I have used Qimage to produce 13x19 prints from my olympus 2500 (2.5 mp), my olympus 2100 (2 mp) and my Panasonic DMC-FZ20 (5 mp). I have made a few 20x24 prints from the Panasonic as well. I felt they were of good quality, and I have sold many of them. Your 20 mp camera should be pretty good at the size you are interested in if the interpolation software used for upsizing is of high quality. Try it. what have you got to lose?

Qimage is a very good printing package that automatically resizes pictures and gives maximum print quality. Many think it is the best printing software available. Google Qimage to learn about it.

You can do a certain amount of touch-up of old photos with Picasa using the so-called Blemish tool. It is a poor man's clone tool that you can use to replace small areas with areas taken from other parts of the image.

Try Picture Window Pro at dl-c.com. Less than $100.00 and very powerful and, in my opinion, fairly easy to learn. Lots of help provided.

I was in several art shows and didn't do very well. I got really tired of having people come in and say "beautiful pictures" and then walk out. When people ask me if I sell pictures I tell them that I have pictures for sale. There is a difference.

If you want to do the transfer from Picasa you should select the pictures you want to transfer (placing them in the picture tray at the lower left corner of the screen), click on export, producing the Export to Folder screen, click Browse and select your flash drive by name, and click Export.

That's what interpolation does, i.e., it "manufactures" pixels by estimating (using complex algorithms) from the existing pixels in the original image. Even though these new pixels are artificially generated, they do make the picture capable of printing at 150 or 200 pixels per inch, and the results are often not too bad

You should have something like 150 to 300 pixels per inch to make a print. If your camera doesn't produce enough pixels to reach this level of resolution, your image can be "upsized" using one of a number of interpolation algorithms to produce the appropriate number of pixels. The penalty is that the image will be somewhat softer because the new pixels are calculated by the interpolation algorithm and aren't in the original image. I use Qimage to print, and it does the interpolation for me after I specify the print size in inches. My first two cameras had resolutions of 2.5 megapixels and 2.0 megapixels and produced very good 13x19 enlargements, at least to my eye.

There is confusion as to the difference between pixels per inch and dots per inch (dpi). Each pixel is printed using a process called dithering that places very tiny dots of colored ink (often red, green, and blue, but sometimes other colors, depending on the printer) into a pattern that produces the correct color when viewed from an appropriate distance. The dot density can be very high. On my printer (an epson 1800) it is a choice between 720 dots per inch and 1440 dots per inch. Sometimes the dot density is different in the horizontal and vertical directions.

All you have to do is save the file you have edited. The old file will be saved in an invisible folder and the new file will replace the old one so that you can access it from other programs. If you want to restore the original, you just open Picasa, select the file, and click the undo save button. You never lose your original.

Check my book at motorhomememories.com

To make your Picasa edits show up outside of Picasa, you must save the file using the Save As command. Picasa will still remember your original, but your edited version will be available outside of the Picasa environment.

Try Qimage Ultimate. Many think it is the best printing software available at a modest price.

In Picasa it is easy using the text tool. Just open "character map" from Microsoft Accessories, pick a font and font size, select the © character and other text and you are done. If you want it to show up in other environments as well as Picasa you need to save the image.

Picasa is free and runs on either Mac or PC. It includes a link to Picnik if you want to use it. I have written a Picasa book whose table of contents you can see at motorhomememories.com.

If you use the email features of Picasa, the downsizing is done automatically as long as you have properly set up your preferences. Picasa email can also be used with your regular email like aol mail or outlook express.

I have used Picture Window Pro 5.0 in photographing quilts, and I was able to eliminate the perspective effect by using the Warp transformation offered by that software. It is cheap and simple to use.