Unknown to a lot of people, Google has many more products than just search and advertising... and most of them are free.

One of Google's products is called Picasa. It is a free image editing program, mainly for digital camera users. It scans your hard drive for any photos and allows you to perform common functions such as red-eye removal, sharpening, cropping, brightness/contrast adjustment, etc.

One of the best parts of this program is that it does not alter your original image, it leaves it alone. It keeps track of any changes you request and applies them to the image whenever you view it through the program. The reason this is great is that every time you edit a picture with regular programs, you lose quality. With this, you don't have the quality losses you would normally have, and you also have the ability to revert back to the original image or undo individual steps.

The program is available at www.picasa.com for Windows users. Check it out!