Google Picasa 3.5

Unfortunately, I had no luck fixing high contrast photos. Picasa provides three sliders to adjust exposure, but using them is a one-way street. You can increase the Fill Light, brighten Highlights, and darken Shadows, but can't go the other way. When I exposed details in the shadows, I overexposed highlights. When I toned down bright spots, I shrouded my subjects in darkness. A proper color corrector is also needed, as Auto Color and the Natural Color Picker (kind of a white balance fixer) don't always work suitably.

The wow factor

There are several things that make Picasa stand out. I love the Collage feature, which automatically arranged my photos into a designed or messy layout, which I could then fine-tune. Movie Maker lets you make basic movies (including time lapse) and slideshows. While it doesn't provide nifty prefab themes or Charlie Brown music to create slick productions (and it exhibited some bugginess when moving photos around the timeline), it does the job well, and the caption feature is especially useful.

For photo sharing, Picasa integrates with Google's own Picasa Web Albums, which gives you 1GB of free Web space, unlike paying $99 a year to integrate iPhoto with MobileMe. Once you sign up for a free account (you'll need a Google account), you can upload photos, slideshows, and movies to your Picasa Web Albums site. Even better, you can sync Albums and Folders with your site to automatically keep your online and offline collections in sync anytime you edit a photo, add images, or delete them. Your visitors can view your latest adventures, play slideshows, leave comments, make collages and movies of your photos, and order prints. Sure, Picasa Web Albums doesn't have the eye candy of MobileMe, but I don't really miss that.

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