nikon calls it ‘Scene Mode” But Sony and Canon have similar names if not the same. I’m sure the other guys do too.  Let me explain how you can give it a clue and why it works.

Your average scene, the thing in front of the camera, has the same amount of light bouncing off of it as an 18% grey card. (Don’t ask why 18% and not 20%.. it just is.) So 85% or 90% of the time the camera exposes for the 18% grey card and it works… Thats what “Automatic” is doing, looking for the average scene.  BUT WAIT!!!! What if the scene is not average?  What then? That is what scene mode is for… all you have to do is tell the camera that you want it to lean in a different direction.. You give it a hint.  It still does all the bazillion calculations for you but you the genius of photography that you are gave it a hint.  That was mostly all it needed.

Example:  Snow, Beach… Here the scene is much brighter than your 18% grey card.  And if you don’t tell the camera… then you photos will be underexposed… thats right It will take that brightly lit scene and try to make it 18% grey. Ugh!

Example: Fireworks, Night scenery… Here the scene is much darker than an 18% grey card… Left on auto the photo will be over exposed.

OK it can get more complicated.. there are other factors But your job is still easy for the photographic genius that you are.

Example: Indoor Party…. you will use this a lot. Indoor party will flash the nearby subject which is done very fast on automatic… but it will hold the lens open longer so that the room and other people that are farther away will also be exposed. This happens using ambient (available) light and a slower shutter speed. In terms of a fancy DSLR this is the same as Slow shutter, rear-curtain sync.   Yeah, you can forget I said that.

Example: Close up or Macro… often shown with a picture of a flower. This one lets the camera focus closer and tells it to ignore that face in the background.

Example: Landscape… this one tells the camera to focus on infinity (way out there) and ignore stuff close in.

So pull out your camera and find scene mode. If you can’t figure out the pictures… see if you can find the manual. (I know…the last time you looked it was in a drawer somewhere ) It is likely on the Internet under the support section of your camera manufacture’s web site. Or write me.. I’ll help you figure it out.

As all ways… go take some pictures. Let me know how it goes.

ONE MORE THING… I have a two week photo shoot coming up. So the site will go a bit stale. Sorry. There are scenes waiting to be captured… I’ll be back.

#1 Load your photos into the computer. If you set up your software correctly when you plug in your memory card it will detect it and ask if you want to copy all the photos or just a few. When it is done, the photos on your memory card are copied on to your hard drive and a reference to them is in the photo software database. You may be asked to add an “EVENT” name or some keywords. Now is a great time to do this. It only takes a second. Get in the habit. Usually a reference to the year and a description of what the photos are will help you find them later. If the software asks to delete the photo’s from the disk, SAY NO!.  It usually works but your camera is the best place to erase photos. After loading them into your hard drive, make a back up. A separate hard drive is best, but you can use a CD or DVD if you have a drive that will write in your computer. I recommend that as soon as you put the memory card back into the computer you format the memory. WARNING! formatting the card will erase all the photos on it. So be sure you have them copied and backed up. Allowing the camera to format the memory card cleans it up, fixes minor errors and makes sure the card is what the camera software expects.

#2 Take time now to rate and organize your photos. Go through them and click on a rating system. You know you have some that are better than others. If some are black or you photographed the inside of your pocket just delete them. If it is hopelessly out of focus.. Delete them or at least… Hide them. I go through in several passes. The first pass I put one star on the reasonable shots. Some shots are not… shall we say… pro quality but they represent irreplaceable moments with friends and family. Its ok, give them a star. I’ll take 5 or 6 shots of a single subject.. I’m picking out which one is best. It gets the star. Best is based on people’s expressions, sharpness, exposure.. You know it when you see it. I’ll come back from a trip with hundreds of shots per day. For a week’s vacation I’ll print up about 50 4×6 prints to show around. I’ll do a 10-20 larger prints from the week say 8×10 and one or two will make great 16×20 or larger… So as I work my way up the star system… the 2 stars will likely get a 4×6 and a bit of clean up. the three starts get more work and I will print them larger.. I’ll do even more work on the final one or two that I really blow up and the 5 stars go into my collection of my “greatest hits”  I typically only assign 1 and two starts before I start through my recipe below.. the higher ratings actually get added later. It is all very interactive.

BEFORE you work on your photos.  Make a copy in an uncompressed format… Try TIFF if you don’t have a better one.  Work on the copy (tiff) and not on the original.

