| There's an old adage that reads "You get what you pay for," and while this is often the case, it's not always the case. When Cameratown launched last year, one of the features that we integrated into this site was a free photo software section. Unlike the old shareware of the 1990's, today's free software is stable, professional in design, and often packed with useful features that compare favorably with software costing $50, $100, or more. This article covers a couple of my favorite applications that evrey digital photographer should know about.
 Google Picasa 2.0
Google Picasa 2.0: This free software is one of the best Photo Organizer and Management packages I have used. I had originally downloaded it earlier this year when it was initially released as version 1.0. While I loved version 1.0, it had one "flaw" that prevented me from spreading the word about it. The flaw was that it did not fully support external hard drives, which for a photography management application is a must. It would read images off of an external drive and would let you catalog and keyword the images, however if you launched Picasa without the drive attached to your PC (or turned off), all those labels and keywords would be gone for good. I wrote to the company at the time and was told that it did not yet feature support for external drives.
Luckily for all of us, Google added support for external drives in their new 2.0 version. Now labels and keyword will be saved for those times when you launch Picasa 2.0 without your extra drives attached.
So what makes Picasa 2.0 so worthwhile? For one thing it's fast! Other companies would do well by looking at Picasa and try to emulate its speed. Picasa also includes many powerful, yet easy-to-use features that make image enhancement a breeze. You've never been able to crop, straighten, remove red-eye, adjust contast, add fill light, convert to B&W with control over color filtering, and sharpen an image with this much ease.
Picasa allows you to enhance, edit, and save changes to an image WITHOUT actually altering the original image - thus allowing you to undo those changes at any time. Picasa also makes it SIMPLE to batch export selected images - resizing them all at once, print multiple images, create a webpage of images and even upload them to your own personal (and free) web blog.
I cannot say enough good things about this application. You want more? Okay, how's this. You can easily right click on any image to open it into Adobe Photoshop or any other of your installed applications. Slideshows are a breeze, creating a movie from your photographs is brilliantly simple, as is creating a screen saver. Picasa allows you to batch edit your images allows you to save hours of work by applying sharpness filters, B/W, etc. to a folder of set of favorite images. Picasa's timeline view lets you quickly scroll through images using a timeline display, and you can quickly find images by searching keywords or clicking on labels that you have attached to your photographs.
Picasa also allows you to export images to CD or using the the GIFT CD feature allows you to BURN slideshows in varying resolutions directly to a CD.
All this power doesn't come at a price - honestly. Picasa 2.0 is not only FREE, it is a MUST have image management application.
Virtual Photographer
The next application I wanted to share with you iis actually a plug-in for Adobe Photoshop and compatible applications. This Free plug-in called "Virtual Photographer" lets you create a variety of photographic styles with single click ease. Effects such as Film Grain, Soft Focus, B/W, B/W tinting, High contrast, and ISO simulations are now simple to add to your images.
Once you copy the Virtual Photographer folder into your Photoshop Plug-ins folde the application will automatically show up the next time you open Photoshop. You'll find it located in a folder titled "OptikVerve Labs" under the menu titled "Filters."
Virtual Photographer is a plug-in that every digital photographer should have in their Photoshop Toolbox. At a price of $0.00, you can't afford not too.
Our Free Software section lists over 65 photogrpahy programs that will cost you nothing, have no spyware attached to them, and will not time out on you. Browse through the list, download them, put them through their paces, and see for yourself that sometimes there IS such a thing as a free lunch.
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