I've been a bit absent in blogland for a bit. Em and I have been under the weather, and I'm just now feeling back among the living. Thankfully, Em felt well enough to go back to school today, and I took the opportunity to get some much needed sleep. That's pretty much all my body wanted to do today.
Anyway, I'm probably SO late to the party, but I wanted to share that Google now has Picasa 3 available for download. I've been using Picasa for a couple of years now. I mostly use it as a photo viewer, and maybe do some quick crops and photo-editing with it. It's not a bad program, actually a pretty cool little software program that's FREE and gives you a lot of bang for your buck. Well, a friend alerted me to the fact that there is now a beta version of Picasa 3 available and boy, does it have some cool new features. I haven't even begun to explore them all!
There's now a retouching tool, the ability to create and edit movies, you can add text and watermarks onto your photos and so much more. Seriously, check it out at Picasa.
And while the old Picasa version had some collage features, this new version has some totally improved collage features. I was playing around tonight and created these:
The Picture Pile Collage - very cool with so many options to reshuffle your photos, tweak individual ones, adjust the background color and so much more.
The Mosaic Collage - lines up everything neat and square; you can choose the width of the grid lines, the color, you can frame each photo in a polaroid type of frame....
You can also do the mosaic collage with a central photo that's more prominent:
And here's one with actual photos:
You know how handy this little tool will be to make calendars? Actually, I spend a lot of time making mosaics like these for birthdays, anniversaries, mother's and father's days - you know, using pictures from the past year of that person or couple. Well, this will make that so much easier now!
I think I'm in love..... and yes, I know there are other programs that can do stuff like this, and yes, I know this will never take the place of Photoshop, but for a very user-friendly program that can do a lot for FREE, you can't go wrong with Picasa 3. If you've got the 2.7 version, uploading to the new version just takes a second, and you will be able to start using it immediately.
Sorry for the infomercial today....back to your regularly scheduled programming! :)
This is so funny, I actually just downloaded this yesterday and I agree, I LOVE IT!!!!!!!! The collage capability is just awesome, I'm not sure where it is that I can create a watermark though, could you point me in the right direction if you have the time?
Have a great day!
Jen
Posted by: jen davis | November 12, 2008 at 07:40 AM
Looks very cool Linda! Glad you and Em are feeling better.
Posted by: Lisa Dorsey | November 12, 2008 at 08:05 AM
Wow! I love cool stuff like that! Thanks for sharing!
Posted by: betsy sammarco | November 12, 2008 at 02:19 PM
Very cool! Thanks for sharing that information!
Posted by: staceymichu | November 12, 2008 at 05:26 PM
wow, that PIcasa.. .looks fun... love those collages!
Posted by: Kim FAucher | November 12, 2008 at 05:45 PM
Awesome, I'm going to check it out right now!
Posted by: Danielle (vtpuggirl) | November 13, 2008 at 02:31 PM
very cool. i m a ps junky so I never tried picasa but I may have to for the movie editting
Posted by: lily goldsmith | November 14, 2008 at 06:12 AM