Edit/Improve Photos – Page 2 – Learn Picasa and Google Photos!

Picasa Tip: Brighten a Selected Area of a Picture

Apr 262014

Have you ever wished you could use Picasa’s Fill Light tool on just a selected area of a picture? Take the picture at right as an example, the Lincoln Memorial in the background is perfectly exposed, but the two faces in the foreground are too dark to see. If you use Picasa’s Fill Light tool, you can make it so the faces are bright, but the whole picture is affected. The Memorial will be way overexposed.

If you upload the picture, using the “Share with Google+” button, you will have more editing tools available to you, including the Selective tool. Once the picture is showing on your Google+ Photo album, you can view it then click the Edit menu. If you are using the Google Chrome browser, you will then see the four basic editing tools and several “Creative Adjustments.” We’re using the Basic editing tool of ‘selective.’ This is similar to ‘burning and dodging’ in darkroom terminology. This feature requires the Google Chrome browser, it won’t work with Internet Explorer, or Safari.

Once you’ve chosen the ‘Selective’ tool, then you click on “Add Control Point.” In this example, I did it twice, once for each face. So

Add Control Point, and click on one face
Adjust size of selection to cover the face
Increase brightness by clicking on B and dragging to right
Increase contrast by clicking on C and dragging to right

When you’re done, click “Done Editing.” Now isn’t that better?!

This edited picture only exists online, in your Google+ Photos Album. If you want it on your computer, you’ll need to use the Download command.

Geeks on Tour members may want to review the videos about uploading pictures:

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, orbecome a paid member and be able to view all of the videos in the Learning Library.

Blurring Someone’s Face

Edit/Improve Photos, Picasa, Special Features 12 Responses »

Feb 282014

Q: I do therapy work with people and horses. I love taking pictures while the people are with the horses, but I need to preserve their privacy before I show the pictures to anyone else. When Picasa had the Creative Kit option, I would use the Focal Pixelate feature to make the faces unrecognizable. Is there a way to do that now with Picasa?

Melinda

A: You’re in luck! I have discovered a way to do this. On the last tab of editing tools, you will see a Pixelate option. That will pixelate the entire picture. But … if you hold down the shift key, you will notice that “Pixelate” becomes “Focal Pixelate!” Who knew?! Then, there’s one last step. “Focal Pixelate” will pixelate the entire picture except a circle around a focal point. What we want is to pixelate only a circle around a focal point. To do that, you click on the Reverse checkbox.

Now, you need to set the focal point to a face. You should notice that your mouse is a green crosshairs and wherever you click will set the focal point to that spot. Then adjust the sliders until the pixelation is strong enough to make the face unrecognizable – that’s the Impact slider. The Radius slider controls the size of the circle. Edge Hardness refers to the outline of the circle, it’s better to have it soften so as to blend with the rest of the picture. When it looks how you want, click Apply.

You can repeat this process if you have multiple faces that need to be blurred.

This feature can also be used to blur some text, just realize that you are limited to a circular area.

Creative Kit is Picmonkey.com

You might also want to know that all the features you knew and loved in Creative Kit are available in the online photo-editing website called Picmonkey. Teeth whitening, suntan, arrows, speech bubbles, hearts, mustaches, and so much more. Picmonkey allows you to edit pictures from your computer, Dropbox, Facebook, or Flickr

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, using Smartphones, 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.

Give your pictures a little Boost

Edit/Improve Photos, Picasa 1 Response »

Feb 062014

Have you ever played with the tools on Picasa’s last tab? There are a lot of fun effects here. The first one is called Boost. Just a single click will make your picture pop! Actually, it may pop so much it hurts your eyes! So, we recommend toning it down a bit by using the slider. When you first click on Boost, it increases color and contrast to the 50% mark on the slider. If you drag it back to 15 or 20% we think you’ll get a much more reasonable effect.

Too Much Color and Contrast

Take a look at this picture, it’s a bit overdone don’t you think? This is what you get with just one click of the Boost button. Notice the image of the slider, the strength is set right in the middle.

Too little Color and Contrast

This is the Original:

Just Right Color and Contrast

Now, here’s what it looks like if you click on Boost, but just back off on the Strength Slider a bit. I think this picture is just right. The grass is a luscious green, the sky is a sun-drenched blue and the shadows of the palms are more distinct. It makes the original look a little muddy by comparison, yet it doesn’t look too unreal. Just click Apply, and you’re done!

There are lots more fun and easy editing tools. If you are a Geeks on Tour Member, you can watch these videos that will demonstrate all of the editing tools:

This tip brought to you by Geeks on Tour

Bummer! Picasa’s Creative Kit is Gone

Edit/Improve Photos, Google+ 25 Responses »

Sep 152013

If you click on the button in Picasa to ‘Edit in Creative Kit’, today this is what you’ll see:

What was Creative Kit?

