Google Picasa
Quick and Fast: Free alternative to Adobe Photoshop Lightroom as well as stable and easy to learn!
Where to get it: http://picasa.google.com/ Windows XP/Vista Only, I believe.
Don’t be lead astray! You may have heard from people that Picasa is useless for editing photos. Feel free to blatantly ignore these people. They just don’t know.
First, what’s the difference between Adobe Lightroom and Adobe Photoshop? Photoshop is for making a bad photo look good, or making a graphic for web design, print, etc. This requires a lot of industrial strength tools (which are amply provided by GIMP).
Lightroom however, is for making a good photo look better and then sending a lot of great photos to friends/relatives/clients, etc. This doesn’t require a lot of robust tools and Google Picasa does this very well also.
Lightroom users may be slightly disappointed, but in reality, Picasa can not only show, edit and email photos, but it’s a great movie player as well. It can play all kinds of movie formats, since it’s simply “playing the frames in a row with the audio intact”. This however, is really all you need for a good video player. I like watching movies in Picasa, just select them and click the play slideshow button.
And in case you were wondering, I’ve worked with a pro photographer before, who gave me informal training in Lightroom, and I’m telling you: The tools in Picasa are very close to Lightroom’s tools.
Plus, Picasa is even easier to use than Lightroom! It’s great!
Tutorials: After you’ve messed around with Picasa, you’ll know at least 75% of it.
License and Use: I’m pretty sure you may use it for commercial purposes. The Terms of Use are at http://google.com/accounts/TOS?hl=US
