Editing Trail Camera Pictures

How many times have you had a photo from one of your game cameras and had no idea what was in the picture. The flash may be weak and all you can see is a set or legs or sometimes you see nothing at all. When you have a picture like this you can not help but wonder if it was that big buck that likes to hang up just out of flash range. Now with the help of a free and simple to use software you can enhance your trail camera photos .

Photos can be edited and enhanced very quickly with the use of Picasa, a photo editing software from Google. Picasa is capable of performing all the basic editing functions and can also gather and organize every picture on your hard drive. There are also capabilities of photo sharing that we can get into on another article.

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To begin the process of editing a trail camera picture let's start with a topic that was posted on a hunting forum. In this thread one of the members posted a picture that was so dark you could barely make out the outline of the deer.

Here is the picture of the deer that we will be using for this tutorial. As you can see the flash did a very poor job of illuminating this deer.

After downloading and installing Picasa2 you will only be asked one question on the first run of the software. The question will be would you like for Picasa2 to scan the entire compture in an attempt to find pictures or should it just look in the MyDocuments folder.

Picasa will now take a minute or two to scan your computer and locate any photos on the folders that you selected it should scan. Once the scan is complete you simply scroll through the folders on the left tool bar and select the image that you would like to view or edit.

Below you will see that I have selected our picture of the deer and it is maximized in the main window of picasa.

Now comes the part you all have been waiting for. Brightening up this photo is no problem thanks to the simplicity of Picasa. The control panel at the top left of the screen is all we need to worry about. A quick glance of this panel and you will see that you are basically left with two options to brighten up this picture. You can start by trying the "I feel lucky" button. In this case it did not provide enough enhancement. The next option is the "Fill Light" tool.

You may have to experiment with the options on the panel and try different things to get the results you are after. The main thing is don't be affraid to try different things. You will not loose the image unless you save over the working copy and you can always utilize the Undo button at the bottom of the control panel.