If you don’t know what Creative Kit was, here are some articles I wrote about the useful tools in Creative Kit that do not exist in Picasa3 proper. Now they don’t exist for Picasa/Google+ users at all!

Picasa Tip: Speech Bubble on Your Pictures (put text into a speech bubble right on your picture – using Creative Kit)
Picasa Tip: Merry Christmas Photo! (add clipart directly to your picture using Creative Kit)
Picasa Tip: Adding Lipstick (using Creative Kit’s ‘FacePaint’ feature to add makeup)

What is the Replacement?

If you have joined Google+, there is a new Edit button when you’re looking at a single photo. When you click it you get several photo improvement tools. Other than the ‘Selective Adjust’ which allows you to change exposure for selected areas of the picture, I don’t see anything that you can’t otherwise accomplish using Picasa3 on your computer. And, you must be using the Chrome browser for this new edit tool to work.

Are there other Options?

The Creative Kit button began as a plugin to the Picnik photo editing website that Google bought a few years ago. Some of the Picnik folks have gone on to create the websites PicMonkey.com, and Ribbet.com. Check ‘em out! The Ribbet.com website looks a lot like the old Picnik / Creative Kit with effects, stickers, text, and many more features. The basic tools are free, then there is a Premium version for more. The Premium version currently is free for a limited time. Ribbet can connect directly to your Picasa Web Albums / Google+ Photos, so it is almost like having the Creative Kit back – only better! The only drawback is that it’s not accessible with a button from within Picasa3 on your computer – like the old Creative Kit was.

Picmonkey.com has it’s own look and feel, but seems to include all the features you could possibly want for editing, enhancing, and embellishing your pictures. I also notice that it is integrated with Dropbox! Hmm, could this be a complete alternative to Picasa Web Albums / Google+ Photos. I know a lot of people who would love to have all the capabilities of online photo storage and editing without the need to be a part of Google+! If that is you, then PicMonkey and Dropbox are worth investigating.

Why did Google Make this Change?

We REALLY don’t know! The new Editing button is completely different … not an upgrade of what was there. The Google/Picasa folks don’t maintain any communication with us like they used to back in 2009 when they had us do a joint webinar with them. I think the team is all new people, and we don’t have a clue what their plans are. It’s been clear for quite a while that Google’s priority is bringing everything together under the umbrella of Google+. In fact, Creative Kit was getting so good, I was almost ready to say they planned to do away with the Picasa3-on-your-computer program and insist that you do all your editing online. But, the new online Editing doesn’t have anywhere near the features that Picasa3 has! We’re at a loss.

All comments are welcome!

p.s. Thanks to Ribbet’s facebook page, I did find a little more information on this article: Google’s Bet On Native Client Brings Chrome And Google+ Photos Closer Together. So now I understand that the change is because of a technology choice – my hope is that they will start enhancing these tools and add things like text and stickers and facepaint back in.

Picasa Tip: Crop to Zoom

Edit/Improve Photos, Picasa 4 Responses »

Aug 202013

This week’s Picasa tip takes us back to some basics of making pictures look better. Almost every picture can be improved with a crop. Crop can substitute for zoom. If you have a good optical zoom lens on your camera, you can bring your subject closer when you take the picture. If you don’t have that lens, you can crop the picture later to get closer.

Before Cropping	After Cropping

When you use the crop tool, you have the choice of ‘Manual’ so you can make it exactly as wide and high as you’d like, or you can choose a width/height proportion like 4X6, or Square, or 16X10 for HDTV displays etc. What you choose depends on the final destination for the picture. I chose 4X6 for all of the pictures above just so they’d be the same. Then you just drag a rectangle around the picture you want to keep and click Apply.

If you are a Geeks on Tour member, you can watch several videos that show different aspects of cropping as well as some other basic editing tools:

pics14.Basic Edits

pics14a.Crop Size Options

pics57.Resizing Pictures to Width and Height

pics86.Editing Example

Picasa Tip: Making Awesome Panoramas

Edit/Improve Photos 3 Responses »

May 302013

We’ve been in Colorado for the last couple weeks and we’ve seen some spectacular scenery. At the Red Rocks Amphitheatre, even my Cannon’s 18mm wide angle lens simply couldn’t take it all in.

So I decided I needed a panorama – multiple pictures taken from left to right that I could stitch together later with the computer. First of all, here’s a little tip: since this is going to end up as a very wide picture, you need as much height as possible. For that reason, I take the multiple pictures in portrait mode:

Using Picasa’s Collage to stitch the Panorama together.

In this past article, I wrote about how to use Picasa’s Collage feature to manually stitch these pictures together. Unfortunately, this just doesn’t turn out so well. You can see where the original pictures were taken by the difference in the lighting.

Using Windows Photo Gallery to Stitch the Panorama together.

