I don’t know why I bought Photoshop Elements 4.0? Oh, yes, I remember, there was a $35 coupon at Costco a while ago. But Picasa is free and very easy to use, it can do great things for you in just one click. These photos show what happened when I used the “I’m Feeling Lucky” button with some underwater photos. Behold the “before” and “after”:

Some fish were always very friendly and would come up close. This one was too close and I wasn’t even sure the camera would focus properly in the muddy waters. With the wonder button “I’m Feeling Lucky” it changed into something beautiful!

A pretty bad and muddy photo can be transformed into something cool with a couple of clicks, first “I’m Feeling Lucky” and then by sliding a few notches on the “Color Temperature” button to make it bluer. Voila:

And a turtle turned out to have more interesting colors and patterns than we saw underwater (I cropped it too):

Allright, one last photo, which I actually thought wasn’t too bad originally:

Get Picasa here:

Even with all the trouble we had with the SD500, we decided to go with another Canon. Not the SD550 after all, we researched the E18 error and it seemed to be a problem specifically linked to the 500, but also to some 550s - and we didn’t want that to happen again!

I miss the 7 megapixels though. The SD700 has “only” 6, but it has other nifty things like a 4x zoom, better position of the on/off button over the top right corner of the huge LCD screen. I’m also discovering how to play with the Color Accent and Color Swap functions! That’s fun…

These show with blue and then green color retained, everything else turns black and white.

The other function I played with today is the Color Swap. I pick out one color and choose another one to replace it with. Not altogether successful… I guess these things can be done in Photoshop too, I haven’t played with that yet.

And I forgot to mention the best reason to buy this model: we got it from Costco! After our experience with a camera just out of warranty, we wanted something more reassuring. As with everything else we buy at Costco, they offer a 100% customer satisfaction guarantee, which translates to: if the camera stops working, I’m not satisfied and I’m returning it!

I am the happy owner of a wonderful camera that takes beautiful pictures. We’ve had it for just over a year. And then, while on vacation, it stopped working. The lens wouldn’t retract into the casing, and an error message appeared on the LCD screen: E18. I’m not so happy anymore.

We could still view and download the images on the card, but the camera would not shoot pictures, and when turned off, the lens was stuck more than halfway out.

The sad thing was, of course, that the SD500 was out of warranty by a month and we didn’t buy the extended warranty when we purchased it. We’d had our previous camera, a Canon Powershot S110, for 4 years without any problems and trusted Canon to make good cameras.

A call to Canon Camera Support didn’t help that much, the cost of repair is $119 (with 40 days warranty on the repair) or I could get a refurbished model for $199 (with 6 months warranty). A new SD500 costs $250 at Amazon, and then I get a full year’s warranty! I think I saw it at Costco recently for $230, but then I’d have to pay taxes of course.

I feel mostly tempted to get a new camera and “start over” (we already own and love the underwater case for this camera), but should I get an extended warranty as well? A 2 year plan costs $30 and doesn’t get any good reviews. In any case, a cheap “warranty” in keeping my camera safe from dust and scratches would be a soft leather carrying case!