Picasa – The Poor Man’s Photoshop
If you ask me why I chose Picasa over Photoshop my first answer would be – “It is lighter on my pocket and my hard disk”. Indeed it is because it costs nothing and occupies mere 13.6 MB while Photoshop costs a whopping $100* and occupies 3.4 GB. But then yes, it does provide smart features which Picasa does not. But when water can do the work why would you buy champagne.
Picasa, acquired by Google is a free photo editing software that makes your pictures look stunning and at the same time provides easy sharing option. Picasa needs a simple Intel CPU to run and remains compatible with Linux, Windows and Mac OS.
Photoshop, on the other hand is a very powerful photo editing and creating tool that helps portray your memories in the process automatically organizing and protecting them. But more features do not make Photoshop better, it is because a regular user fails to understand and thus use such advanced formatting tools.
Apart from technological handicap, while using Photoshop another problem that seemed to arise was its requirement of multicore Intel processor and 1 GB RAM, which my grandmother’s Gen PC could not provide. It is also listed as one of the difficult software to use.
Picasa becomes the next door tool with its simple yet phenomenal editing tools like in-built fixes, tuning, geo –tagging, may it be of units or blocks and not to forget basic photo editing needs.
Though Photoshop provides excellent social media sharing and it supports wider range of file types, the ease and simplicity of Picasa more than covers up for it with astonishing features like rich – multihued color themes and scripting which are not provided by Photoshop (by default).
One may argue that GIMP is no doubt the best free alternative for Photoshop but let me tell you the intention of this article isn’t to provide you exact alternative of Photoshop. By saying, Poor man’s Photoshop, I am not just pointing out to free software but emphasizing on ease of use.
[alert-note] Online Browser Image Editor Similar to Photoshop [/alert-note]Picasa is easily integrated, trouble free and undemanding. Having used both Photoshop and Picasa I realized that while Photoshop is technically very sound and provides advanced photo edits like masks, layers and photo re-sizing freeware it is a bit complicated for gullible users. Thus, Picasa by far remains the poor man’s Photoshop.
*Pricing of Photoshop varies with versions.
