Picasa 2

I have always been one to use Photoshop any time I had to do anything picture related. Even simple straightening and cropping of photos. Recently I've been scanning in several pictures to put to a video slideshow for a memorial service and was NOT looking forward to taking every image into Photoshop to crop and straighten. In my quest to find a free simple program that would do such things I remembered about Google's free photo program called Picasa. I already had it installed on my computer but never really used it. So I updated to the latest version and opened it up to see what I could do. I love it!!! For simple tasks it is the fastest and easiest ever! SO much easier than Photoshop because there are both 'straighten' and 'crop' tools. You straighten (and adjust) a bunch of photos, then when you're done, you can save your changes. Picasa will save your original unaltered file in a hidden folder and replace your adjusted picture in place of the original. That made it super easy to straighten, crop, and color correct pictures without the hassle of opening them all in Photoshop and doing them manually one by one.

The final slideshow turned out really nice. I did it in Adobe ENcore DVD which has a nice 'automatic' slideshow feature. Although I did have revert back to CS2 to make it work. The program kept crashing when I would try to build the final project and burn a DVD using Encore DVD CS3. I almost had to revert to using Microsoft Photo Story 3 or Wondershare DVD Slideshow Builder. Each are nice and easy, but quality is not nearly as good as Encore DVD.