Picasa - Exercise 5
In class on March 29th, we went through all of the steps required to get a photograph from a digital camera and publish it on the internet. After snapping some pictures, we plugged the camera into the laptop via USB and copied the pictures into a folder that we created. Then we opened Photoshop to crop one of the pictures, which we saved under a new filename. After that, we opened a web browser, logged into the WordPress dashboard of the New Media weblog, uploaded the picture, and published it as a post.
And that’s the simplified version. Which is why I am looking at Picasa for Exercise 5. Picasa is a photo organizing software, offered free by Google, that essentially fast-tracks the process that I described above. Rather than using a minimum of four different pieces of software (Explorer, Photoshop, Web Browser, WordPress), I can simply use Picasa to accomplish what ought to be a very straight-forward task.
When I plug my memory card (or camera via USB) into my computer, I launch the Picasa software. In the upper left-hand corner, there’s a button with an icon of a digital camera and text that reads “Import.” Compared to when I take a roll of 35mm film to Walgreens—and it’s been quite a while—where I’m asked if I want to pay for double prints, and whether I prefer glossy or matte. Plugging in the memory card is akin to dropping off the roll of film, because it’s the first step in processing photos, but Picasa gives control of the process to the user. I click on the “Import” button.
Thumbnails of the pictures on my camera or memory card (media) are displayed in the “Import Tray” on the left. Before the photos are even removed from the media, I can use the Picasa software to modify the photos. When I click on a thumbnail, I see a larger version of the photo in the “Preview” area on the right. Immediately below the preview image are two arrow buttons, one indicating that I can rotate the image clockwise, the other counterclockwise. The way we did this in class involved rotating the pictures after they were copied from the media, and by utilizing a new program. With photo prints from Walgreens, vertical orientation is not important (just turn the picture around), but because digital pictures are primarily for viewing on a fixed monitor, vertical orientation is important. So important, that Picasa has made the picture rotation feature available early on in the copying process.
Once all the thumbnails are loaded, and have been rotated if necessary, I need to click on an import button. If I only wish to import some of the photos, I select the ones that I would like to import and click on the “Import Selected” button. If I wish to import them all, I click on “Import All.” Then I’m prompted to enter a folder name for the photos that I’m importing. During our in-class demonstration of this process, we had to use Windows Explorer, and create a file folder before we copied the images into it. Picasa takes a more logical (or at least more user-friendly) approach by having me choose the pictures that I want before I name the folder that I want to put them in. Walgreens goes a step further, because when I pick up some prints, they’re already in a “folder.” The difference being that the folder from Walgreens takes up real space, where the folder that I name via Picasa takes up digital space. I have a finite amount of storage on my hard disk, but whether it contains 1 picture or 1,000 pictures, the disk and the computer it’s attached to remain the same size. I have a finite amount of storage space in my apartment, and the difference between storying 1 picture and 1,000 is not negligible.
So I name the folder that I’d like to save these pictures into. Then I select the folder that my new folder will be created in. The “My Pictures” folder is chosen by default, though it can be changed. Again, this is far more streamlined than the process that we used in class, because of the automation built into the Picasa software. The next thing I can do is input some additional photo information. If I were to do this with a stack of prints from Walgreens, my hand would get tired after writing the date and occasion on the back of each. With Picasa, I enter the place that the photos were taken, the date they were taken, and a description if I like. When I click on the “Done” button, I’m done copying the pictures.
The next screen I’m shown has a list of folders occupying about 25% of the viewable area on the left hand side. The remainder is occupied mostly by the thumbnail images. When I click on a folder in the list on the left, the thumbnail area scrolls quickly to the folder and displays thumbnails of the images in that folder. Because I named the folders in Picasa, the software knows where I saved the pictures. There is no need for me to navigate the Windows filesystem to find a non-descript filename in the hopes of finding my photos. To this point, however, the only editing I’ve done to the photographs has been to rotate them if necessary. Picasa has many automated processes built in to enhance the photographs, and to see them I need to double-click on a photo.
I’m presented with a large preview of the image, and seven “basic fix” options: Crop, Straighten, Redeye, I’m Feeling Lucky, Auto Contrast, Auto Color, and Fill Light. No matter which button I click, the image will be modified–but as the user of the software I don’t do anything. Picasa uses the new media principles of automation and numeric representation to analyze the photo and alter it in a way that is hopefully pleasing to the eye. If it’s not, there’s an undo button. Some fixes, such as the Redeye fix, are not fully automated and do in fact require user input. The programmers of the software could not program Picasa to reliably tell red eyes apart from something that is supposed to be red, such as a Christmas light. There are too many variables for this to be reasonable. A picture could have been taken of a large group, resulting in 25 pairs of red eyes. Perhaps the everyone same group had rosy red cheeks as well. It’s a problem that can’t be easily solved–certainly not in free software. So user input is required in the form of highlighting the small area of the photo to be corrected. If there are three red eyes in the photo, I’d have to highlight each one. This is no more time consuming than using the green markers sold at the photo counter to “correct” redeye in photo prints. With the marker, I have to dot each eye and with the software I have to highlight each one. With the software, however, I can “undo” my mistakes. Photoshop can do some of these tasks as well, but the process is not automated, most likely because Photoshop is not designed with casual users in mind, nor for the purpose of routine photo enhancement.
Picasa automatically saves all of the changes made to photos. So if I cropped someone out and changed the contrast of a digital photo today, I wouldn’t need to do it again tomorrow if I “forgot” to save. The software doesn’t save these changes over the original files, however, and preserves the originals allowing you to revert to them at any time. The original images are often much larger than what is practical to be used on the web. Once the image is enhanced to my liking, I can use Picasa to export the image at a web-friendly resolution. The proportions are taken care of, so I won’t get an image that is stretched or otherwise askew. Exporting the image though, requires using another program to upload the image to the web. I can do that directly from Picasa.
This is where the transcoding principle of new media comes in to play. The easiest way to get pictures from Picasa onto the internet is to click on the “Web Album” button, at which point I create a photo album of selected digital images and publish it on the internet. Obviously this is not a physical photo album, it’s a digital rendering of one, using HTML in such a way that pictures are displayed in a predetermined order. Culturally, we place a value on photo albums, and so to make sense of digital photos occupying a digital space, we arrange them into a digital photo album. Once the web album is uploaded, if made public, anyone on the internet can view it at any time. We accomplished the same thing as a class, because the photo on the New Media weblog is also theoretically available to every person connected to the internet–but we had to use four different programs to accomplish what Picasa was able to do.
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