#3 Straightening… If your horizons are accidentally less than level… (Happens to us all) Now is a good time to straighten them. I’ll talk about this more later. If you added an angle for an arty shot, by all means keep it.

#4 Cropping… Face it, many times we are shooting from the hip and we can not get close enough to the subject or we are lazy and don’t walk over. Look at the photos used by the software companies to show their stuff. People are full frame. Don’t worry about head to toe shots. The Taj Mahal in the background is secondary to your family. Make the family stand out.  If you want a picture of the building just take one. Aunt Martha doesn’t have to be in it. Know what your subject is and make it prominent.  If you straighten you photo you had to crop a bit there so you didn’t have empty corners. Now is a good time to use the rule of thirds we discussed a while back. Cropping can help us get what we forgot to do when taking the photo… come on. I mess up. I’m sure you do to… if only on occasion.

#5 Levels… OK, this one is hard to describe in a single paragraph. Folks used to adjust Brightness (exposure) and Contrast… but levels is much better.  With out getting all technical (Which is the point of this blog) you are adjusting the brightest point close to pure white and your darkest point close to pure black. This will perk up a dull photo. And we will discuss it many times before we are done.

#6 Global enhancements… This is where you compensate for blown highlights or add a bit of lightening to the shadows. You can add some mid tone contrast and mid tone saturation. All these will affect the whole photograph.

#7 Color… Look color is hard. It was the thing that took me the longest to learn. The good news is that by hitting the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button in Picsa or the auto adjust button in most other software you can likely make a big improvement. Just remember if it is worse and not better, undo the change before moving on.

#8 Red-eye… All programs have a way of killing red eye. It is easy and obvious so on any thing you print…. fix the red eye.

#9 Blemishes, and other imperfections… On the more special photos… Because each of the following starts to be more work, use the editing tools to kill the zits and other imperfections. Clone out the telephone lines or stray hair, add rocks where the sun washed out the corner of the photo… stuff like that.

#10 Size for output and sharpen… But before you do, Save you work to date… and save it in an uncompressed file format such as DNG, PSD or TIFF… Compressed formats such as JPG and PNG will loose a bit of quality each time you open them and save them. It is OK to Shoot in JPEG… Just don’t save you work in JPEG. If you want to Email the photo, I suggest you use some thing small. like 640×480 and save the small copy as JPEG. (Don’t loose the big Tiff) For a 4×6 photo you can use 240 or 300 pixels per inch thats 1200 x 1800. And so forth. Before you hit the “SAVE” button… sharpen the print.

OK, that is my recipe. I don’t do all steps on all photos. I might hit the “I’m feeling Lucky button” on the 4×6 prints. And only really work on the 3 stars and higher and there won’t be too many of those.

Next time we will discuss how to help your camera to take better photos. but until then.

Go take some pictures.

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.

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.

I’ve had a couple of  little devices for a few years now and they are 40GB and 80GB. And with the 2 week trip to Hawaii coming up.. I’m worried they are not big enough. In fact I know they are not enough. I will shoot 16GB in a day or less. Look when you shoot RAW and not JPEG and the camera is 25 MegaPixels it doesn’t take much. My little camera takes SD cards and saves in JPEG, which are compressed. I put in a 4GB and shoot for weeks… MOST people are in the latter category. But back to my problem, I need a new gizmo to back up my photos.

My favorite little device is an Epson P3000. Great screen, but smaller disk drive. AND it does not take the SDHC memory cards. (That is the 4GB SD card for the little camera.)  Epson has fixed that by introducing the  P7000. Beautiful piece of gear. Nice LCD screen, bigger drive, I’m almost sure it takes the SDHC cards… But they want $750+ for it on Amazon. WOW! My significant other would shoot me. (Probably not but why risk it?)

Then it came to me… Actually the idea came from my daughter Lyndsey. She wanted a netbook to work on papers for school riding the bus. I did some searching for her and found that a popular brand is ASUS from Taiwan. She got the 9″ with Solid State drives. But netbooks sell for  $300 to $350, half the cost of the Epson. TA-DA! and the 10″ screen on mine is bigger than the Epson. And it has USB so I can back it up on the internal drive and on a SECOND external Hard Drive.  I told you I was paranoid.

