Pyat endorses....

[pyat]

Picasa, Google's free image editing software, seems to work quite well. I'm very impressed.


Mostly, it's good at turning poorly exposed, dark, or unevenly lit photos into nice shots.


For example, this photo of anidada, from Geeksgiving 2006. Nothing wrong with it. It's not a very interesting shot, I fear, too dark and poorly composed.


However, a couple of clicks in Picasa substantially improve it!


Or, this recent photo of velvetpage, which is already quite good if I do say so, myself.


A bit brighter, a bit sharper, and a bit more colourful.

Comments

[kianir.livejournal.com]

Beware the perils of photo editing!

Your automatic camera is already auto-exposing and auto-color correcting. Brightness in particular, if cranked up too much, will bring out JPEG/CCD artifacts in the shadows and wash out bright spots. And saturation can make your pictures much more Crayola than need be.

Not to say it doesn't have its place, but a light touch is best.

[pyat.livejournal.com]

*Nods*! Indeed!

[kfops.livejournal.com]

The trick often is not to adjust the brightness so much as the levels. Often the image has more colour information than you can see, it's just that it's smashed together at one end or the other of the spectrum. The software will often allow you to fiddle the levels to "stretch" things back.

The big thing is that Picasa has allowed you to take photos you weren't overly happy with and bring 'em back into Pyat goodness!

Indeed

[pxtl.livejournal.com]

I'm a huge fan - it's like a home version of those apps they have at the department store. Fast, easy cropping, sorting, redeye, etc. Love it - except for a few things - the scrolling sucks, and the only way to fullscreen is to go into slideshow mode, which isn't a perfect replacement for fullscreen browsing (lots of slideshow-isms creep in). My wife's a shutterbug and I'm a packrat so we've got folders full of hundreds of images of which only 3 are the ones we really really really want so it's nice to be able to keep track of which ones were good enough for printing without mucking about with folders and whatnot.

Only major catch is that I use Flickr, and it's not too compatible with it (Google is of course pushing their own version of Flickr, so that's to be expected). No tags, and I gotta export to a folder and use it with Flickr Uploadr