Photoshop is $700. Picasa is free. You definitely get your moneys worth – but for most of us Picasa is “good enough”. Welcome to my primer on how I can use Picasa in a pinch to clean up portraits at my local camera club shoots.
This is Picasa:
This is some photographer during a test shot. My camera has a few dust spots (or hair) either on the lens or the sensor. The file was shot in JPG but RAW can be modified as well.
Crop using the first option in the “Basic Fixes”. Too much white space on either side of the subject.
Straighten if your photo needs it. Just push the slider left or right. Little explanation is needed:
Red-Eye Reduction: Picasa is pretty good at finding it – but portraits rarely need it when you’re not using on-camera flash.
Retouch: Use the Retouch command to get rid of any dust spots or wall blemishes that detract from the photo. It’s also a god-send for getting rid of acne, scars or even wrinkles. Don’t get carried away though or it’ll start to look like a cover of Cosmo. Click first where you want to get rid of the dust spot. Then click another part of the (clean) wall to clone/retouch. Don’t like freckles? Get rid of those as well. Zoom using the slider at the bottom.
After hitting Apply, you’re now looking at a photograph that can viewed by a client. A few other settings I can play with to give the photo a little more “pop”:
Add Highlights, Fill Light and shadows if you didn’t have the correct camera settings when you took the photo. Definitely something you should correct on-set when you have the lighting, but mistakes happen.
Also if your White-Balance is off, try finding something in the photo that should be white and setting that as your base. Select the Eye-dropper (under the Color Temperature slider) then select something that should be perfectly white. It should correct the colour balance. Otherwise just play with the “Colour Temperature” sliding it to the left or right if your photo looks to warm (orange) or cold (blue). On a portrait, the colour balance should be Flash and rarely am I fiddling with temperature.
Otherwise I don’t touch the Effects menu in Picasa. To each his own though.