The big problem for me was that while they are advertised as available with Linux, All the deals I found had Microsoft Windows XP on them. The upgrades for which did not fit the allocated partition on my daughter’s machine.  Personal opinion here and no data to back up my assertion… I think Microsoft lives in dread that the average computer user will discover that Linux and the FREE software that runs on it is not just for geeks any more. It is downright accessible. Easy to use even. So Microsoft has cut a deal with ASUS and most of the machines shipped to the US come preloaded with XP.  And the minute I powered up the computer with Windows XP it started selling me MS Office for Windows. That and the anti-Virus software would cost more than the computer.

I travel to Asia a good bit and know many engineers with ASUS computers. The name is not common in the US but they are good systems. So I got my ASUS 1005HA netbook with MS Windows along with a 2GB memory stick. Some really cheap memory sticks cut corners and won’t work for this.. Spend the big bucks ($10 or less) and get a good brand like Kingston data traveler. Google EasyPeasy. Download the software and put it on your desktop. Download the loader to put the software on your memory stick. Follow the instructions and boot off the memory stick rather than the Hard drive.

Play with it some to make sure all this Linux stuff is not too scary.. If you like it. Install it over Windows. Congratulations, you are now free of the Evil Empire. And if it is too strange too unfamiliar, stick with Windows, thousands do. Let me assure you, Easy Peasy is a graphical user interface like Windows and Mac. You point at things and click with your mouse. Easy. If you are a computer science major you can open a window and do obscure Unix things… (Just like MAC) but you don’t have to. In fact I’m a UNIX wizard and I don’t. But I could… I’d just rather spend time taking photographs…

I thought I would immediately download GIMP. GIMP is a pretty good (FREE) photo processing software. I don’t know how easy it is to use. I think there is a learning curve just like Adobe Photoshop. And here was the pleasant surprise… Easy Peasy came with Picasa. (Earlier I said Picasa saved my wife from frustrations with iPhoto) And Picasa is what I need. I’m not going to edit my photos in Hawaii. I may want to look at them and show folks by the pool what we have been up to. It is all I need and no work is required. Good! more time for photography.

Picasa is also available for Mac and Windows so your choice of operating system is not really important.

So that is my cool money saving suggestion. Sorry Epson. I am now a NetBook fan.

I’ve been promising to talk about how average users can fix or improve their photographs with software. I will use Picasa as that base. The principles will apply to any program. And I’ll start that conversation NEXT TIME.

Until then, Go shoot some photographs.

There is a whole new category of Video Cameras on the market and Wired used one as its example of good enough. A company named Pure Digital has a range of Video cameras both SD (Standard Definition) and HD (High Definition). They are called the ‘Flip Video recorders” [http://www.theflip.com/] It recently got rated #1 Pocket HD Camcorder by MacWorld Magazine. [http://www.macworld.com/article/135965/2009/09/pocket_hd_comcorders.html?t=226].

You have figured me out. I can not resist a new gadget. I got one.

Full disclosure, It helped that my parent company, Cisco, like the idea so much that they bought Pure Digital. And there is an employee discount. But you can do nearly as well on Amazon. I like the idea of adding short video clips to my slide shows.

Years ago, Kodak used to tour with a grand show of 6 screens, There would be 12 slide projectors and occasionally the slide would go dim and a movie would play, It was all automated with a sound track. I was inspired. I did some work during college as one of my professors was on the SMTP committee that was setting standards for this type of thing. And I had my own mini version of a single screen with two projectors of a trip I took to Europe in 1975… But now you can do the same thing with iMovie… and I’m sure there is some program for the long suffering Windows users..

The idea of carrying a BIG digital camcorder around along with my DSLR turned me green.. And then Good Enough to the rescue.

I’m taking it to Hawaii next month. Got the underwater housing and all.  I’ll let you know how it works out.

The true answer to the “Best Camera” question is one I dislike… That answer is “It depends…”  It sounds so wishy washy. Cameras are different because they appeal to different needs. So compromises are made to achieve a certain goal.  I had a co-worker that loved the little flat Casios. He kept it in his back pocket… I do not recommend this method of carrying a camera but it what was important to him. My first Nikon CoolPix took a life time to turn on (power on time) and when you pressed the shutter… It clicked some time later. (Shutter lag) Not bad if you are trying to capture the Grand Canyon… Terrible at sporting events. It drove me nuts.  To be honest, I’ve been through a series of cameras. The Sony was small and fit in my pocket for that trip to Japan. It took sharp photos but used the Sony memory sticks that no other camera adopted. The little Nikon with 10X zoom and a swivel display…

My first good camera in college was a Canon FTB with interchangeable lenses. Fully manual. You had to learn photography to get a decent shot. And eventually regardless of what cute little camera I was packing on a given day, I started to miss the SLR. Nikon to the rescue. The D100 was released. Actually, I thought long and hard about Canon vs. Nikon. I was ticked at Canon that my old lenses would not move to the digital version. Nikon actually kept the same mount from film to digital. (Turns out it is not such a great advantage…) And the D100 was a bit better than the Canon version at the time. So I went Nikon. Later Canon had a better one, then Nikon, then Canon… you get the drift. On average either choice was a good one.  Now that I have a big investment in those Nikon lenses, I don’t look at the Canons more than a glance… too much inertia to change.

