I’ve taken thousands of pictures of jewelry. If you have perfect lighting (I never do), and a good camera that will take clear close-up shots, you can get a pretty good picture every time.
But what do you do if the light outside is *too* bright, and the light inside isn’t bright enough? This is a [...]

I am *sooo* proud of myself, I figured out how to do something neat with GIMP, all by myself!
I was wondering how to make a “transparency” – kind of like when you print an image on transparency paper, then glue it to a collage – except I wanted to figure out how to “paste” a [...]

One of the things I’ve always wanted to learn is how to do cool stuff to my photos. Alter them digitally, or alter printed photos, whatever – I’ve always been a little in awe of people who can take a photo and make it into a work of art.
Picasa has been great for me to [...]

Have you noticed my pretty new photo layouts? (Maybe you don’t think they are pretty – I happen to love them, but I’m kind of biased)
I made them using the collage function with Picasa 3.
It’s really easy to do! While browing your photos, click on one and drag it into the space at [...]

Yesterday’s cute baby photo is one that I edited on my ipod. There are some fun photo apps that cost anywhere from free to about $5, and I’ve been playing around with a couple of them.
I also love the happy, excited expression on his face, and thought the addition of some sparkles really added to [...]

Yesterday’s post is a photo I took of a single flower from an arrangement a friend gave me on my birthday.
I edited it to make the background black and white, which is a fun effect I’ve been playing around with for my jewelry photos too. Now that I’ve started editing, it’s becoming addictive!
I used the [...]

Today’s Picasa tutorial is really more of a tip. It’s something I try with most of my jewelry photos – the sharpen function.
You can find it under the “effects” editing tab, and if you click on it, it basically emphasizes lines in your photo.
It won’t fix a photo that’s really blurry, but if you just [...]

Here’s a neat trick I learned by accident playing around with Picasa: if you have a bunch of product photos taken on a white background, but in the photos the “white” looks more green, or yellow, or {insert color here}, you can fix it really easily!
Open the photo you want to edit, and click on [...]

Okay, now that I’ve told you why I love Picasa, and given you an overview of some of the things it can do, it’s time for a tutorial!
So, you took a photo, and it’s great except that there’s just way too much background, so your subject looks tiny. You need to crop that photo down.
Here’s [...]

The first thing you need to do is make sure you are using the latest version of Picasa, which at the moment is version 3. It is available for both Mac and PC (I use both, depending on if I’m home or at my part time job). It is free, you just download and install [...]