Google Picasa 3 and Windows Live Photo Gallery are software programs that you can use to view and edit your personal photographs. These photo editors are not full-featured, professional image editing software programs. If you want a free, professional-grade image editor, you're better off with the open-source image editor, GIMP. Picasa and Windows Live Photo Gallery provide simple and automatic tools that ordinary people can use to quickly and easily edit their photos without a lot of technical expertise. These programs are very similar on the surface, but when you explore the features in greater depth, you can see they are not created equal.
Google Picasa 3 will run on Windows XP, Vista or Mac OS X version 10.4.9 or greater. There are special versions of Picasa 3 for Linux and for Windows 98, ME and 2000.
Picasa's interface allows you to browse images in your picture library and select them for editing. The image editor opens automatically when you double-click on a picture. Picasa has tools such as crop, straighten, redeye, auto contrast, auto color, retouch and text. There is also an "I'm Feeling Lucky" tool which will correct your pictures automatically. In the main interface, you can access the "Fill Light" tool. There are two additional tabs in the image editor, labeled "Tuning" and "Effects." "Tuning" provides access to the "Fill Light," "Highlights," "Shadows" and "Color Temperature" adjustment tools. There is also a "Natural Color Picker" in this tab. The "Effects" include basic effects such as "Sharpen," "Sepia," "Black and White," "Warmify," "Film Grain" and "Saturation." "Undo" buttons appear on the left as you make changes to your image.
You can easily save your edits by clicking "File" and "Save." For best results, you should select "Save As..." and give your image a new file name. This preserves your original image for future editing.
Picasa has no built-in help files. Clicking "Help" and "Help Contents and Index" at the top of the screen will open a browser window with online help pages on the Google website. However, the online help is quite comprehensive and well organized.
