How to editing Pictures to Look Better

What do you call the era when Kodak, one of the biggest names in the world of photography, stopped making their analog film related products?

One might call it the dark era of photography. Others might say it's the era of digital photography. While the second label is more like it, I nevertheless prefer to call it the era of the amateur photographers. Why?

These days, creating photos using a digital camera is as easy as blinking your eyes. And with the endlessly growing capacity of memory cards that are soaring to bigger gigabytes, it's so easy to fill up your hard disk with thousand of photos in no time. 'Shoot now, think later' That is the spirit.

Problem is, not everybody is blessed with an eye for good pictures. Of the hundreds of photos that we take at any given time, maybe only less than half can be classified as good. More efforts are required: editing your pictures to look better. But managing thousands of pics on your hard disk is harder than going over just one or two picture books.

So we definitely need help here. We need something that can do both: editing pictures fast and easily and making the huge photo collection manageable. Oh, and one more thing, it has to be free.

Being a digital Picasso

Well, stop fretting! Help is here. The nice people at Google offer you Picasa (version 2 already), the free, easy, and powerful picture manager and editor. Judging from the name, we can assume that Picasa is capable of making you a modern age Picasso digitally. Interested? Picasa is about 3,2 MB. You can download it from this site http://www.google.com/downloads/

And here are some of the features you can get:

- Organizing. Basically this job is done automatically. All you have to do is put your pictures there. But you can get more power using the menu Tools -> Folder Manager

- Editing. Use the feature "I'm feeling lucky" to get all the editing features working automatically.

- Saving all your work to CD effortlessly. Just click the Gift CD button

- Picture Collage. This is my favorite feature. Use this to make a picture consisting of a collection of other pictures. It's in the menu Create -> Picture Collage

- Sharing. There are a few options to share pictures. You can send your pictures via email, Instant Messenger, or Blog. All can be done easily.

In general, unless you are a professional artist, Picasa is more than enough to cover all your imaging needs. It's free and powerful, so what are you waiting for? Go get it.