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BY JONATHAN G. MICHEL

If you don’t know what to do with the many digital photos that you have stored on your hard drive, do what my daughter did. Using Windows Movie Maker, for Father’s Day, she chose the best pics and added descriptions with some some of my favorite music, and put it in a movie. She then saved it to a CD and gift wrapped it. Wow! It was wonderful seeing flashbacks of our family life in that fashion.

If you’re not happy with the outcome of some of your digital photos, but would still like to use them, why not use many of the free utilities or software available to put some finishing touches to them. They are not that complicated to use and are cheap — actually free. There are quite a few of them, but here we’ll focus on the most popular and user friendly choice. With these types of programs, you’ll be able to store, organize, edit and share all of your favorite little treasures.

Check out software called Picasa by Google, probably named after Picasso. Picasa from what I’ve gathered is a full-featured application, very sophisticated, giving high-end results, and extremely user friendly.

With it’s easy to use buttons, sliders, and fade-out transitions, its got to be one of the easiest digital imaging programs to use. It does all the basics such as sorting, organizing, viewing slide shows, resizing for emails, and CD photos, but does much more and with such ease.

You can also add keywords or keyword phrases, captions, create collages, back up your work. You can crop, do fill lighting, highlighting, color temperature, and yes soft focus. It’s a very impressive image editor for the price — free.

Digital imaging can be lots of fun and with the ability to create slide shows on CD’s, it also makes for great gifts. In addition, aside from arranging a number of photos or images in a sequence, you can ‘pan’ across a still image giving the illusion of motion. You can also vary the time that the images stay onscreen using a timeline, and add audio, whether it be some voice track for narration or your favorite music track.

You want to keep in mind that, when creating a presentation such as what my daughter did, less is better. Pick a few well-chosen images that will make an impact. What she did was choose images of all of my kids growing up in family situations and having fun. It made me realize how time had flown by and how quickly they grow up. It actually brought a tear to my eye. It told a story of our family life and brought a lump to my throat. I didn’t realize it then, but there was a message in that presentation. I couldn’t have received a better gift!

Jonathan G. Michel writes for Home Fun Systems where you can discover the magic of HDTV home theater systems and the many joys of viewing family HDTV CDs on your own mini-cinema!