Picasa 3 for fashion bloggers (or anyone really)

This isn't a 'what I wore' post. You get to see plenty of those if you are a fashion blog follower anyway. I'm so excited to tell you that Picasa 3 is here to save you all fashion bloggers who don’t have Photoshop(or anyone who would like to do some cool things with photos). Let’s face it. You don't need a hefty image editing app like Photoshop to do a simple 'inspiration board' (fancy term for fashion scrap image) or image collages. Photoshop used to be my bread and butter so it isn't a big deal for me but personally I prefer to use a lighter program such as Picasa for simple blog image preparation. Photoshop is a very resource intensive and sometimes it slows down my computer. This is really for you, Marian from the House of Style and Miss Cav who were asking about how to do some simple editing.  I’m not going to write a step-by-step guide as I’m a firm believer of ‘learn by playing’. Here’s a list of things that Picasa 3 can do (which Picasa 2 couldn't). Oh before I forget - Picasa 3 is only for windows users. Oi, Mac people you have iPhoto.. I'm sure you're quite happy with it. Aren't you?

1. Text manipulation– Add text to images and move it around. This thing takes a bit of practice if you’re used to Photoshop (or Fireworks) but it's a lot simpler in Picasa and it’s faster as well!
2. Collages – Picasa 3 comes with 5 different kinds of collage options with a much greater control. You can scatter photos around or line them up neatly. Whatever takes you fancy.
3. Borders – Have you ever wanted to add simple white borders around your photos? Or a Polaroid effect? Picasa 3 does it for you automatically. No more layering business in Photoshop.
4. Screen captures  – Windows Vista has a nice Snipping program for screen captures but with Windows XP I always had to open a separte image program to save screen captures and edit. Not anymore! Picasa stores all the captures - ready to be cropped and manipulated. So much quicker and easier.

Full list of Picasa 3 features are available here. It's free of course so download Picasa 3 from here. There are many other functions such as creating a CD with a slide show and it also claims to make a movie. Now it’s up to you to play with those funky features but I’d definitely start with some simple image corrections such as cropping, colour balance, and level (light). Any questions? Just shoot me a mail at songyknox at gmail dot com. As some of you already know I like helping non-geeks and I’m pretty good at it too.  {click each image to see bigger me}

In case you’re wondering I was wearing all black today. Thinking of military looks with a jacket from Zara or an anorak from Target. That leather bag was a steal at $20 from ebay. The boots are from Wittner shoes.

Update: Seeker followed my advice and tried her first collage. Marian now adding text in her pictures. Silje is also using picasa for pictures.  After this post, I had series of other pictures prepared in Picasa. Go to the home page and check them out from the latest post and happy image editing in Picasa :).