New Picasa Effects

Google's free photo editing program Picasa recently had an update and has some new effects! It looks like they're some of the same effects from Picnik. They're pretty cool and super easy to use. I thought I'd give you a little example of what some of them can do. Here's my original picture of some blooms we came across this Easter.

See the new tab here? The picture on the tab is green.

And here? This other new tab has a blue picture on it.

On the first, green tab here are some of the effects you'll find.

Row 1: Infrared Film on the left and Lomo-ish on the right

Row 2: Holga-ish on the left and HDR-ish on the right

Row 3: Cinemascope on the left and Orton-ish on the right

Row 4: 1960s on the left and Cross Process on the right

On the second, blue tab you'll find several effects including these:

Top Row: Boost on the left and Vignette on the right

Bottom Row: Focal Zoom on the left and Pencil Sketch on the right

There are also a few "frame" options including the Polaroid effect:

I'm looking forward to using some of these effects!

I'm having a blast at these lovely linking parties. 

Time To Live February {Picasa Photo Collage Tutorial}

About a month ago I shared a post about the collages I'm creating every month with pictures I'm taking every day (well, almost every day)...Time To Live. I also have a page with all the collages I've created so far and a description of the collages. I'm enjoying taking the pictures, but looking back at the last month is even more fun! Here's the collage for February. It's a little snapshot into our life in February.

Last month I used Photoshop to create the collage, but this month I wanted to do it a little differently and then I remembered the Collage feature in Picasa. 


It was actually easier that what I did in Photoshop, and I like the result a lot better than January's collage.


First, I cropped the photos and added the dates to all the photos. This is something you can easily do in Picasa. I'm not going to going into the details of that here, but please feel free to email or leave a contact if you need help with this step. :-)


Once I had all my pictures edited, I started on the collage. Here's how to do it:


All your pictures for the collage should be in the same folder.


Go the library in Picasa, find the correct folder, and select the photos you'd like in the collage. Then, click the "Collage" button near the bottom of the screen.

Picasa will take you to another screen where you'll choose the type of collage you'd like to create.

Then, you should choose the size of the collage.

You can move the pictures around by hand or simply shuffle the pictures (using the "Shuffle Pictures" button) until you get them where you want them.

Once everything is arranged how you'd like it, click the "Create Collage" button in the lower right hand side of the screen.

You'll get this screen while the collage is being created.

Your collage will automatically be saved in the "Collages" folder under "Projects" in the Picasa library, but if you'd like to save the collage somewhere else, you can do that too. Click on "File" and then "Export Picture to Folder..."

That's all there is to it! Let me know if you have questions, and I hope you have fun creating some photo collages. :-)

I'm having a blast at these lovely linking parties.