September 10, 2005
Picasa
If you've read the comments on many of my photos, you've no doubt seen me complain that my Olympus C-2040 Zoom doesn't fare so well in low-light conditions. Focus is often hard to obtain (I'm too lazy to try and manually focus using a digital interface), and when I abstain from using the flash I often end up with poor color. Google's Picasa to the rescue. Not only is it a phenomenal program for digital photo management, but its image-editing functionality is extremely easy to use. "I'm feeling lucky", an automatic all-around adjustment, works surprisingly well. It wasn't sufficient to fix a few problem photos of mine, but a bit of experimenting with the color tempature slider and the neutral color picker made considerable improvement to these pictures:
Also impressive is the speed with which you can flip through photos. Blows the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer away, which is acceptably fast in the foward direction but a dog in reverse.