Given the proliferation of digital devices nowadays almost everyone has a digital camera, and those that don’t make use of their mobile phone cameras. Off course most of us aren’t experts when it comes to snapping pictures and often it happens so that memories captured on a camera by novices suffer from minor shortcomings. Imagine not getting good results of a whole birthday party long pictures due to less light. Off course holding the birthday again is not an option. Thankfully help is available for the most novice user, for free. In my last post on Picasa 3.5 I wrote about the addition of facial recognition features in the application. Picasa 3.5 also has some very good photo editing tools which can be used to fix minor shortcomings in everyday photography. Some of the common photo defects are:

• Less light hence darker pictures.
• Red Eye.
• Pictures that are not straight.
• Color and contrast problems.

With Picasa these shortcomings can be easily remedied by anyone with a few clicks. The good part is that you do not have to be a Adobe Photoshop specialist to do this, besides since Picasa is free you also don’t have to spend extra money on buying a new photo editing suite not to mention its rather steep learning curve.

How is it done? Simply right click on the image from Picasa library and choose “View and Edit” on the right hand side you will be presented a Basic Fixes tab showing Crop, Straighten, Redeye, I’m feeling Lucky (Google?), Auto Contrast, Auto Color, Retouch, Text and Fill Light. Other tabs include Tuning and Effects. See the picture below.

As an example a photo with very less light was snapped and can been seen below, a light filled picture is also shown after that. The editing was done by simply moving the Fill Light slider to fill in the desired amount of light. In a similar way other effects can also be applied.

Before

After

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