I really love Picasa, Google's free photo editor and organizer. The best features I like about the program is it's Basic Fixes tools like Fill Light and Redeye. With Fill Light, I can easily adjust dark pictures to literally brighten them, if for example I didn't use the flash of my Canon Powershot A530 digital camera. And then with Redeye, you just click and drag your mouse around the eye, and the red eye effect disappears.

If you want more specific tunings of your photo, just use Picasa's Tuning tools which has Fill Light, Highlights, Shadows, and Color Temperature slides. Picasa's Effects tools, meanwhile, filters your photo to achieve the desired effect like Sharpen, Sepia, Black and White, Film Grain, Soft Focus, etc.

After you've made your changes to your photo, you just go Back to the Library, and there's a button there for you to save all the changes you've made to all the photos in a particular folder. What's great about Picasa is that it automatically creates another folder containing all the original photos on which you have made changes. Cool, huh?

After making the changes, it's just a step away from uploading my improved photos to my favorite photo repository, Photobucket.