Photoshop Lightroom Arrives, Picasa Retired

Well, we finally got a copy of Photoshop Lightroom. After extensively testing Picasa as a photo catalog, we're here to report that -- for FREE -- it's an awesome application. Its photo re-touching tools, while limited and rudimentary, worked for most of the photos we took over the past 3-6 months.

Overall, Picasa ranks as one of the best applications we've used, free or for purchase, photo-centric or not.

It's one slick piece of software!

Now, in the next few days, we'll open the shrinkwrap on the Lightroom disk and hope it offers all (and more, of course) that the beta did way back when we gave it a try.

The GIMP

I've decided I'm going to give the GIMP a try. I've grown tired of Adobe Photoshop's ever-increasing cost and complexity and Photoshop Lightroom's cost. I'm looking for less for a lot less. I don't need (yet!) any fancy stuff. I've been using Photoshop Elements and find its image editing features to be solid, yet its photo cataloging abilities to be sub-par.

As far as I know, GIMP offers little, if any, cataloging/tagging/metadata capabilities. But that's okay because I've also been using Picasa, which is FREE, easy, and -- so far -- bulletproof.

So I'm going to begin using Picasa and the GIMP together to see if I can't rival something similar in functionality to Photoshop Lightroom.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Online photo editing with Picnik

There's a whole host of online photo editing tools. I recently ran across a review of the most popular and useful apps on TechCrunch, where I stumbled upon Picnik, which got TechCrunch's approval. In fact, the folks at TC like it best out of all the online photo editing applications.

Picnik uses Flash. It is fast. The UI is very intuitive. It has a limited number of tools, but for quick edits, especially if you're "on the go," you cannot beat the utility of this tool. It's best thought of as an online version of Google's Picasa.

There are two especially neat things about Picnik. First, you don't have to upload any photos to their servers. You simply browse your hard drive for the photo(s) you wish to edit and -- voila -- use the tool.

The second really cool thing is Picnik's integration with Flickr. You can use the tool and then automatically have the edited versions of your pics posted on Flickr.

Really nice job, Picnik!