Digital Tips Today

Note you can get to the edit screen by double clicking on a photo or by right clicking and selecting “View and Edit” from the popup menu.  The Edit Screen will open and show the photo in a larger size.  Note there are arrows above the photo which allow you to scroll forward and back through the photos in that folder.  On the left you can select from a group of editing features.  If you click on I’m Feeling Lucky it will automatically adjust the color and exposure. 

On the left there are 3 tabs for the editing features.  The Basic Fixes allow you to Crop, Automatically adjust Color and Contrast, Straighten and add Fill Light.  These work very intuitively and cover most of the simple edits needed for adjusting your photos.

Once you have downloaded and started Picasa it will go out and find all your photos. The Picasa Main Screen is an easy and intuitive way to manage your photos.

When you begin using Picasa you should take a minute to familiarize yourself with the Main Screen. The largest area is made up of thumbnails of your photos. You can scroll up and down through all of the photos and it scrolls automatically from one folder to the next. In the lower right corner is a slide bar which allows you to size the thumbnails up and down. You might want to size this down to search for a folder of photos of a topic – perhaps last summer at the beach or a series of flower photos. You then might slide the slider to the right and enlarge the photos when trying to locate a specific photo.
Once you click on a photo it is selected. You can see what is selected in the lower left corner of the screen. You can select multiple photos by holding down the CTRL key and clicking on each photo you want to select. You might want to select a group of photos to copy or print them – but more on that later.
On the left hand size of the screen is the list of folders that have been found by Picasa with photos in them. These can be displayed in a list or in a tree structure. There are two buttons above this area which toggle between those two display formats. The drop down list allows you to select how you want the folders ordered. I like to see my folders in a Tree Structure, sorted by Name.
Finally in the upper right part of the screen are ways to located and filter the photos. You can find photos containing a specific word in the folder, description, caption or filename. You can also filter them to find only the starred photos. These capabilities become more powerful as you identify your photos when you upload them.

If you aren’t familiar with Picasa you are in for a wonderful surprise. First of all it is FREE! And it works great for managing and doing simple edits for many, many photos. I have over 40,000 photos and it allows me to easily keep track and find the photos that I want to work on.

If you are over 30 you probably have a lot of non-digital photos. And for most people they are still in the envelopes and stuffed in a box or drawer where they are not only accumulating dust they are slowly fading away. Now that even most grandmothers have a digital camera and perhaps a digital photo frame it would be nice to have some of those old photos to look at and and preserve. And the only hope that your children and grandchildren will keep them may be to get them scanned to a digital format to share with them.
I know I was guilty of this problem. I had decades of photos of my children growing up and of my parents and other relatives who are no longer with us. I did not want to lose these images. While they are certainly not photographic art they are precious memories to me that I want to preserve.
So I was delighted to find a website, ScanMyPhotos that would scan 1,000 photos for only $49.95!  I know from personal experience it would take me many weeks of scanning photos to scan that many photos!  And it would never get done.  They have an even more affordable option where they send you a priority mail box to fill with as many photos as possible and they pay the postage.

I immediately set to work gathering up my old photos and putting them on some kind of order, elminating duplicated and disasters.  Even just this task took me the better part of a week to prepare about 2,000 photos for scanning.    I also ordered the photo index book which printed a thumbnail of every one of my photos.

I must say I was delighted with the results.  Browsing the book is like watching my children grow in fast forward.  I made copies of the disks with the photos to send to my sons and they browsed them all too.

I’ve been teaching some classes on digital photography recently. I have come across some great books and there is one that I would especially recommend for the amateur photographer who wants to make the most of their digital camera. Digital Photography, The Missing Manual by David Pogue is just what the doctor ordered. He writes for layman, he never uses technical jargon. He gives great, simple tips on photography and goes through all the necessary steps to load photos into your computer, how to organize them and how to print and share them using Picasa and iPhoto.
Note you can order this book at Amazon.com http://www.amazon.com/David-Pogues-Digital-Photography-Missing/dp/0596154038/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1243098337&sr=8-1