Picassa - wrangling order with photographs

[north-north-west]

Bah. I refuse to use any photo editing programme that requires importing and exporting images. To damn fiddly.

[tasadam]

The question is what offers the best bang for buck.

Perhaps, as a suggestion, a better approach would be to find out what is available, what they can do for you, which of these options is right for you, and whether you can afford it.
Then, if you cannot, look for a less expensive (or free) option, to get you by. Why settle for "bang for buck" if there is something out there that costs (or costs more) but does so much that you cannot get by practically without its features.

One really cool feature of PS CS5 is a thing called Content Aware.
Say there's a power pole sticking out from behind the head of someone in a digital photo. Use one of the selection tools to select the pole, then press delete. Up pops a menu, select Content Aware as the fill, and the program fills in the space with typical content based on the surrounds. Also works in white sections of sky if you do a panorama stitch that doesn't line up properly.
Not that I need this feature much, but the way it works is cool.
Sorry, getting a bit off track from Picasa, I'll leave it at that.

[corvus]

So that is how photographs can tell lies
corvus

[Ent]

Actually Corvus this is a good point. Back in the eighties a lot of proponents of "ray tracing", which is the bases for creating fake photographs were approached to testify at criminal trial hinging on photographic evidence to suggest that photographic evidence cannot be relied upon as it might well be skillful tampering instead. At that time the first artificial photograph had been created that many people thought was real.

The intended purpose of the thread was to show what a simple free program could do. If people chose to take this path and it leads them to more elaborate options then so be it. I find the feature to identify faces gives me the ability to quickly find walks that people are on and then if they request extract the photographs of that walk. One thing I have noticed is you have very few pictures of yourself on your own camera so it is good to swap photographs. Also something as simple as fill light can turn a "bin" photograph into a memento.

It is not uncommon for people to express sadness that photographs get lost or destroyed and the best way to avoid this is with a photograph cataloging tool. I take great enjoyment seeing people I know changing through life and Picasa has a very simple and powerful tool to do this. A relative asked my to extract photographs of their children to prepare an album for theor grandmother. By all accounts this album was a treasured item. Happy to help out and very pleased that Picasa meant it was an hour job rather than the many days otherwise needed.

On this and other threads it never ceases to amaze me that people using alternatives feel that I must convert to their alternative or acknowledge that it is "better". I have found Picasa excellent for what I require. The photographs sit unchanged in directories organized by date. This approach suits me. What is often not understood is a JPG when manipulated can lose information in the process. One option is to save the "corrected" version as well as the original but then you have two photographs. Picasa has but one with the adjustment settings stored away from the photograph. This means that if I feel the need to "improve" my photographic manipulation tools then I have but one photographs as taken at the time. And yes I break this "rule" myself and create multiple copes at times.

Picasa being developed by a large company is gradually improving so as time goes on I would expect the tools to get better. As mentioned right at the beginning the biggest weakness of Picasa is it first uses a basic raw to jpg converter and then plays with the jpg. The true power of raw imagines is achieved with an editor that directly handles them. Photoshop (well the version I played with) needed the raw imagine convert to a tiff format (or large JPG) which was massive even compared to the rather large raw imagine. I set my cameras up to take both raw and jpg as it is often simpler to copy the JPGs to people not interested in raw from the card itself without having to get to a computer to convert the raw to jpg. This means by default I have two copies of the photographs and this can be complicating but sorting by file extension I can quickly eliminate the duplicates.

Cheers

[biggbird]

I reckon it probably comes down to the tool you become most comfortable with.

I think is really what all of this comes down to. I (unlike pretty much everyone here, apparently ) use photoshop for all of my post-processing, basically because it's what I first started using, and consequently is now what I am most comfortable with. I heard all the talk about LR and how easy it was, how it streamlined everything... But when I tried it, it just didn't feel right! Went back to PS and was immediately much happier.

As for all the other stuff happening in the thread... Well, I was going to write about it, but now don't think it's worth it. Only thing I'll say is that as a (fairly) casual reader of the forums, it's much nicer to read threads without the extra to and fro.

[Onestepmore]

Just watch one thing with Picassa - if you join Google +, then make sure you take a peek at the photos it 'automatically' allows to be made public. Maybe I mussed up somewhere making albums to go on various forums (I'm a WoW player and we have our own website) - I saw some of these had been made public due to their web sharing ability. I had to go and manually change my privacy setting for a lot of individual albums.