Your Many Options In Digital Imaging

If you don't know what to do with the many digital photos that you have stored on your hard drive, do what my daughter did. Using Windows Movie Maker, for father's day, she chose the best pics and added descriptions with some some of my favorite music, and put it in a movie. She then saved it to a CD and gift wrapped it. Wow! It was wonderful seeing flashbacks of our family life in that fashion.

If you're not happy with the outcome of some of your digital photos, but would still like to use them, why not use many of the free utilities or software available to put some finishing touches to them. They are not that complicated to use and are cheap - actually free. There are quite a few of them, but here we'll focus on the most popular choices and user friendly. With these softwares, you'll be able to store and organize, edit and share, all of your favorite little treasures.

There's a software called Picasa (picasa.google.com), probably named after Picasso. Picasa from what I've gathered is a full-featured application, very sophisticated, giving high-end results, and extremely 'user friendly".

With it's easy to use buttons, sliders, and fade-out transitions, its got to be one of the easiest software in digital imaging to use. It does all the basics such as sorting, organizing, viewing slide shows, resizing for emails, and CD photos, but does much more and with such ease.

You can also add keywords or keyword phrases, captions, create collage, back up your work. You can crop, do fill lighting, highlighting, colour temperature, and yes soft focus. It's a very impressive image editor for the price - free.

Digital imaging can be lots of fun and with the ability to create slide shows on cd's, it also makes for great gifts. In addition, aside from arranging a number of photos or images in a sequence, you can 'pan' across a still image giving the illusion of motion. You can also vary the time that the images stay onscreen using a timeline, and add audio, whether it be some voice track for narration or your favorite music track.

You want to keep in mind when creating a presentation such as my daughter did, that less is better. Pick a few well-chosen images that will make an impact. What she did was choose images of all of my kids growing up in family situations and fun. It may me realize how time had flew by and how quickly they grow up. It actually brought a tear to my eyes. It told a story of our family life and brought a lump to my throat. I didn't realize it then, but there was a message in that presentation. I couldn't have received a better gift!