James Mok’s Soliloquy

I have decided to try out Picasa photo edit capabilities for Iris & Gary’s set of wedding photos. It has all the tools that I need to create that washed out tinted and grainy feel. Editing was swift and it only took me about 2 hours to finish editing over 250 photos. Unfortunately Picasa does not support Adobe RGB color profile and had displayed all the photos in much less color saturation than the files exported after edit.

As I didn’t want to waste all that editing, I used Photoshop to batch convert all the files into sRGB color profile and made them less saturated. I then returned to Picasa and copied the filter settings from my last edits and applied them to the sRGB profiled files. A few photos still didn’t come out right after the export so I just bring them back to Photoshop for some fine tuning.

It was then that I have discovered another problem with Picasa. The more editing applied to a photo and more deviated from the original photo, the larger the exported file despite being much higher contrast and monotone. My original photos were about 1.5MB to 2MB each and I tried to export the edited photos into JPG 10 – the maximum quality in JPG format. Some of the edited and exported photos came to as high as 27MB in size! More than half of the total number of exported photos came out to be over 7MB. So back to Photoshop and re-save them into JPG 10 with a few very large files in JPG 8 to bring them back to a relatively more manageable size of below 9MB. Such a task would degrade the JPG further but with the washed out tinted feel that I had aimed for, this does not affect the photos visibly.

The final count of photos came to just less than 200 after careful selections. It took the flickr uploader about 3 hours to upload all of them which is not too bad.

Despite all the bumping into different problems, I’d say that it was quite fast in getting all that editing done for so many photos with Picasa.

I have also looked into Nikon Capture NX and it has similar save filters for applying to other photos capabilities as Picasa does. So one can edit one photo, save all the edited filter settings, select a set of photos, and apply the same edited filter settings to the selected photos in one go. While Picasa is good for a more crude editing job but good for those special effects, Nikon Capture NX is good for fine turning photos but it takes more steps to get the photos into those special effects that’s built into Picasa.

It would have been good if Picasa would support Adobe RGB color profile as most digital SLR cameras do. I will look into Nikon Capture NX more closely as to getting the same effects for my photos.