Recreating a picture of the past

Published Nov 27, 2008

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Picasa is a boon to digital snappers, a filing system and editing suite. It creates flattering results: transforming squonk, blurry visual shorthand into evidence of professional talent and art.

Picasa, a Google program, is an easy download of about four minutes from

Once loaded, the utility merrily snuffles out images on your computer from - you can restrict it to My Documents to prevent enshrining junk.

It creates a directory of image folders and sub-folders, when you double-click one, an editing option appears and the picture grows.

The options are for improvement and correction. They range from cropping - that's how photos taken miles away get to look intimate - to sharpening. Some tools adjust light and shade, others remove blemishes like red-eye, the mysterious inflammation caused by flashes.

A handy one-click feature does most of this in one go. Picasa also lets you correct or abandon corrections.

A second set of options is called tuning, after what teenage boys did with girls at parties. This involves adjusting colour temperature - okay, Picasa, you can have "program" but not "colour". It has a slider to add or remove the mystery and moodiness of shadow, and mechanisms that prove you're an artist of great depth and sensitivity.

The final set of options is the piece de resistance. With Effects, you can sharpen the photo, turn it sepia or to black and white, give it film grain or grade its tints.

Best of all, lousy pictures are easily deleted. For sharing or for self-promotion, you can mail the results, with the option of resizing the photos - many people resent the download stime for large files at their expense.

Automatic resizing project reduces a 1,7 megabyte triumph of monumental art to a slim 71kb. For domestic use, the reduction doesn't impair quality.

Picasa3 - the trial version - also has mechanisms for uploading photos into online galleries and can take images directly from your camera. (The latter is preferable, I find, to camera storage software which seems cumbersome) And instead of Christmas cards, you can make collages of happy families and inflict them on friends instead of cribs, kings and reindeers.

The electronic image massaging of a Picasa has interesting implications.

Instead of taking prints or film to a specialist, you do it yourself. This is like banks and supermarkets hailing service as their triumph of customer service.

An effect of this new empowerment is to blur the distinction between amateur and professional. Formerly arcane skills and knowledge in the hands of professional photographers are now in yours and mine.

The second blurring is between fact and fiction. Many take snaps as souvenirs - trophies of experience and evidence of having been there and then. Some photos are to jog memory, especially those of ceremonies of transition, like graduations, birthdays and weddings. (What would a good divorce picture look like? Lots of space, blurring, redness … a bit messy.) With a Picasa, and its touch up facilities, the record can be transformed into the fictional.

The image moves from being a record to an independent fiction about a record - what Aristotle called "the imitation of an action". Sophocles' Oedipus comes to absorb and render negligible its inspiration. The image of the wedding is more riveting than the wedding.

We know that traditional distinctions between fact and fiction are merely verbal: the act of communication transforms the fact. Fact ultimately only exists in images, words, consensus and distorted behaviour.

Happy snaps increase the distance between what occurred and what is recorded.

Images also have an uncanny way of replacing memory. With a Picasa, you can recreate the past.

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