Editing Photos - Picasa!!!

Alrighty, we all have a zillion photos from our shiny new digital cameras. I would like to share with you my methodology for processing and sharing those photos. As many of you know, Picasa3 (www.picasa.com) is my favorite photo editing and management program, and I bug you all to use it. Whenever I get a new batch of photos to edit, I run through 9 very quick and easy steps:

1) Import: Import the photos into your "My Photos" directory, or wherever you save your pics. Picasa has an import tool, but I prefer to do this manually.

2) Correct: Click on the new folder so that all of the pics are selected. In the menu, click "Picture", then "Batch Edit", then "I'm feeling lucky". This auto-corrects white balance and colors. Pictures ALWAYS look better after running this. Give it a moment to update your thumbnails.

3) Describe: Give your folder a very descriptive name, and type in a little blurb about the event(s) in your folder.

4) Remove duplicates: Time to go through the photos. Double click on the first photo. For duplicates, pick the best one and delete the others. If you keep more than one, make sure that there's a compelling reason.

5) Crop, crop, crop! For me, 99% of these photos will only be seen on a computer screen. They will look better if you simply crop out all of the unnecessary stuff so that the things you want to see will be BIGGER. Focus on the faces. Don't be afraid to crop into other aspect ratios, but I would recommend nothing taller and skinnier than a typical 4x6 portrait. That means that you should shoot for 4x6/3x5 aspects, square, or something panoramic.

Picasa3 has face detection technology, so when you click the crop button, it gives you 3 suggestions of different cropping around the face in your pic. The suggestions also tend to automatically exclude the boring stuff, like the monochromatic elements at the edges around your subjects. The suggestions are not perfect, but they make editting easier and faster.

6) Finish: Apply other finishing effects to the photos. There's one click stuff for other effects like sepia or b&w, red eye reduction, and even simple retouching. Not strictly necessary, but can be great to mix it up a little.

7) More describing: Add captions for as many photos as you can. Photos tell a story, but they don't always say everything that needs to be said.

8) Feel lucky, again: Select all the photos again (your cropped, captioned, tagged, de-duped photos, hopefully!), and re-run the "I'm feeling lucky" edit from step 2. Whenever you crop or apply effects to a picture, that can change how the white or color balance looks, so if you re-run this, the pictures will probably look just a little bit better.

9) Upload! Click "Sync to Web" to share the photos. It may ask you to set up a google account for this if you don't have one. Once it finishes uploading the pictures, click the "Web Albums" button and send the link to your fam and friends or put it in your blog. Because of the "sync" feature, if you make changes to the picture (changing captions, retouch, crop, etc...", it will automatically update the web album too!

Voila! You are done! I hope that helps you save your memories.

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One last step that I like to do is click the "save" button (to commit your updates to the pic). Don't worry - ALL edits are undo-able, even saving. Normally, picasa effects are "applied" to the original photos each time you view it, so when you view in Windows or Photoshop, you wouldn't see you changes. This last step will make every app show your nice pics the same way that Picasa does, and will make them ready to archive.

See this page for more tips, including tagging, geotagging, gift CDs, Flickr, and keyboard shortcuts.

One last thing, it just came out for mac, and it plays nice with iPhoto. Check it out!