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Picasa is a great free beginner to intermediate software for photography enthusiasts from Google. It allows you to do almost everything imaginable with your pictures – import from digital devices, automatically organize into albums by date, print, edit, compress, create collages, slide shows and even edit with the short videos you’ve taken with your digital camera. You can even email your creations directly from the build it mail client or upload them into either the Picasa Albums Online or YouTube to share with friends and family.
To make sure Picasa is right for you, watch the video below and see the software in action.
One of the features I loved was the extremely easy to use red-eye correction tool that automatically selects the red-eye area and fixes is better than I could ever do it manually. I was also pleasantly surprised with how easy it was to change the lighting & contrast in a picture or erase somebody’s pimple – the corrections I use the most when processing my family photographs. All those who already use the Picasa Album Online should definitely have the desktop application, as it makes it extremely easy to keep the photographs on your desktop synced with your online albums. Picasa works with JPGs, GIFs, PSDs, BMPs, couple of popular video formats and MP3 files when you use them as your music background for movies and slide shows.
The only Picasa’s feature that in my opinion still needs major work is the video editing section, which is still very cumbersome and bit counter intuitive (at least for past FinalCut or Avid editors). On the other hand, if it would only export the final product into more file formats than .wmv, it wouldn’t be that bad for the first-time users…
Related Links:
Picasa’s Website