Last week’s column regarding printing your digital pictures online generated many emails.  Some responded by suggesting other sites and many recommended various ways to improve your photos before printing them.  Several people wrote asking how to remove redeye from a photo before printing it.  Today we will look at software that will allow you to edit your photos and make them a little better before you print your photo album.

There are many software packages out there which will let you do this like Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro and others.  However, if you are like me you don’t have the hundred or hundreds of dollars to spend on those programs.  So something a little more “pocket friendly” would be appreciated.  You may have even gotten some type of photo-editing software included with your digital camera and it may be all you need.

However, if you didn’t get one of those applications with your camera never fear, there are many other freebies out there.  The two that I most highly recommend are Picnik.com or Picasa.

I have mentioned Picnik here before which is basically a free graphics editor.  It can do many of the basics in photo editing plus some of the not so basics.  It is free unless you want more advanced editing features. If so, you can pay $24.95 per year.  Also, Picnik is in the cloud, meaning all online and you do not have to download anything to your computer.

Picassa is the one that I use most and is owned by…guess who.  Yes, Google. Can you believe that?  I can since they appear to be taking over the web/computer world more each day.  I will tell you more on that another time.

Both of these programs do very well when doing basic editing of your digital photos.  Basic editing includes such features as; resizing, rotating, cropping, adjusting exposures, color saturation along with the “biggie”, getting rid of “redeye” in your subjects, etc.  In other words there are many things available, some you may use often and some that you may never use. No matter which, there should be enough to keep you busy.  Once again, this would be for the average photo taker.  If you consider yourself a advanced amateur or professional then you will want to get something more heavy duty with more functions.

If you would like to see my vacation photos, some of which were edited in Picasa, go to http://bit.ly/lJgaF (case counts in this link).  Let me know what you think of Picasa’s photo storage and sharing features.  You can also comment on each individual photo if you have a gmail account and the time.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, July 14th, 2009 at 6:34 am and is filed under Columns. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.