Picasa vs. Photoshop

I've been a Picasa fan for a while, ever since my sister Karen introduced me. I still love Picasa. Photo-editing is SO easy in Picasa, and don't even get me started on how easy it is to post pictures to my blog via email through Picasa! (Read - not limited to 4 photos at a time, thank you, Blogger!). And really, for a free program, you can do a lot of cool stuff in Picasa. But I recently got Photoshop CS 2, and just began trying to play around with it. It's a little bit LOT intimidating and overwhelming, but I found a fun blog with free actions you can download, and so I've slowly been dipping my toes in the PS waters.

Just out of curiosity, I did a little comparison. I took a bad photo - I mean, really, it's NOT a good photo - and first, in Picasa, I just hit the "I'm feeling lucky" button. Usually that will get me pretty decent results. This is what I got:

So then, I went into Photoshop, and used the Perfect Portrait action from CoffeeShop, and THIS is what I got:

I was seriously amazed! I mean, it's still not my favorite photo...but the colors are so much more vivid, his eyes are brighter and have more "pop," his lips have more color, his teeth are whiter...it's just a world of difference!

So now I'm going to have yet one more thing sucking me into my computer, preventing me from doing my chores...photo-editing in Photoshop!! Imagine what I could do with a photo that was actually good to start with!