But some time you don’t want to haul around a pro camera and 4 or 5 lenses. For many trips I used a Nikon D200 with an 18-200mm VR lens. One prosumer camera and one lens will cover 90% of the shots and it is much less to carry.  BUT even then I wouldn’t take it to many places like the dining room on a cruise and so many opportunities would be lost. Then Nikon came out with the S60.  Small, light weight. Fits in my pocket. Fast power on, very little shutter lag. And now that little camera is nearly always in my pocket or brief case so that I don’t miss any opportunities.  So when I go on a vacation trip with my wife, The grand scenic shots are taken with a pro or prosumer camera. These often end up enlarged and taking up a wall in my house. And all the little moments are captured with the pocket camera. These get printed up as 4×6 photos or put into a photo album for my wife to share with her co-workers.

So when you pick a camera, It is hard to go wrong. But understand the trade offs. How much optical zoom do you need? How easy is it to see the LCD display? Does it fit in your pocket or do you mind carrying it around? What batteries, What memory? How long does it take to power up? Does it have shutter lag?  The newest feature is the ability to capture good shots in low light. There are 3 or 4 cameras out this year that do pretty good.

In the end, having a camera with you when you see something to photograph is the important thing. The “BEST” camera is the one that you keep with you.

I was working in Germany with a group of engineers from Taiwan. I had a pretty nice 5 MegaPixel Sony that took great shots. [It was a while ago. 5 MP was good then.] It was the best camera of the 15 or so people there. This one engineer had a cheap little no name digital camera that was 2 Mega Pixels. Near the end of our time there we were sharing shots and he had several that blew me away.

I had a shot of this path. It was beside the river. It was about 50% covered with fall leaves. There were lines of trees on either side. The total effect was that of train tracks leading off in to the distance as the rows of trees seem to converge… I show the photo to folks and they say “That is really nice…”  My friend from Taiwan shot the same scene on a different day. He got down on his belly and shot an ant’s eye view looking down that path. He has leaves looming large in the foreground and the trees reach to the heavens. I show his photo to folks and they say “WOW!  That is really something.

I have photos of the cathedral in Cologne. I’m not wild about them. This same engineer went out at night. crossed a train bridge on foot. Strapped his camera to the rail and took a long exposure (several) to get a really nice shot of the Cathedral all lit up a night. I have this photo in my office not my own. It was great. Of course he had to go out at night. He had to watch for trains… But man, what a shot with that crummy little camera.  That guy is a photographer.

Now in defense of my 24 MP DSLR… I can only blow my friend’s photos up to about 8×10 before the lack of resolution is very noticeable. And a DSLR will give you more creative freedom if you know how to use it. But the camera does not make the photograph, the photographer makes the photograph.

So every time I’m tempted to get the easy shot. I remember my friend and look for a better composition. Getting on the ground is really work with my old knees but what shots….

Go take some pictures.

[Besides, I'm downloading Picasa on my main workstation so that I can describe it better and it is still finding photos... ]

In no particular order… (We will come back to each in more detail in the fullness of time.)

