I recently heard someone say they weren’t all that impressed with picasa, because photoshop can do everything picasa can do, and more.

This is completely true – picasa only does a fraction of what you could do with photoshop or paint shop pro – so why do I like it so much?

It’s easy! It would take me an hour to figure out how to get rid of red-eye using one of the big programs, but with picasa, I just click the red-eye button, and poof! Red eyes are gone!

It’s the one-click (or maybe two-click) ease of use that makes me love picasa as a photo editor.

The process I use to edit jewelry photos goes something like this:

• Crop the photo
• If the color is off, either use fill light, auto color, auto contrast, or in “tuning” the neutral color picker to click on something that *should* be white. One of these three usually gets the color back to nearly perfect.
• If I didn’t take the sharpest photo (I’ve been known to not use a tripod, despite being told a million times I should), then I use the sharpen function.
• If I’m feeling artsy, I might add a graduated shadow, or highlight one area of the photo by making the rest soft focus

That’s it! It takes me about a minute to do all that – but the amazing part is, I figured out *how* to do all that stuff the first day or two playing around with the program. I can’t tell you how many hours I’ve spent in paint shop pro or photoshop wondering which of the 500 menus I need to be in to do the seemingly simple thing I want to do.

Now – picasa is definitely not a replacement for either of these programs – if you want to do fancy things with layers, for example, or add a frame to your photo, I don’t think picasa will do that – but for fixing the most common problems with photos, adding text, and resizing, it’s my favorite program.

I’m going to post some tutorials here on how to do some basic fixes with picasa. Don’t be surprised if they are *very* short posts