Technophilia: Edit your digital photos with Picasa

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You take lots of digital photos and you need a quick way to fix red eye, adjust crooked images, crop, sharpen and zoom. If you don't have the cash or patience to get a copy of Photoshop and learn what to do with it, the free Windows photo manager software, Picasa, may have everything you need to adjust your photos to your liking. Last week, we covered how to organize a massive digital photo collection with Picasa. This week, I'm going to show you how to use Picasa to edit your photos quickly and easily with an eclectic array of useful tools.
Getting the editing party started

Now, granted, anyone familiar with the magic of a full-fledged photo editing program (such as Photoshop) is probably going to scoff with disdain at Picasa's editing power. However, Photoshop and similar programs cost a lot of money. Picasa is free. Neener, neener, neener.
In order to edit an individual picture in Picasa, simply double-click on the picture's thumbnail sitting in your Picasa library.

Once you've done this, you're taken to the editing screen with three tabs of options to the left of the editing workspace: Basic Fixes, Tuning, and Effects. I'm going to briefly go through my favorite tweaks with each of these; basically, the ones that I found the most useful.
Basic effects

The Basic Effects tab is pretty much where I end up spending most of my time. You can crop, straighten out crooked photos, fix a red eye, and tweak contrast and color; there's also the "I'm Feeling Lucky" button which asks Picasa to fix your photo anyway they see fit (it usually turns out pretty good, but I prefer doing it myself).

Anything you do can be instantly undone with the handy "Undo" button. In addition, edits are not final until you click on the "Save Changes" button, which is kind of weirdly placed. You have to do your edits, click the "Back to Library" button, and then hit the "Save Changes" button in the album header. At this point, your edits are now saved and you have officially overwritten the original photo, however, your originals (sans edits) are all conveniently stored for you in a folder titled "Originals" within Picasa.
Tuning

The tuning tab gives you options operated by sliders that allow you to adjust the lighting in your digital photos. Again, definitely not as powerful as a full-fledged editor, but it does the job. Here's what you get:

• Fill light: adjust background lighting while keeping front image intact
• Highlights: brighten up the whole image
• Shadows: darken up the entire photo
• Color temperature: play with the colors in your photo

You'll get the best effects if you use these in tandem instead of only one at a time; in addition, similar to the Basic Fixes tab, you do have the option of letting Picasa do all the work for you by clicking on the small buttons with what looks like a magic wand on them...or maybe it's exploding rhubarb? Either way, it gets the job done.
Effects

Now we come to the Picasa photo editing section in which you can apply effects such as Warmify (warm up the skin tones or other colors), Glow (gives a cool fuzzy effect), Sepia (age your photo), and a few more. For every option, you get sliders that allow you to direct size, sharpness, tint, or just a plain "Undo" button. It's pretty basic, to be sure, but for a free program this isn't too shabby.
Various Picasa editing tips

While I've pretty much laid out what Picasa offers as far as editing options, there are a few more goodies you should know about:

• You can place captions on your photos by clicking on the "Make A Caption!" text underneath the photo you are editing.
• If you want to edit a lot of photos, simply click on the arrows at the top of the editing workspace; this will give you the next photo in the folder.
• If you want to edit multiple photos at once, Picasa does allow limited batch editing. Select multiple photos by holding down the CTRL key, then hit "Picture", "Batch Edit." If you want to select photos from different albums, you'll want to click the "Hold" button in the photo tray at the bottom of your editing window.
• Undo multiple edits to multiple photos at one time? Simple. Select your photos while holding the CTRL key down, then click "Picture", "Undo all edits."
• If you need more than what Picasa can give you editing-wise, you can use other photo editing applications from within Picasa itself. Just click on the photo you want to tweak, then hit "File", "Open Files in an Editor" (or CTRL+Shift+O). Your default image editing program will come up.

That's it for Picasa editing tomfoolery. Next week, I'll show you how you can use Picasa to make slideshows, web albums, and more fun stuff. Until then, why not share in the comments how you've used Picasa to either organize or edit your digital photo collection? Come on, you know you want to.
Wendy Boswell, Lifehacker's Weekend Editor, is a photo editing fool. Subscribe to her feature series Technophilia using the Technophilia feed.
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