Picasa Tip: Cut thru the Haze

Our motorhome is currently parked in Salem, Massachusetts. A little city park called Winter Island. We're using this home base to sightsee in the area, including Boston. For our day in Boston, we decided to take the ferry. Nothing better than a boat ride to start the day, and what a great way to see Boston for the first time! See our blog post on this wonderful day.

The weather was setting record highs ... 95 degrees, and there was a lot of haze or smog in the air. You couldn't even see the skyline of Boston until we were almost right on it! Not a good day for taking pictures.  I was glad I had my SLR camera with a Polarizing filter, that helps cut thru the haze a bit.  Jim has a little Nikon point and shoot (no filters) - I figured my pictures would be much better than his!

But with just a few clicks in Picasa - here's Jim's picture:

 



Here's what he did:

1. Basic Fixes: Straighten


2. Effects: Sharpen


3. Tuning: Increase Shadows*


4. Tuning: Increase Highlights*


5. Basic Fixes: Add Text

*I'm Feeling Lucky does almost as good, with one click, as increasing shadows and highlights.

• Tutorial Videos: Basic Edits


• Tutorial Videos: Picasa’s 12 Effects


• Tutorial Videos: Tuning


• Tutorial Videos: Adding Text to Pictures

The 'before' picture I wouldn't want to show anyone.  The 'after' picture proudly went on our blog!

This tip brought to you by Geeks on Tour

Geeks on Tour is a membership website with hundreds of Tutorial Videos on topics of interest to travelers, such as managing digital photos with Picasa, Route-Planning with Streets and Trips, and sharing your travels with a website using Blogger or with friends on Facebook. You can subscribe to our free e-newsletters, or become a paid member and be able to view all of the videos in the Learning Library.

Members may want to view the following tutorial video.  Not a member?  Join now.

•  Using Special Effects for an artsy-fartsy Miami Skyline


• Single Picture View

 

 

 

Picasa Tip: Printing options, White Borders

The following tip is taken directly from our brand new Booklet, Beginner’s Guide to Picasa. You can have the whole printed booklet, for $34.00(shipping included) including the tutorial videos on a DVD. Order Here.

Shrink to Fit:You might notice a white border that you don’t like. This happens when a photo has been cropped to a size which doesn’t match the ratio of the print size. (see ‘Cropping’ earlier in this booklet). You can change the setting from ‘Shrink to Fit’ to ‘Crop to Fit.’ (Tutorial Video: Basic Edits)



Crop to Fit: For some photos, crop to fit will work fine, but watch out for what is being cropped. In this example photo, it doesn’t work – it needs to be set to ‘Shrink to Fit.’



In either case, Picasa is showing you exactly what you’re going to get from the printer – a wonderful feature.

Printing captions on borders: From the Print screen, click on Border and Text Options and you will see the following screen:(Tutorial Video: Printing Photos)



In the Caption area, choose Captions and Below Image and this will print your picture’s caption in the white border below the picture.

This tip brought to you by Geeks on Tour

Geeks on Tour is a membership website with hundreds of Tutorial Videos on topics of interest to travelers, such as managing digital photos with Picasa, Route-Planning with Streets and Trips, and sharing your travels with a website using Blogger or with friends on Facebook. You can subscribe to our free e-newsletters, or become a paid member and be able to view all of the videos in the Learning Library.

Members may want to view the following tutorial videos.  Not a member?  Join now.

• Crop Size Options


• Add Captions to your Photos

 

Picasa Tip: Different ways to Save

If you've been reading these tips all along, you know that we advocate *not* saving. As long as you use Picasa every time you work with your pictures, you don't need to save. However, if you ever want to use your picture in another program; like Word, or Powerpoint, or a website - then it is important to know the different save options available. Here they are:

Save - File Save or right click Save.  Saves all edits to the file on disk - puts the original in a hidden folder called originals.

Save all Edits - same as File Save for all pictures that have been edited in the current folder.

Save As - Saves all edits to a new file, allowing you to give it a new name and/or location.

Export- Saves all edits to a new file in a location you specify.  Also allows you to resize.  This is the only way to resize. (Tutorial Videos: Exporting Pictures for Use in Another Program)

Save a Copy - File / Save a Copy ... duplicates the selected file, adds a number to the end of the file name.  Puts the copy in the same folder as the original.

