Stuart Herbert | Gentoo

There’s no ebuild for Picasa in Portage yet, but installing Picasa by yourself is trivial. Just download the self-extracting binary, chmod 755 it, and run it. It politely installs itself into /opt/picasa, and very shortly you’re up and running.

Is the hype around Picasa is just a little out of proportion with what Picasa itself can do? As a free photo album and basic photo editor, it’s fine, but to say that Picasa is a viable alternative to Adobe Photoshop Elements (the baby edition of Adobe Photoshop) … well, maybe that’s true for a lot of folks, but it’s not true for me. I’ll be sticking with Photoshop Elements on Windows for the time being, and if you want to know why, continue reading below.

(If you’re reading this article on Planet Gentoo, click on the title of this article to read the full article)


A Typical Photography Project

The last photography project Kristi and I did back in April was capturing the paintings of William Dowdall for Credible Books (the publishing firm run by Kristi’s folks). We photographed 24 separate paintings between us, ending up with 78 files to select from and turn into 27 master images. We spent about 50% of the time behind the cameras, but the other 50% of the time was spent in Photoshop Elements either proofing the images or mastering them.

Good camera gear is very important, but with digital photography, the right editing tools are equally important.

We did this project entirely with Adobe Photoshop Elements v3, but could we have done it using Picasa instead?

Picasa And RAW Photography

With the Nikon D200, I shoot in RAW mode. RAW images contain more image detail than JPEGs, and you can do more work with RAW images without the image starting to break down. With JPEGs out of the camera, on the other hand, the moment you start to adust the colours of the image, you introduce visible artifacts into the image, reducing the image’s appeal both on the screen and especially when printed. Digital cameras don’t always take shots where the colours are exactly accurate; the final image needs adjusting in an editing package to bring out the right colours.

With Picasa on Windows (I don’t have any RAW files on my Linux box to test Picasa on Linux), the good news is that you can open Nikon RAW files (even those from the D200, which was a pleasant surprise) by using the ‘Import’ option. Once imported, editing the image is just a a click away.

Unfortunately, the imported image doesn’t seem to include any of the original image’s EXIF information at all. This means you lose useful information like when the photo was taken, which camera and lens was used, and the camera settings involved. If you’re even remotely serious about your photography, this information is very important for helping you keep track of what works and what doesn’t.

Kristi and I pretty much stayed with the same lenses (she used the 50mm macro, I used the 80-400mm telephoto) throughout the shoot, so it’s not too much of a challenge to remember how we did it. On this particular shoot, we’d probably not have lost anything important by losing the EXIF information this time around.

But it remains a basic feature I’d like to see added to a future update of Picasa.

Putting The Record Straight

Whether it’s my eye or the weight I press on the shutter release button, many of my images come out of the camera with an uneven horizon. Image rotation is one of the first functions I reach for in an editing package.

I must say that the speed of the image rotation in Picasa is fantastic. It takes much longer to rotate 10 megabit images in Photoshop Elements than in Picasa. Picasa also has a lovely touch where a grid automatically appears during rotation. Combined, these points make the freehand rotation very practical, and are a great timesaver.

Looking back at the original images from our shoot, it’s clear that Picasa would have saved us a useful chunk of time during the mastering process, just from the time saved rotating images. I dare say a few of the images would have come out rotated more accurately too, because the speedier rotation tool is much easier to use.

I normally crop the image next; partly to speed up the rest of the editing workflow, but mostly to help me “see” and focus on the image that I’ll be working on. Cropping in Picasa (as in Photoshop Elements) is very straight forward, leaving me with the final image to clean up.

Cleaning Up My Act

Cleaning up an image normally involves three things:

• Red-eye removal on portraits
• Removing dust and other particles from the lens and sensor
• Adjusting colours to compensate for in-camera settings

I don’t have much to say about red-eye removal. I rarely take portrait shots (photographing people feels weird to me, like I’m pointing a gun at them or something), and I’ve never been left with any red eyes to clean up.

I do typically spend a fair bit of time removing dust and other particals. Camera lenses do pick up all sorts of crap (especially out on long hikes), and even during a studio shoot like this one dust can settle on the lenses during a long shoot. Sensors get dirty over time too, and unfortunately nearly all digital SLRs (including my Nikon D200) aren’t self-cleaning. Being able to rescue an image back at the computer can make the difference between a successful day’s shooting, and a great day out but no images to show for it.

