Description:

In one of her postes, Lisa Barth "Jewelrygal" had mentioned she'd downloaded Picasa, which is a free program offered by Google. You can find it here: http://picasa.google.com/ I decided I'd look into it and downloaded it this morning. The file size was under 10 MB. I'm always sceptical about free image editing programs. I've used PaintShop Pro for over 10 years now, so going from such an involved program to one that has somewhat limited abilities can be frustrating. I've played with the program all day, which says a lot about Picasa 3 if you know me and my obsession with web graphics! Now, that doesn't mean I'm good with a camera! LOL


Here is a detailed review as the program would pertain to jewelry images...


In the display image above I used the "Soft Focus" effect which creates a blurring outside of a radious that you specify. Soft Focus creates a demand that the viewer's attention focuses on a specific area. You can move the focus area anywhere you like on the image and adjust the radious of the focus as well as the degree of blurring that occurs outside the focus area.


Text is easy to apply and remains editable after hitting the "Apply" button. You can go back to the text and change color, font, size, bold, italic, underline... even outline color and thickness. The drawback of the text feature is that you can not apply a drop shadow, which is something I really like and is handy when text color is perfect for the image but in some areas it needs a shadow to show up better. Text Outline seems to be a bit choppy and there is no way of adjusting the antialias (adjusts pixels on outer edges to create a smooth line).


Adjust brightness doesn't really exist. One would think it would be an option by name. The "Fill Light" only washes out the image. But, it can be done by using the "Glow" effect. Fortunately the Glow effect can be adjusted, and it can be applied multiple times which will brightnen the image.


Cropping is pretty simple. If you aren't sure what it means to "crop" an image, I'm going to tell you! If you have ever taken a picture of something... say a butterfly... and you really want to have the butterfly show up without all the foliage surrounding it, you would use the "crop" feature to draw a box around the butterfly and cut away the rest.

Resizing... The only way you can resize an image is when you go to save it. This is fixed by first bringing the image into the program, then choosing to save it and setting the size. Then you would open that saved image and do your editing. Why would you want to do it like this? Because if you put text on an image then resize it, that text could turn out to be very very small.


BRING THOSE FILE SIZES DOWN! Images that take forever to download... there is no excuse for it anymore! Get Picasa 3 and use the "Export Picture To Folder" option under "File" in the menu bar. Resizing to tiny images just to get them to upload isn't necessary and are annoying to wait for.


If I weren't familiar with image editing, I think I'd be thrilled to find this program! It is free, fun and very useful!