Google has released version 3.5 of their image editing software Picasa. For many years I have been a frequent user of Adobe Photoshop, but as Picasa develops more tools I find it filling my needs. Essentially when processing family photo’s and such I just need to crop, rotate, and maybe adjust the lighting or coloring. Picasa is more than capable of performing these duties. Obviously I still need Photoshop for more advanced image manupalation including changing the color pallette to CMYK for print ads or create images using layers. Incidently, I have been playing around with the free GIMP to possibly replace Photoshop for these jobs.
One of the most noticeable new features in Picasa 3.5 is face recognition. This feature has been available on the web version for quite a long time, but it is easier to use and much faster on the desktop version. It does a remarkable job of picking out and profiling faces in your images. It sort gives you a bit of a chill how it connects faces to your contacts. I hope Google never decided to go to the dark side.