While many people using a mouse,  some prefer keyboard shortcuts; this list shows Picasa’s key board shortcuts and should prove useful as you import, organise, edit and share your travel photographs:

Shortcuts for selecting photos

• Ctrl-A: Select all photos in a folder/album
• Ctrl-D: Deselect photos
• Ctrl-I: Invert photo selection
• Home: Select the first photo in your folder/album
• End: Select the last photo in your folder/album
• Ctrl-H: Hold selected photos in Photo Tray
• Ctrl-O: Choose a file on your computer to display in Picasa

Shortcuts for viewing photographs

• Ctrl-1: View your photos as small thumbnails
• Ctrl-2: View your photos as large thumbnails
• F11: Use Picasa in full-screen mode
• Ctrl-4: Start a slideshow
• Ctrl-5: View your timeline
• Ctrl-Enter: Locate the photo file in Windows Explorer
• Hover over a photo and use Ctrl-Alt: Full-screen photo preview

Shortcuts for editing photographs

• Ctrl-3: Open an image in ‘Edit Mode’
• Ctrl-R: Rotate the image clockwise
• Ctrl-Shift-R: Rotate the image counter-clockwise
• Ctrl-Shift-H: Flip image horizontally
• Ctrl-Shift-V: Flip image vertically
• Ctrl-Shift-B: Add black and white effect
• Ctrl-8: Add a star

Picasa Keyboard Shortcuts is a post from: mp3travelclub.com

Sharing photographs from Picasa is quite straightforward and the video shows  how to use several methods (the hyperlinks take you to the little bits of software which you need to make it happen) :

• Picasa Web Albums – Google’s own photo sharing site – a built in facility
• Email – interfaces to Outlook and gmail, which allow you to control who can view the photos ( logged in gmail recipients only, recipients and people they send the link to and public)
• Facebook – Facebook albums which are similar to Picasa Web Albums
• Flickr – a favourite photo sharing site
• Bloggr – Google’s blog platform already has a Picasa button
• WordPress blog – this plugin will hep you install a Picasa-to-your-WordPress-blog  button

If there are any other sites you want to upload to, then comment below and we’ll try to find something for you

Bonnes Voyages

James

Sharing Photographs with Picasa is a post from: mp3travelclub.com

Making movies or videos with Picasa is very simple – select the photos for your movie.  Put them in order and ten simply click the Movie button next to the Photo Tray.  If you’ve selected a folder or album, you can use the “Create Movie Presentation” button in the folder or album header.

You can then use  the Movie, Slide and Clips Tabs to adjust

• The audio
• Transitions
• Slide duration
• Slide overlap
• Captions on/off
• Full frame autocrop
• Add text to the any slide (and adjust the font, colour, size and style)
• Add a new text slide for the title
• Add or remove photos from the movie
• Drag and drop photos  in the filmstrip at the bottom of the screen to change the order in which they appear.

After all that, you have the option of creating the movie and saving it on your hard drive or creating it and uploading it directly to YouTube.

Bonnes Voyages

James

Making Movies with Picasa is a post from: mp3travelclub.com

Some of the most useful features of Picasa are not very well known.  This video shows you where to find them  and how to use them:  So you don’t have to watch the whole movie  to find out wht is in the video:

• Contact sheets – how to produce a page of thumbnails – useful for ordering prints after a family occasion or office event
• Resizing – All pictures can be resized into standard print sizes or custom sizes
• Collages – not only useful but fun and can make the fridge door much more interesting
• Ordering prints online – how to upload your photos from Picasa to photo printers
• Printing Your Own – if you have a good printer and the right paper, this can be a more convenient option

Bonnes Voyages

James

Useful features of Picasa is a post from: mp3travelclub.com

Picasa’s Effects Tools won’t add much to your travel photographs, but they can be fun for your party photographs or whatever.  From the sake of completing  out Picasa video series we’ll cover them anyway, so here they are :

