Sunday, October 3, 2010

Thing #6 - More Image Mashups

Of course, right after posting my month's quota of images on Flickr, I find a program that lets me give my photos some badly-needed touching-up.  Perhaps next month I'll be able to put a few of those up for display on Flickr, then.

The program I'm talking about is Picasa (or, to be more precise, Picasa 3).  I've used Photoshop extensively at work, so I have GIMP on my home computer (since GIMP sells itself as an Open-Source Photoshop alternative), but it really didn't do what I needed it to as far as correcting my bad camera lighting for my photos.  Picasa, though, touched them up exactly as I wanted it to, and then re-saved them to my desktop.  The downside of being able to do this is that it's not an online program, but a downloadable one, which you have to put onto your computer to use, and can't access from anywhere.  The other downside I've found so far is that it can only edit certain file types =\  namely, it can't even open PNG files, so I had to convert all of mine to JPG first in order to edit them.  Regardless, I'm very happy with the results it's gotten on my photos, which tend to be way too bright if taken outside, and way too dark if taken inside.  I really love the "Auto-Contrast" feature (I do in every photo-editing program I've used) as far as brightening up colors and picking out details go.  Despite my deep and growing mistrust of Google, I have to admit, they're conquering the world for a reason: they've got good products, and they usually offer them for free.

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