Edit Copy - with one photo selected, Edit / Copy.  Now you can go to Word, or Outlook, or Powerpoint and Paste.

Each of these techniques is demonstrated in the Show-Me-How video at Geeks on Tour: Tutorial Videos: Ways to Save.

This tip brought to you by Geeks on Tour

Geeks on Tour is a membership website with hundreds of Tutorial Videos on topics of interest to travelers, such as managing digital photos with Picasa, Route-Planning with Streets and Trips, and sharing your travels with a website using Blogger or with friends on Facebook. You can subscribe to our free e-newsletters, or become a paid member and be able to view all of the videos in the Learning Library.

Members may want to view the following tutorial videos.  Not a member?  Join now.

• .How Picasa Handles Edits


• Embedding Web Album Photos Elsewhere on the Web

 

Picasa Tip: Make a Movie

Picasa 3 has a very easy way to take a bunch of photos, add a song you like, and create a movie.  All you do is select the photos you want in the movie and click the Movie button at the bottom of the screen.  Once in the ‘Movie Maker’ you can add a song from your computer’s music library.  It will even time the playback of the photos to match the length of the song.  You can also choose among several choices for the transition between photos.  Pan and Zoom is the default transition.



Show-Me-How Videos:

• Tutorial Videos Make a Movie


• Tutorial Videos: Movie Files from your Camera


• Tutorial Videos:39.Record a Movie from your Webcam

 

This is different from Picasa’s slideshow feature in that the end result is a single file – a .wmv movie file.  Once the movie is created, you can upload it to your Picasa Web Album, or better yet, to Youtube.  It’s a single click to create movie and upload to Youtube.  You must already have a Youtube account.  The .wmv file will playback on any computer with Windows Media Player.  If you want to play it on a TV’s DVD player, you need one more step.  In Vista there is a DVDMaker that comes with Windows.  Just open that up and add your .wmv file to it – then burn DVD.  If you’re on XP, you need some other software like MyDVD from Roxio. For Macintosh, I believe iDVD will do the trick.

The movie maker capability in Picasa is very basic.  For example, if you would like one song for the first 10 slides and another song for the remaining slides – it can’t do it – one song per movie … period.  Our favorite *free* program for making fancier slide show movies is Photo Story 3. (Tutorial video: download and install Photo Story 3).  It allows for many different songs on the sound track.  It will even create the music for you and make it end at the right place.  You can also add narration.

This tip brought to you by Geeks on Tour

Geeks on Tour is a membership website with hundreds of Tutorial Videos on topics of interest to travelers, such as managing digital photos with Picasa, Route-Planning with Streets and Trips, and sharing your travels with a website using Blogger or with friends on Facebook. You can subscribe to our free e-newsletters, or become a paid member and be able to view all of the videos in the Learning Library.

Members may want to view the following tutorial videos.  Not a member?  Join now.

Show-Me-How Videos about photo story:

• Download and Install Photo Story 3


• Make a Quick Movie


• Adding Narration


• Adding Music

 

 

Resizing Photo Files

When you email a photo using Picasa, the file is resized to something that is compatible with email.  Same thing when you upload a picture to a Web Album, the file is automatically resized to something appropriate for uploading to the web. (Member Tutorial Video: Upload Photos to the Web)

What if you just need photos resized for including in some other program?  Powerpoint, or Word, for example. You use the Export button for that.  Just select the picture, or pictures (as many as you want), that you want to resize and click the Export button.  You will have the option to specify a location and a size for the exported pictures.(Member Tutorial Video: Exporting Pictures for Use in Another Program)

This tip brought to you by Geeks on Tour

Geeks on Tour is a membership website with hundreds of Tutorial Videos on topics of interest to travelers, such as managing digital photos with Picasa, Route-Planning with Streets and Trips, and sharing your travels with a website using Blogger or with friends on Facebook. You can subscribe to our free e-newsletters, or become a paid member and be able to view all of the videos in the Learning Library.

