Danaville

Scanning and Browsing Your Collection
Are you going to be pulling out that digital camera during Spring Break, taking a mass amount of pictures and putting them in your unorganized pictures folder?  If you find some time for yourself before the break is over, you ought to start cleaning up your photos. Get rid of those red-eyes and pimples, brighten them up, and then organize them to share with friends and family.  If you haven’t already settled on a photo management and editor program, consider Picasa. Then you can make more use of the tips we’ll discuss in this piece.  Picasa is developed by Google, available for free on both Linux and Windows.

Here are a few tips to help while  fumbling through your photos:

• Stop a run-away image scan: The first time I ran Picasa, I was prompted for what folders/drives to scan, so it can populate with photos. Mistakenly, I choose to scan an entire drive, the one that I keep all my personal documents and files on. I found out the scan isn’t instant, it was taking forever. Plus it was popping up images I didn’t want to browse through, like screen shots for my articles and miscellaneous images for applications. I closed the application, thinking I could stop the scanning that way. I was wrong, it resumed after reopening the application. Finally, I figured out how to modify the folders to scan. Click Tools > Folder Manager. Then you can deselect the folders/drives you don’t want to scan anymore, plus select those you know will contain the beloved family snapshots.
• Browse through only headshot photos: This is one feature I’ve found pretty neat. In the Filters area on the toolbar, click Show only photos with faces. Now you should only see photos that, apparently, have a headshot. I use this filter when I want to quickly find a photo to send or print to family and friends.
• Tag favorites with a star: Like most other photo apps, you can tag your favorites with a star. Select a photo, or select many by holding down the Ctrl key, and hit the Start button on the lower portion of the application. Now you can hit the Show starred photos only filter button on the top toolbar. Now you can show off your memories using the pictures you deem shareable–don’t star those early morning or other embarrassing shots.

Editing and Enhancing for the Finishing Touches

When it comes time to clean up your photos, here are several ways you can make yourself look 20 pounds lighter: (just kidding)

• Carefully apply fixes and effects: When clicking the icons to apply fixes and effects to a selected image, keep in mind, many are only undoable in the order applied using the undo button. For example, if you realized you sharpened the image too much after you spent a lot of time cropping and fixing, you’ll have to undo everything you did after the sharpening. To prevent wasted time, apply these fixes and effects cautiously before moving to a new one.
• Undo is available even after saving: One great thing about Picasa’s undo scheme is that even after saving or applying changes, you can usually still undo them. Just reopen the image and hit the undo button. This is great if you cut too much out of the picture or made changes you want to now reverse.
• Level-out with the straightening tool: Did you have too much to drink? Did a little one get a hold of the camera? In any case, Picasa lets you straighten out lopsided snapshots–another feature I’m a fan of. Just double-click a picture, click the Straighten icon, and use the slider bar to tint left or right. You can also use this to unstraighten select photos, to give them a professional or artist look.

• Retouch to remove blemishes: Want to cherish your memories without remembering the acne, blemishes, or shaving cut? You can use the Retouch feature to remove these unwanted spots. It’s pretty nifty. Open a photo to edit, click the Retouch icon, select the problem area, and then move to an area of the face that’s similar, but acceptable, and click. The good area you mark is copied over the problem area. You can adjust the brush size and/or the zoom, with a mouse scroll or keyboard arrows, for best results. You can also use this tool to make some goofy edits, add a third eye ball

• Make batch changes to save time: Picasa has some great batch editing tools that can make changes across multiple images at once–what a time saver. Select photos by choosing folders or albums, clicking and dragging to box in the ones you want, or holding the Ctrl key down while clicking individual images. Then click Picture > Batch Edit and choose want to want to do. Fix all the devil looking red-eyes, rotate images, rename images, and so on.

Showcasing Your Photos

Whether you want to craft a last-minute Christmas gift for a loved one or just have fun, Picasa includes a few cool ways you can showcase your best smiles:

• Piece together a collage: Picasa has a really neat collage feature. The final product can be set as your desktop background, printed as a poster, or posted on your website. To get started, select a folder or pictures and click Create > Picture Collage. The selected images are thrown up on the collage editor. The Clips tab lets you add and remove photos. The Settings tab is where all the magic is. There you can pick different layouts, picture borders, the background, and more. On the bottom of the collage workspace is two useful buttons. The Scramble Collage button moves the pictures around, keeping them in the same picture frame. The Shuffle Pictures button keeps the picture frames in place while switching around the actual photos; great if you want to change the collage but already have a nice layout. If you save the collage, you can return later to make edits by double clicking it in the Projects\Collages folder and clicking the Edit Collage button in the upper left area of the screen.
• Direct your own movie: Picasa even includes a movie editor where you create a slide show of your photos with background music and transitions. It saves to a Windows Media Video (.wmv) format. You can upload videos to the Picasa Web Albums, email them to friends, upload directly to YouTube, or burn them onto a CD to be played in DVD players that support the format.
• Create a gift disc: This puts selected pictures onto a CD or DVD, which can also include a automatically created slideshow. If you want your family member or friend to see the edits you’ve made to your photos, opt to include Picasa on the disc. Plus this gives them no excuse to why they don’t have an online gallery for you to see their photos.
• Upload to a web album: Creating shareable online galleries of your photos and videos is easy with Picasa. Plus you get 1GB of space on Picasa Web Albums for free. All you have to do is right-click on the photos or video clips you want to share and select Upload to Web Albums. The first time you’ll have to signup for an account. Then you can send the link to your friends. They can even download the images, link to them, or order prints.
• Export as HTML: There’s yet another creative feature; you can export a folder or selected photos to HTML. You pick from several templates, where Picasa automatically creates the photo gallery web pages. Select templates include both a thumbnail page and a larger preview page. This feature is great if you already have a web site.

Getting further assistance

If you need more help, check out Picasa’s online documentation. Plus you can visit the site for Picasa Web Albums. Have fun with your editing and sharing!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 7th, 2009 at 7:07 pm. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.