Here is a link to an excellent program for making adjustments to your digital pictures. I have been playing with the program for a couple of weeks now and am very pleased with the results.

Merely click on the following link: http://picasa.google.com/ then follow the page down to the "Learn more about Picasa" and "Watch a video introduction"links.

It is free, very user friendly, and can make good pictures even better!

Phil,
What a neat program that is loaded with features. Thanks for sharing this information with us. I plan to download this program.

I downloaded this program & being behind a firewall it asked me twice if it could connect to googleadsomething or other. Looks like a good program just be aware of the ad server that wants to come with it!

I agree - EXCELLENT program.

I just downloaded this yesterday and it is amazing, especially with the automatic adjustment features that you can do and undo - color, contrast, sharpen. Very user friendly.

But my favorite feature is the adjustment for straightening a photo - when straightening a photo, it shows a grid that comes on the screen and you just line up the watch case or whatever according to the grid guideline. The background moves with it and it all stays at right angles (instead of tilting the whole photo and leaving white spaces as with my current program that I have to manually fill in). My photos have improved 1000 percent. The only drawback for me is the export feature which I am currently working on. I've used another program for so long that I forgot the steps necessary to do export. I sure it is something simple I've overlooked in the help section.

Here's a before photo



Barbara

This one speaks for itself . . . . YAY!! You da man, Phil! Thanks!!

Barbara

Have been using Picasa for a few weeks,it works well and simply for basic tuning, BUT it sucks power bigtime. I'm running a Pentium 4 2.66GHz,an 80 GB HD with 512 RAM on a Dell 4600, and have found it best to exit other programs to use Picasa. Haven't loaded Photoshop yet, but am told that it doesn't drag your computer down as much. When I get time, I'll compare the two(maybe by Christmas! ) I will say that Picasa is better by far that other free downloads I've tried.

Phil:
Thanks for the tip on Picasa! It seems to work well!
Joel Sarich

I have used Photoshop Elements on a low power computer, and now on a much more powerful computer. It worked very well on both. It is also very reasonable!

I've used Picasa for at least four years now, and highly recommend it. I also recommend using Google's free web albums, which you can access and set up in Picasa. These albums can be public, accessible to anybody and cataloged or you can limit their access to only people you specify. You can adjust your Picasa settings to "dumb down" the size of uploads or emails automatically. You can see one of my albums of Japanese art here.

Another option for free photo editing is the gimp or "gnu image manipulation program" its free software and available for Windows, mac os and linux.