09 Edits Collages Exports with Picasa

Now that you have all the keepers organized into easy-to-find folders it’s time to think about the final product. There are probably still too many pictures for a trip or family history to easily view in one sitting. An album of the best pictures tells the story best. Those are the pictures I will edit; it is too time consuming to edit all pictures.

Let’s get started. Go to the folder of pictures you want to use. Double click a picture and the edit window will open on the left side of your screen.

Most of the basic “fixes” are under the wrench tab. Fix the red eye first, then straighten and crop. You can do a manual crop to get exactly what you want to view. I like to do a 16:9 HDTV crop so it fits perfectly on a TV screen. I’m feeling lucky is Picasa’s best guess at a color and lighting fix. Retouch can be used successfully for small blemishes. The text option is a very versatile tool for putting captions anywhere on the picture. There can be as many captions as you want. Adjust their size, color, tilt them, etc.

On the settings tab you can play with highlights, shadows, and fill light. Highlights often help when there’s not a lot of bright area in the picture. Shadows often help contrast, especially on black and white pictures. Color temperature can soften an image or document with a little brown tone. Here you can again play with the one-click fixes to see if Picasa can do better than you.

Now for a few of my favorite fixes under the next three knife tabs. Sharpen works when the picture is only slightly out of focus. Be careful not to get it looking too grainy. Sepia, tint, and warmify can soften and colorize a picture. You might want to do this when adding a black and white to a collage with a color picture. Soft focus can be used to focus on a central area, such as someone’s face, while blurring the surrounding area. And finally add single or double borders to a picture and adjust their widths. One feature I really like is the vignette. This creates a soft or blurry border with your choice of color, width, and intensity. I often use this where I want the picture to fade into the background color of a collage. There are many other “fixes” under these tabs; play with them and find ones that work for you. If you don’t like a particular fix, there’s always a tab to undo the last fix, and then the previous one, and so on backwards until you have a totally unedited picture.

Collages allow you to place one or more pictures into a single image: side-by-side, overlapping, tilted, re-sized, or picture-within-picture. If you don’t like the cropping of a picture in the collage, you can re-edit the picture and it now appears in the collage with the new cropping. Adjust the color background with Picasa’s palette or just point to a color in one of the pictures. Collages are great for individual sibling pictures, before and after pictures, or two vertically oriented and related pictures that now fill the screen. Captions can be anywhere, not just on the body of a picture. Use the collage for a single picture where you want to put a lot of text underneath or to the side of the picture. Access the collage feature under the create tab upper left. Or create a quick access button at the bottom center: just right click to the right of existing buttons and you have a choice of additional ones.

After editing a picture or creating a collage, right click the picture and add to an album, either new or existing. All albums will appear in Picasa’s library under albums. Remember, everything you have done up to now is virtual. The edits and albums are only visible through Picasa, they do not exist on your computer. The upside is that you will always have an unaltered picture in your library. After previewing the album and adjusting the order of pictures by drag and drop, you are now ready to export the album. This creates a new permanent folder of the album with all your edits. Such a folder is not dependent on Picasa for viewing. To initiate an export select and right click the album and select all pictures. Now hit the export button at the bottom. In the popup box it will show the destination for this folder under “my pictures, Picasa, exports”. Create additional folders under exports to better organize your exported albums such as travel, family history, grandkids, etc. Also in the popup box you should choose original size and check the box to preserve order. Now if the exported pictures are not in order, simply sort on name.