Thursday, April 10, 2008

Picasa reviewed

Picasa, a free downloadable photo management tool from Google, works well at locating, organizing, and even doing basic adjustments of photos resources on your computer. The price is certainly right.

Once downloaded and installed, Picasa software scans your computer for pictures and videos. It handles a wide assortment of image formats, including my JPEG, PSD, and CR2, the raw format images that I get from my Canon cameras. The default organization of folders is by time, an interesting approach and probably a very useful one for most people. But if you want the folders displayed in the more customary folder tree layout, just click the button, and presto you have a folder tree.

It was refreshing looking at the folders in chronological order, wherever they might be located on the machine, even among multiple drives. I keep live storage in the 1.5 TB area, so scanning my drives is no small task. It handled it pretty well. Of course, I did go keep the wife company watching TV while Picasa stayed at work finding all my pictures.

By the way, under the Tools Menu you can choose which drives and folders to scan and which drives and folders to hide. This comes in handy when you have folders with things that don't need to be indexed again, like Website development folders with tons of thumbnails, slices of pages, and so forth. Believe me, those are boring to look at!!! Just turn them off. You can change your mind later.

The image manipulation is above average as a fundamental image tool. Cropping and straightening was intuitive and offered 3 common formats to help get proportions right. Would have loved a warp or perspective tool to straighten up some buildings and trees, but what the heck, it's art, right?

Even the, "I feel lucky" tool turned out some pretty predictable results a few times, although there is a difference between feeling lucky and being lucky.

Tuning Tools offer highlight and shadow adjustments, white balance control, as well as slider for fill light to lighten up those darker shadows in otherwise well exposed images. These tools seemed to work better on raw images than JPEG, but were quite a bit slower with raw. I shoot both raw adn JPEG at the same time, and I ended up playing mostly with the JPEG because of the speed. I was impressed that Picasa did seem to recognize changes that I had previously made to raw files in other programs, like Lightroom and ACDSee Pro. Those changes are stored in XML files, and Picasa seemed to get that, although there was a time lag to render and display thumbnails with those modifications.

The special effects tab was interesting. I expect for many users it is a very fun set of filters. More experienced users may be frustrated. It sharpens, but bit too much and there is no way to roll it back part way. You can oversharpen multiple times if you like, though. It felt like many of the tools made too much of an adjustment. If a little sharpening is good, a lot of sharpening should be really good. Right? No.

There were also some effects that had better controls and worked well. There were multiple monotone makers including a black and white conversion that allowed a choice of colors to base the conversion on. Using the little pointer to try different values was easy and rendered the results in real time. No layers and no masks to fine tune things, but a good overall effect.

All in all, Picasa was a happy surprise, as most things made by Google have been for me. It does what it says it will do, and like the swan gliding across the lake, you don't see all of the techy stuff paddling hard beneath the surface of the interface struggling to keep it gliding. Good job.

Gary

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