Windows Photo Gallery is a free download from Microsoft. It is a photo management program, much like Picasa. There are some things about it that I like better than Picasa – such as this Panorama stitching feature. It doesn’t have some of my favorite features from Picasa though, so I have no intention of switching over from using PIcasa all the time to using Photo Gallery all the time. There is no reason why you can’t have both because they are both just tools that work on the pictures located on your computer. Think of it like taking your car to different mechanics that have different specialties.

To make the Panorama, I open Photo Gallery and find the pictures I took by navigating to their folder, then selecting them. You can select multiple pictures just like in Picasa, with the Ctrl-click technique. Once the 6 pictures are selected, choose the Create menu and Panorama, then just wait. The processing takes a minute, but it’s all automatic.

Once the stitching process is complete, you will be prompted for a folder location to store the resulting panorama picture. You should probably choose the same folder where the original pictures are located. In any case, as long as you choose a folder that Picasa is watching, when you open Picasa the next time you will see this picture that Photo Gallery created. You can then use Picasa’s tools to crop it, frame it, add a caption, add text on the picture, etc. etc. And, even share it by Uploading to Google+ / Picasa Web Albums.

On the Macintosh, Unfortunately, like Picasa, iPhoto does not have a panorama stitching feature and Photo Gallery is a Windows program. I have heard good things about Hugin, a cross-platform panorama stitching program.

Google+ Auto-Awesome

Earlier this month, Google announced some new features for Google+ Photos. One of these is called Auto-Awesome. The idea is that if you upload a series of photos that are recognized as being for a specific purpose, Google+ will automatically put them together. There are 3 specific purposes for a series of pictures:

Animation: a series of action shots. They will be put together as an animated gif.
HDR: a series of the exact same picture with different exposures. They will be put together into one HDR photo.
Panorama: a series of photos capturing one wide scene. They will be put together into one panorama.

I was very excited to hear this news and immediately uploaded samples of each type of series. My results were not so exciting. There is nothing you can do to make this feature happen. Your sole job is to upload the appropriate series of pictures and Google+ is supposed to Detect them and operate accordingly. I uploaded:

A series of my granddaughter in action playing WII bowling. I hoped that they would be put together as an animated gif.
A series of a mountain scene with 3 different exposures. I hoped that they would be put together into an HDR picture.
Two series from left to right for Panoramas, one of Red Rock Amphitheatre and another of Rocky Mountain National Park.

The results were disappointing. Neither the action series, or the HDR series were detected at all, and only the red rock panorama was detected. Even with Red Rocks, it only used 5 of the 6 pictures in the series to create the panorama. Auto-Awesome is only automatic, there is nothing I can do to specify pictures for the awesome features!

For now, I’ll stick to Photo Gallery for my panoramas, but I will definitely keep trying with the auto-awesome features of Google+. After all, it was just released this month, I’m sure there will be some improvements ahead.

Geeks on Tour Members might also want to watch the tutorial videos on how to make Collages,

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.

Picasa Tip: Pick Text Color from Picture

Edit/Improve Photos, Special Features 6 Responses »

May 082013

We just visited a beautiful place near Mobile, Alabama called Bellingrath Gardens. As you may have guessed, there were lots of beautiful flowers there and I used Picasa’s Collage tool to put several of them together into one picture. Then, I wanted to type the words, “Bellingrath Gardens” on the resulting collage.

When you first use the text tool, you may not notice that you can choose any color you want for the text itself. And when you use the Collage tool, you also have the ability to set a custom color. You don’t need to limit yourself to White, or Black. (Geeks on Tour Members can learn all about using the text tool in this tutorial video: Adding Text to Pictures)

The Color Palette

When you click on the color options for text (or background, or borders) you will immediately see a color palette and you can then click on any color of the rainbow by using that color palette.

The Color Picker

But, what I think is even better, is that you can pick any color you see on your screen! Notice that your cursor changes when you’ve clicked to change a color. Your arrow, or pointer, becomes a little eye dropper icon. That’s called the color picker. It means you can click on any color and it will pick up that color and use it for whatever object you are coloring. So, in my flower collage, I want the text of Bellingrath Gardens to be that bright yellow from the flower in the lower right corner. First you click on the circle to the right of the solid T – that indicates you want to specify a Text color. Now, your cursor becomes a color picker, move your mouse over the area with the color you want – you should see your text change color even as you just hover over the different areas. When you get the color you want, click.

The same is true anywhere that colors can be specified. For example in the background of a collage, or the color of a border. Wherever you can specify a color, just click on the color control, your cursor becomes the color picker, and you can click on any color you see on the screen.

Geeks on Tour Members might also want to watch the tutorial videos on how to make Collages,

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.

