Your thoughts on Picasa?

[Matt Green]

Are any other members using this post editing and storage program?, and are there any other free to download programs that are better?

I've been using a simple Kodak compact (hopefully soon to upgrade to digital SLR) to take pictures of mostly landscapes and architectural subjects with mixed results, most of my pics have had some treatment with picasa ranging from simple sharpening and lightening to effects overload!!

Here are some of my results so far...please feel free to criticise!

Matt

[Snowyowl]

Try Freestone. I prefer it to picasa. I don't have link but a quick Google will find it.

[greypoint]

I use Picasa as a downloading program - it does have some useful tweaks for editing though. Photofiltre is a good free editing system - just google it - easy to use but it has a lot more options than picasa.
Nice results from your kodak by the way!

[sassan]

Not sure about FreeStone that Dan is referring to but I remember the very good program I heard about it from Christine called "FastStone". Here is a link to the site and download LINK. First download, Viewer is what I am talking about. Rest are useful downloads too.

Matt; Picasa is the best program out there you must have, especially if you are to start post processing as beginner or just need to have a good organization of your images on your computer. It also gives ease of sending several images at right size etc by email. In short it offers too much for nothing that I am surprise why they give it free. Thanks to Google and hope your stock price go even higher (Only regret, not to buy them when first came out at $70 a share). Of course my other complain is that it is not available for Mac (To the best of my knowledge) so poor mac users need to suffer as usual. Well back to Picasa, that was my gate way to photoshop that is inseparable part of my photography today, but still I enjoy using Picasa for fun of it.
Here is download LINK to Picasa if anyone needs.

[greypoint]

And don't forget Irfanview - still the one I use for viewing, re-sizing and sorting photos and free of course. Let's hear it for freeware!

[Birdsnapper]

Try googlin 'The gimp' - just about the best bit of free software you can get.

[Tony_photoplus]

Ok, Gimp and PhotoFilter are photo software, were as Picasa, Freestone, Infranviewer are viewers with tweaking of pics. I use Picasa and XnViewer, the reason is I can simply use it with my camera and I can link with PS, Gimp or any other program I desire. If you are looking for a photo program free Gimp is an excellent program (although I was disappointed with the new version 2.4 as it hailed to be more than what it actually delivered) and the other free goody is Piant.Net. Paint.Net is an excellent freebie and I highly recomend it as a serious software for enhancing photos. I am hoping to get my website together soon and all links will be on there.

I don't use any websites to download pics as like many here have there own websites to proudly exhibit their own pics in their own way.

[Snowyowl]

Faststone/Freestone! Same thing after all what's in a name? I did mean Faststone.

[Snowyowl]

I have used Gimp and Photofiltre and both are excellent substitutes for PS. My main complaint about Gimp was the lack of a manual. My experience was that it was a very user unfriendly program (worse that PS).

[Tony_photoplus]

Try this if you haven't already..
http://www.getpaint.net/
But what didn't you understand about PS and Gimp? Gimp can be very unfriendly agree, so here are some links if you still want to get a handle on it

http://athena.nucleares.unam.mx/~fed...-the-gimp.html

http://www.freecolormanagement.com/c...r_manager.html

http://www.gimp.org/downloads/

http://registry.gimp.org/index.jsp

http://gimp-plug-ins.sourceforge.net/

http://www.gimptalk.com/forum/board.php

http://plasticbugs.com/

http://design.rainharbour.net/resources.php

You can download the Gimp manual as an extra download from the gimp site