Moving on from Picasa

Davy 90

Davy 90

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Edit My Images
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Hi all, new here and first question..

Having done a quick search nothing specific came up quickly... so apologies if this has been done to death on the forum.

I'm currently using Picasa for my photo organisation, tweaks and uploads for sharing. I've some Photoshop skills but I like the speed and ease Picasa lets me adjust shots for basic stuff and then easily upload the results to share with family and friends. I find that I can get through a weekend's photos reasonably well within a couple of hours.

I also like the Picasa interface as it is light, quick and works well on my laptop. I also like the fact it seamlessly leaves the original image alone and then saves the tweaks elsewhere - although so far I've not looked into backing up the tweaked files, just the originals.

I find that this covers about 90% of my needs as most of my pics are of the kids - its the 10% of my photos which I want to work on further which have lead me to here..

Occassionally I'll print something out via snapmad.com in which case I'll bypass Picasa and wrestle with GIMP - this has been reasonably sucessful but was very slow and fiddly and resulted in multiple copies of the same image.. I can manage basic RAW stuff and am familiar with levels and curves and a bit of unsharp mask fiddling..

So to my question, I'm looking at PS Elements 9 to get more involved with post processing images (particularly sharpening which is a bit ropy in Picasa) - will this deal with my workflow described above and can it integrate with an online pic sharing provider (ie. picasa) so I can quickly tweak and share the 90% of my simple pics whilst enabling me to get more involved as required?

Hope that lot is clear..

TIA

Adrian
 
Nikon View NX2 is a free download and includes Nikon Transfer.
http://nikoneurope-en.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/47426/p/42/c/649/r_id/150284
View NX2 will allow you to edit your NEF & JPEGs and will give you better results than Picasa but you will have to learn how to use it.

There are 3 videos here: http://www.video.bhphotovideo.com/ you need to enter NX in the search box.

The 1st deals mainly with Transfer with a bit of View NX2 at the end
The 2nd deals mainly with View NX2 with a bit of Capture NX2 at the end
The 3rd deals with Capture NX2
 
Both Lightroom and Elements 9 might do what you want, LR is a catalogue as well (perhaps closer to Picassa) while elements has an organiser.
It might be worth while trying the demos of both and see which suits your needs best.
 
The Organizer in elements is a very poor Image organizer (dam tool) compared to others.

Also try out ACDSee 12 Photo Manager as it is similar to picasa but a lot better in my opinion.:)
http://store.acdsee.com/store/acd/en_US/DisplayProductDetailsPage/productID.178981500?resid=A@jvoAoHAtUAAGsj9c8AAAAF&rests=1297666850547

Also if you do not need the raw editing capability of Lightroom then it is overkill and over expensive for what you want and it is not the best Dam program out there if image managing and searching are your criteria.
 
Last edited:
Suvv said:
Nikon View NX2 is a free download and includes Nikon Transfer.
http://nikoneurope-en.custhelp.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/47426/p/42/c/649/r_id/150284
View NX2 will allow you to edit your NEF & JPEGs and will give you better results than Picasa but you will have to learn how to use it.
Click to expand...

I've got View NX2 as it came bundled with the camera and I use Nikon Transfer to upload pics from the card to the computer. I find NX2 really slow in providing simple previews (Picasa is super fast in comparison).

I went through a phase of shooting RAW but have returned to high res JPEG to take advantage of the in camera sharpening which compensates for Picasa's lousy sharpening abilities... would like to return to RAW for all the obvious reasons..

At some point I'll look into Lightroom and PS Elements demos - was fiddling with a version of PS6 (:eek:) I have on an office pc last night and found that even that provided reasonable unsharp mask tweaks compared to Picasa.

Thanks for all the replies. :thumbs:
 
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