1. Get close. Fill the frame with your subject. If you are taking a picture of the kids get in close. You may need use a lens with optical zoom if you can not get close.
2. Get off your duff and move around. Move close to your subjects if you can. Try a different angle. I once climbed a small mountain to get the shot of a Norwegian Stave Church. It was the only way to get a clean overall shot. The church was surrounded by a fence in a clearing in the woods. The only good shot was down from an adjacent hill. Lazy photographers get so so pictures.
3. If you have a good camera, Use the rule of thirds. In other words, Ignore Kodak’s advice.  In the little pamphlets that Kodak used to publish the advice was put the subject in the middle.  The reason they did that was that all the Kodak Instomatic Cameras worked like my mom’s range finder. You did not look through the real lens… you looked through a view finder that was parallel to the lens. So you could only guess as to what the lens was seeing. Especially if you are close to your subject. The technical term is parallax error. If you have a SLR (DSLR) or a camera where you look at the LCD screen rather than a camera with a separate view finder… ignore Kodak. Use the rule of thirds. Visualize two vertical lines and two horizontal lines each dividing the scene into 3 sections… like a tic-tac-toe game.  Put the subject on one of those lines or intersection… mostly.
4. Be aware of light… Photo-Graphy is literally “Writing with Light”. It is all about the light. The old Kodak rule was “Have the sun behind you (the photographer) over your shoulder.”  And that works in that the subjects face is not in the shadow.. But in many of our family photos my sister and I are squinting. How you compromise and both light up the face and avoid the squint is the art.  If the sun is behind your subject then don’t be afraid to use the flash. If it is besides then it can make for a pleasing composition but half the face will be in shadow. You can either fill with flash or put the subject near a light wall so that some of the light is reflected back to balance the shadows on the face. Overcast skies are sometimes good but they can leave the picture flat.
5. Be able to control you flash.  I don’t care if you read the manual. That doesn’t work for my wife. If it doesn’t work for you find someone to show you. I have run into countless folks on vacation or in museums that have no clue how to control the flash. You need to be able to force it to flash when it doesn’t want to. You need to be able to force it not to flash. More on this later.
6. Use your camera modes/scenes… the more information you camera has the better job it can do.  Most work pretty well on full auto…but it is better still if you use a mode like “Indoor Party” or “Beach/Snow” or “Fireworks” or “Backlight”

That is enough information for now. Go have fun.

Shoots some pictures.

Now why is it important to enhance (fix) your photos?  I look at the ads, not so much the ones of grand vistas like the Rocky Mountains or the NYC skyline. No I look at the ads showing families having fun. No one is squinting in to the camera. No kids are making that strange face that comes only when mom and dad snap a photo. My son David is a master at the odd face. And in fact mom and dad are both in the picture. Who is taking these photos?  Ahhh it must be a pro.  How do our family shots approach that level of photo nirvana? You fix them is the simple answer. Just like the pro did. It is not all that hard. you just need a bit of information and a little of the right software. And of course you need to learn a few tricks when you are the person behind the camera. But all that is the subject of this blog.

I use a mac. And so most of my comments are tilted in that direction. I have used Windows in the past so I do have some experience there. And this is not the place for a Mac / Windows debate. They both work. Use what you got.   I started my wife off with iPhoto. My own snapshots are on iPhoto. iPhoto is a cool place to house and organize you photos on a mac. It links with all the other iLife and iWork apps that come with your Mac making it easy to do cool stuff like making a slide show for your neighbor’s daughter’s rehearsal dinner.

What iPhoto is good for is 1)integration with other programs on the mac. 2) Organizing you photos (I have about 10k (thousand) in iPhoto and 20k else where). And minor editing. iPhoto 09 will help you find all those shots from San Francisco (by location) and of David (Facial recognition) It is really pretty cool. Photos are organized by events, people, places (with GPS) or you can create your own folders. You can easily make slide shows, books, calendars and other photo enhance objects.

It is really simple to use. but we had problems with it. Where it falls down is in the photo enhancement area. It also suffers in the talking to strange hardware department. And lets face it. Mac is a small subset of the PC market. Not every printer manufacturers drivers work well with Mac. We have a new Canon Selphy printer for those glossy 4×6 photos and we could not get the software combination of iPhoto and Selphy Mac device drivers to scale the print to fit the 4×6. Instead of Grandma’s Face we were getting just the nose or an eyebrow.  Not cool.

So the logic was… move up the food chain. (Get better software) If Adobe Photoshop is the top of the line… then Adobe Photoshop Elements must be good right?  Wrong. It was a disaster for us. And hey, my wife may be normal but I’m really pretty good at all this.. And if I had trouble…. I’ll discuss this in more detail in a later post.

So I thought there must be something (cheap is good) that could work. We went to the Apple web site and looked under downloads. And there it was, Picasa from Google. It was free. So what is the harm in trying. Works like a charm. Imported all the photos from iPhoto, scales the print to fit the printer and most of the time… the “I feel Lucky” button otherwise known as “Automatic” adjustments works like a charm. Every one I have talked to that has used Picasa and has a positive experience.  And it is available on Windows and Linux… but that is a story for another day.

Picasa is my wife’s new favorite photo software… Good job Google!

Go take some photos….