Picasa – understanding why you don’t have to save your work

Edit/Improve Photos 5 Responses »

Jan 192013

Picasa is different. With most programs, we teach .. Save, Save, and Save often. With Picasa, we teach – Don’t Save!

This is important for maintaining the quality of your photos. Usually your photos are .jpg type of files. These type of files are compressed. Every time you re-save them it goes through the compression process and you lose some quality. This is called ‘Lossy’ compression. If you want to understand it, I found this good article on the .jpg format. Basically, every time you make a change and re-save a .jpg picture, you are degrading the quality of that picture by one generation. If you crop it and save, you’re 2d generation. If you then add some fill light and save again, your picture is now 3d generation, and on and on. Think of making copies of copies and you’ll get the idea. Although the amount of degradation is invisible to the human eye on the computer screen – it will make a difference if you ever want to print your picture. The example of the purple flowers is an extreme example and you’ll need to click on the picture to see the difference.

Picasa does not allow you to overwrite your original photo. When you make edits, Picasa stores them in its picasa.ini file. When you look at a photo using Picasa you are seeing thru the eyes of this .ini file – with all the edits you made – but your original remains untouched. When you print, or email, or upload, or export – Picasa applies the edits on the fly so you see what you expect. Using this technique, your end result will never be more than 2d generation. If you do use the save command Picasa will save your original in a hidden file, thereby duplicating the amount of space taken up on your computer.

Our recommendation is: Don’t Save! Let Picasa do it’s thing. Use Export to create pictures for other programs to use.

Geeks on Tour Members will want to watch the following videos on this topic:

How Picasa Handles Edits: Non-Destructive Editing
Ways to Save
Exporting Pictures for Use in Another Program
Resizing Pictures
Resizing a Batch of Pictures
Resizing Pictures to Width and Height

This tip brought to you by Geeks on Tour

Geeks on Tour is a membership website. There are lots of tutorial videos on editing your pictures with Picasa’s tools. The first 3 are free for all to view. To see all of them, you need a Geeks On Tour membership. It’s only $7/mo or $58/yearly. Join Today!

Picasa Tip: Get Creative and Play with your Pictures

Edit/Improve Photos 1 Response »

Jan 112013

With Picasa’s Image Processing tools and text tool, so much is possible! Most people barely touch the surface of these simple creative tools. I was just playing around with this picture of a pretty orchid:

And I think I came up with something worthy of a greeting card, or a poster, or a book cover:

The real joy is how easy this is … just keep clicking on the fun tools available. If you don’t like what happens, click Undo! If you do like what happens, try some more!

The Features I used

First I cropped close to the flowers and, thinking of the Rule of Thirds, I put the flowers on the left side of the image. See member video Basic Edits
Saturation – on the third tab – makes the colors more vivid
HDRish – on the fourth tab – this is like a super-sharpen and gives the image some depth, almost 3 dimensional. See member video HDRish = Super Sharpen
Cinemascope – right next to HDRish – this mellows the coloring and adds the top and bottom black bars.
Text – it’s a good idea to save the image before adding text because the positioning is more stable then. I entered one line of text “a thing of beauty” and selected the AR JULIAN font. (selecting a font among the hundred+ available was the most time-consuming part of this!) I chose a font color by clicking on the purple in the flower, and I used the same color for the font outline. Then I clicked again to enter a separate item of text for “Is a Joy Forever” and I chose white as the font color, leaving the outline at the same purple.
See member video: Adding Text to Pictures

Try it. Just keep playing until you have created a thing of beauty! Then you can use the File->Order Prints command and make a poster for your wall, or the cover for your picture book, or a t-shirt. Or use it for a post on Facebook, or a greeting card sent by Send Out Cards, or the home page of your blog or website.

This tip brought to you by Geeks on Tour

Picasa Tip: Merry Christmas Photo!

Edit/Improve Photos 1 Response »

Dec 252012

note 9/15/2013: Creative Kit has been discontinued.

Jim and Chris, here at Geeks on Tour, hope you had a fabulous Christmas. We know you took lots of pictures, and you’ll have even more fun editing them in Picasa!

Here’s a picture we took of the tree at Jim’s sister’s house. The original is on the left, the edited version is on the right. Below the pictures is a list of the editing features I used.

Border with corner radius at the max and caption height increased. Outer color picked up from the dark green in the tree, inner color from the red around the bottom of the tree,
See this past article about Framing photos.
Color boost for even more color than saturation can give
Graduated tint to darken the upper part of the picture
Text tool used for ‘Merry Christmas’ entered in the caption area created by the border
Santa hat added by using ‘Edit in Creative Kit’ which takes you to the web where there is a ‘decorate’ option. You’ll usually find ‘stickers’ for the current holiday there.

Hope this gives you some ideas! Have Fun. And … Happy New Year!

This tip brought to you by Geeks on Tour

Older Entries Newer Entries