Picasa Tip: You’ll Flip for this Tip!

 Edit/Improve Photos  6 Responses »
Feb 182015
 

201308-001Picasa lovers out there have an endless source of simple tools for enjoying our pictures. I’ve been using Picasa for 10+ years now, and this ‘kaleidoscope’ effect never occurred to me. My friend, Vicki Wassenhove, from the Quad Cities Computer Society and their Digital Photography group had an assignment to use a given picture and improve it in a way that would prompt the question: How Did I Do It?

 

 

When I saw Vicki’s wonderful collage, I had to give it a try! With this original picture, Vicki created several works of art!

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She started with a simple picture of a flower, cropped it and made 4 copies. Then she flipped the copies, one had to be flipped horizontally, one vertically, and the third needed to be flipped both horizontally and vertically. Picasa’s command to flip horizontally is Ctrl-Shift-H (Cmd-Shift- on Mac) and Ctrl-Shift-V to flip Vertically. She put all 4 pictures into a square Collage, and voila!

Original
image		 Flip Horizontal
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Flip Vertical
image		 Flip Horizontal & Vertical
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And my picture, displayed at the top of this article, started with this original:

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For more information about flipping pictures, see this past article: Flipping Photos.

Geeks on Tour members may want to watch these tutorial videos. If you’re not a member, you can Join Now!

  1. For cropping in a perfect square: pics14a.Crop Size Options
  2. For making multiple copies of picture: pics14d.Ways to Save #140
  3. For making collages (8 videos): pics73.Picasa Short Course: Collages and Banners
  4. For adding a frame/border: pics24d.More Effects 31-36

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: Flipping Photos

 Edit/Improve Photos, Picasa  12 Responses »
Mar 192009
 

Someone recently told me that he had some old slides scanned and some of them came out backwards. Think of a photo like:

mirror1

It’s kind of useless like that! He asked me if Picasa could flip the photo so it would read correctly. I thought a minute about how a click of the clockwise arrow would rotate a picture 180 degrees, but I couldn’t think of how Picasa could actually flip a picture so that mirrored text would read correctly.

Fast forward a couple days, and we’re here at a big RV rally giving our Picasa seminar with over 500 people!! One attendee, Frank Geister, came up to me later and said, “Let me show you something cool I’ve discovered about Picasa and collages ….” It was a cool tip, and I might share that with you in a future post, but what really excited me was in our continued conversation he mentioned a keyboard shortcut for ‘Flipping’ a photo. I asked him to demonstrate that one!

All you do is click on the picture (either single click, or double-click) and hold down the Ctrl, Shift and hit the H key … Ctrl-Shift-H … is the command to Flip Horizontal (Command Shift H on Mac). Here’s the result:

mirror2

And, check out the list of all the keyboard shortcuts for Picasa.

THANKS Frank! I wish I knew who it was that asked me the question in the first place 🙁 Maybe he’ll read this post!

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.