• Sepia – like a photo from the 1890s
• Black and White – what it says on the tin
• Warmify – can warm up a photograph or you can use Colour temperature under the Tuning tab
• Film Grain – add a ‘grainy’ film look to any photo.  The effect can be subtle, but it looks great when you print.
• Tint – strips out the colours and then adds back one – use the Colour Preservation slider to control the depth of colour
• Saturation – use the slider to control colour saturation between black and white and what Picasa calls radio-active!
• Soft Focus – softens the focus except for a chosen area in the photograph
• Glow – brightens the white areas of a photograph
• Filtered B&W – mimics the effect of using black and white film and a colour filter
• Focal Black and White – turns all but a chosen area to black and white
• Graduated Tint – applies a colour tint in a graduated way

Bonnes Voyages

James

Picasa’s Effects Tools is a post from: mp3travelclub.com

With one exception, Picasa’s Effects Tools are not very useful for travellers, but the “Sharpen Tool” really is very important.  In digital pictures, edges can become pixellated and change the colour captured by the digital camera.  As a result, there is a transition between two large areas of colour which looks blurred to the human eye.  Picasa’s Sharpen Tool corrects this effect.  This video explains why almost all digital photographs can benefit from some sharpening and has a short demonstration of a picture being “sharpened”

Bonnes Voyages

James

Picasa’s Sharpen Tool is a post from: mp3travelclub.com

In this video, we explain the reason for Picasa’s complex photograph  tuning function – eyes and camera are different and so sometimes see the same scene in different ways.  Camera designers and photographers talk about colour temperature and colour balance.  Colour temperature is a way of describing the nature of light in a scene being photographed.  Candles and Light Bulbs have a yellowy-orange light, fluorescent lights have some blue in them, while daylight includes more and more blue as the sun rises and this is emphasised if the scene is watery or snowy.  at the extreme colour temperature is that bluey light you get when you watch TV in a darkened room.   Cameras have algorithms to gauge the colour balance; these algorithms have to trade off speed for accuracy and sometimes the resulting picture is out of balance.   Picasa provides tools for bringing the colour balance back to a natural looking colour temperature – firstly you can adjust the colour temperature directly or you can use the neutral colour picker.   Direct adjustment allows you to play around until you find something you like, while the  neutral colour picker allows you to show Picasa a gray or white spot to re-balance the colours against.    But if this is all too complicated, don’t worry – just use the automatic complex photograph tuning button.

Bonnes Voyages

James

Complex Photograph Tuning with Picasa is a post from: mp3travelclub.com

The Simple Photograph Tuning functions of Picasa allow you to compensate for the difficulties of making cameras automatic.  You can adjust the levels of light in the bright parts of a photo, deepen the shadows and there is also a more advanced ‘Fill Light‘ function (more advanced than the function under Picasa’s Basic Editing tab).  The video shows these photograph tuning functions being demonstrated on several photographs and explains the use of Picasa’s Histogram

Bonnes Voyages

James

Simple Photograph Tuning with Picasa is a post from: mp3travelclub.com

One of the Basic Photograph Editing techniques in Picasa is Retouch.  The Retouch tool allows you to choose a “brush” size and then pick up an area of a photograph that you’d like to place over another.  Combine this with some other editing tool (eg MS-Paint) and you can do some nice retouching to get rid of damage to photographs (such as though you might find in the attic of a dead grandparent), little mistakes you’d rather not remember (the video shows an example) or ketchup stains on the bride’s dress!  The video above shows how the retouch tool work with a worked example.

Bonnes Voyages

James

Basic Photograph Editing in Picasa III – Retouch is a post from: mp3travelclub.com

The video above shows some more the basic photograph editing facilities of Picasa including:

• Auto colour – correcting photographs for difference between eye and lens/camera
• Text – adding text to other
• ‘Fill light’ – adding light to the foreground of an overexposed picture

Bonnes Voyages

James

Basic Photograph Editing II with Picasa is a post from: mp3travelclub.com