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I'm not a connoisseur of photo-editing software: I usually send my (non-digital) films off to Tripleprint and get a cd which has some editing features on it. All I know is this one - Picasa 2 - is free and much better than the Tripleprint freebie.
********DOWNLOADING
You can download Picasa 2 from http://www.picasa.com/. There's a grey box in the top right corner that cordially invites you to try Picasa for the first time or upgrade ...
...it did indeed download and install in seconds. It puts a shortcut on your desktop and an icon in your toolbar-thingy at the bottom of the screen (although you can opt out of this too).

*********SET-UP
When you open Picasa it offers to search your computer for pictures, and then, once it finds them, it arranges them neatly for you in folders at the left-hand side of the screen. The arrangement doesn't follow the folder arrangement ... more

I'm not a connoisseur of photo-editing software: I usually send my (non-digital) films off to Tripleprint and get a cd which has some editing features on it. All I know is this one - Picasa 2 - is free and much better than the Tripleprint freebie.
********DOWNLOADING
You can download Picasa 2 from http://www.picasa.com/. There's a grey box in the top right corner that cordially invites you to try Picasa for the first time or upgrade from Picasa 1. I currently have wicked fast broadband so it did indeed download and install in seconds. It puts a shortcut on your desktop and an icon in your toolbar-thingy at the bottom of the screen (although you can opt out of this too).

*********SET-UP
When you open Picasa it offers to search your computer for pictures, and then, once it finds them, it arranges them neatly for you in folders at the left-hand side of the screen. The arrangement doesn't follow the folder arrangement - what I mean is it seems to separate out subfolders and put them in random places. Nonetheless, it does make pictures easy to locate, and it instantly displays thumbnails of the pictures in whichever folder you select.
There is a facility for importing pictures from a digital camera but I haven't used this as I ain't got one: my pictures all come from cd.

********SORTING AND EXPORTING
At the bottom of the screen there is a section with some options for, well, sorting and exporting your pictures. On the left is a kind of holding area: selecting a picture makes it appear in that box, then you can click on 'hold', select a few more and create a collage, by clicking on 'collage' for example. One type of collage sticks your pictures to a page and makes them look like polaroids. The only thing here is that while you can decide which goes on top, I can't seem to move the 'snaps' around on the collage. Bit pants (did I mention it's free?) The bar at the bottom also contains the icons for rotating your pictures. There's also a little icon at the far right of the screen that displays 'histogram and camera information'. I have no idea what this means.

********EDITING
This is the fun bit. Double-click on a picture and it gently glides into the screen. There are a lot of features under three tabs at the top left of the screen:
****BASIC FIXES
You can:
**crop - click and drag to select the chosen area
**straighten - straighten up those drunken party shots
**redeye - add redeye to your pictures - just kidding
**'I'm feeling lucky' icon - the download is sponsored by Google - this does random things to your pictures, as you might expect
**auto-contrast - this provides what the program feels are corrections to the contrast in your picture in, I found, a somewhat indiscernable way.
**auto-colour/color - same applies.
**fill-light - now THIS is useful for those shots where the flash didn't work or didn't work enough - my graduation pictures, for example, taken from a distance in a unfeasibly dark auditorium, benefitted from the light this feature gave. Like it.

Incidentally, in my experience, it's hard to tell when the changes have been saved. Initially I played with a bunch of pictures then discovered I couldn't get back to the originals. But when I opened them with 'my documents', there they were. I still have to figure this out, but it was a little panic-inducing to have blurred my sister-in-law out of a picture and not be able to get her smiling face back. There is an undo function too, and you can 'undo all edits', so I guess that's a way out of accidentally erasing people.

****TUNING
This set of tools has to do with the light and colour of the picture:
**fill light - sneaky - seems to be a repeat of the same feature in 'basic fixes'.
**highlights - tones up the light parts
**shadows - tones up the dark parts
For both of these, if you select it, a scale comes up so you can choose how light/dark you want the relevant parts to be.
**colour-temperature - this seems to add more warm(red) or cool(blue) tones to the picture. So, I had a picture taken on rather a dull day and it makes the picture seem like it was taken on a warmer day by adding reddish hues.
**neutral colour picker - this goes over my head. Hovering over any feature on the screen causes an explanation to pop up: this one says it 'allows you to pick a neutral grey or white part of the picture to remove colour cast'. Marvellous: what does it mean?

****EFFECTS
This is my favourite part of the programme. The tools are fairly self-explanatory for the most part:
**sharpen
**sepia (brownish tint, like an old photo)
**B&W
**warmify (those Americans just love making up words) - this is like the 'colour temperature' feature but a shortcut to a warmer picture
**film grain - makes the picture look a bit speckly.
**tint - you can give the whole picture a hue of a particular colour which you can choose
**saturation - increases the colour density (or something) - almost makes it look animated if you take it to the end of the scale.
**soft focus - blurs the picture around a central spot that remains in focus - you can change the point that's focused, the size of the focused spot and the degree of blur (my degree of blur is fairly high after all this typing).
**glow - or the 'Katie Holmes in Dawson's Creek' effect. Worked well on a picture of my baby niece (aah).
**filtered B&W - this makes a picture look like it was taken in black and white with a colour filter (which you can choose).
**focal B&W - a central circular spot (size and location chosen by you) remains in colour and the surrounding area is black and white - this is nice if you have a central object and the background is fairly uninteresting.
**graduated tint - this fades up into a colour of your choosing. Not sure when I'd use this.

********OVERALL
There are other features I haven't mentioned, but you can discover, such as 'slideshow', and emailing possibilities, but generally I'm very pleased with this freebie software: evidence of this is that I've done barely any work since I downloaded it (ask my students). The program has a nice smooth, clear appearance on the screen and is easy to use.
I'll try and attach some example pictures to this review, to show you how I've 'experienced this product'
Thanks for reading!
 

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