This is where Picasa’s focus on consumer photography really starts to tell. Maybe I’m missing something, but I can’t find anything in Picasa that will allow me to do any sort of dust removal at all. There’s no sign of anything as powerful as Photoshop’s excellent Healing Tool … no sign of anything at all

During the shoot, because we were photographing paintings that were just a few inches across, it was dust and highlights on the paintings themselves that we needed to remove in Photoshop, rather than dust on the lenses or sensors. One painting had been damaged, and needed spots of paint “healing” out simply because there was neither the time nor the materials on the day to repair the paintings on the spot. If we’d been relying entirely on Picasa, there would have been nothing we could have done … and we would have been unable to produce acceptable masters for at least two of the paintings.

So what about colour-correction?

At first glance, Picasa’s ability to adjust colour temperature, highlights, shadows and contrasts seems like a good range of functionality. All of these features work very quickly indeed, and can be used to recover an image that’s well off the mark.

Unfortunately, Picasa doesn’t seem to include the ability to edit the levels of individual colour channels. That’s a real limitation, because, no matter what the lighting is, and what in-camera settings you use, the resulting image nearly always is stronger in one colour channel than in the others.

Looking back at the shoot, we spent the majority of the mastering process adjusting the levels of individual colour channels. We shot indoors under a blue-tinted light, and it took a fair bit of time in Photoshop’s Levels editor to restore the yellows in each image.

We simply couldn’t have mastered these images using Picasa.

Summing Up

Picasa does a lot of things well, and it’s fair to say that many amateur photographers will probably find Picasa a suitable alternative to Photoshop Elements. Both in terms of price and performance, Picasa is a clear winner. It’s well worth trying Picasa for yourself; at the very least, it’s certainly a much better photo album manager than the limited and crash-prone F-Spot.

But, if you’re even a tiny bit serious about your photography, Photoshop Elements is still well worth the modest investment (for the moment, anyway).

The loss of EXIF data when importing RAW images alone is enough to stop me from switching away from Photoshop. When I shot on film, I used to carry a little notebook everywhere with me, just so that I could note down the technical details involved with each shot. EXIF data frees me from that labourious task, and there’s no way I’m willing to lose that data. It’s very instructive to look at a good (or a bad!) photo a year or two later, and to be able to see technically how the photo was made.

The lack of a Healing Tool is another reason to stick with Photoshop Elements for now. Whether it’s dust on the lens, on the sensor, or (unusually in this case) on the subject being photographed, dust gets everywhere. Being able to remove dust in the mastering process is an essential benefit of going digital … and one that Picasa doesn’t provide

On the colour-editing front, Picasa can get you close, but it lacks the tools to take you all the way. Whilst I’d love to create images with perfect colour every time, the reality is that most images need some TLC back in the computer. Picasa can be used to compensate for white-balance problems, and for exposure problems, but it can’t be used to overcome the bias of the camera’s sensor in any given situation.

Kristi and I couldn’t have used Picasa to successfully complete the project. We would definitely have been unable to produce masters for two of the paintings, because of the lack of a Healing Tool … and having tried it today, we wouldn’t have been able to get the colours exactly matching the original paintings on any of the other images.

Picasa’s not a bad tool by any means, but there’s much more to even Photoshop Elements than many amateur photographers realise. Once you discover these tools and start to use them as part of your photography, it’s very difficult indeed to do without them.

Would Fixing These Shortcomings Be Enough To Make Me Switch?

In many ways, Picasa is already a great piece of software, and I’m sure it’ll only get better as Google release new versions over time. I’m already using it on Linux as a good photo album app, but I won’t be using it as a photo editor in the near future.

Even if the next release of Picasa addressed all the shortcomings I’ve touched on here, I still don’t think I’d switch. I find myself occaisionally using other aspects of Photoshop Elements that I haven’t mentioned here, and I know that I’d miss those tools. In the (very!) unlikely event of me exhausting what Elements can do, there are many plugins available to make Elements capable of even more. I already use a couple of plugins to help with my landscape photography; I’d miss those too.

Google would do well to open the source of Picasa, and allow third-party developers to go in there, address its weaknesses, and build a real community around it - just as Xara are doing with their stuff. I can’t see what Google has to gain by keeping the code closed, and I don’t care how clever everyone at Google is - a successfully-engaged, wider community will outperform Google’s own people over time.