Members may want to view the following tutorial videos.  Not a member?  Join now

• Resizing Picture


• Resizing a Batch of Pictures


• Resizing Pictures to Width and Height

Picasa Tip: A Picasa Plug-In for Live-Writer

This is actually a Picasa tip and a Blogging tip.  Many travelers have blogs (simple, instant, websites used as journals, photo albums, or opinion pages) to share their travels with friends and family.  Two very popular (and free) blogging platforms are Blogger, and Wordpress.  I use them both.  Blogger is the easier of the two.  Microsoft Live also offers a blogging platform on Windows Live and Microsoft offers a blog-writing tool called Live Writer.  See this video on Live Writer(member tutorial video).  The beauty of Live Writer is that it works for all the popular blogging platforms, not just Windows Live.

Although I like Live Writer a lot, I haven’t been using it for my personal blog (on Blogger) because I use a lot of pictures and the pictures come from my Picasa Web Album.  I use Picasa Web Album’s ‘link to this picture’ feature, and it just seems easier to do that while working in Blogger than with Live Writer.

UNTIL …

I discovered the Picasa Web Album plug-in for Live Writer!  How cool!  Now all my Picasa Web Album photos are available to me with just a couple clicks.  I am using Live Writer for all my blog posts now.

If you use Live Writer, you’re familiar with the Insert section of the sidebar.  This contains all the basic tools for creating links, photos, and maps.  If you look at the bottom of the list, you’ll see the option to Add a plug-in.  Click on that and you can spend hours perusing all the possibilities.  The one I’m talking about is called Picasa Image Plugin.  If you don’t see it in browsing around, you can search for Picasa.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed it, you will see ‘Picasa Link…’ in your Insert bar.  Click on that, enter your username and password for your Picasa Web Album, and in a couple seconds, you should see a list of all your albums.

Select the album to work with and you’ll see all the photos.  Adding a photo to your blog is as simple as clicking on the little left arrow next to the photo you want.  The picture will be inserted exactly at the point where your cursor is in your text.

You must be online

In my previous article about Live Writer, I promoted the fact that you can create your blog entries while you are offline.  This is a big reason to use Live Writer for travelers who don’t always have a good Internet connection.  But, to use this Picasa plug-in, you must have an Internet connection to your Web Albums.  You can always use the ‘Insert Picture …’ button to get photos from your My Pictures folder on your computer.  Then Live Writer will upload them to Blogger (or whatever Blog system you’re using.)

If you don’t have a blog now, then just stow this tip away.  The point to learn is that Picasa has gained support from lots of directions.  It’s good to be popular!

This tip brought to you by Geeks on Tour

Geeks on Tour is a membership website with hundreds of Tutorial Videos on topics of interest to travelers, such as managing digital photos with Picasa, Route-Planning with Streets and Trips, and sharing your travels with a website using Blogger or with friends on Facebook. You can subscribe to our free e-newsletters, or become a paid member and be able to view all of the videos in the Learning Library.

Members may want to view the following tutorial videos.  Not a member?  Join now.

• Embedding Web Album Photos Elsewhere on the Web


• Upload Photos to the Web

 

 

 

Picasa Tip: Search by Color

Maybe you need a nice flower, or scenic photo with lots of yellow to print on a birthday card. Or maybe you're looking for that great photo of Aunt Louise when she was wearing the bright purple dress.  Or, you're looking for that RED sunset that you took before you started using captions for identification?

Just click in the search box and type
color: red



When I search for Red, I get some flowers.  I also get a red car, red lobster, and red tshirt.  I don't know exactly how it does it, but you can see where it gets its color information by looking at the histogram.  That's the little multicolored propeller cap button in the lower right when a picture is being viewed in single-picture view.


I don't need this feature often, but it sure is cool when I do!  If you'd like to learn a bit more about histograms - a good starting point is this About.com article on Histograms.

This tip brought to you by Geeks on Tour

Geeks on Tour is a membership website with hundreds of Tutorial Videos on topics of interest to travelers, such as managing digital photos with Picasa, Route-Planning with Streets and Trips, and sharing your travels with a website using Blogger or with friends on Facebook. You can subscribe to our free e-newsletters, or become a paid member and be able to view all of the videos in the Learning Library.

 

Members may want to view the following tutorial videos.  Not a member?  Join now.

• Searching for Pictures


• Using Search to Create a Temporary Album