Tuesday, February 5, 2008

Photo Gallery - Tools

Microsoft put into Photo Gallery some basic tools that will help you make those pictures look better, before you send them on to your family or friends.



At the top of Photo Gallery's main window left click on Fix. This will open the photo you selected into a new window. On the right hand side is a menu with five options. These option are to help you do some basic clean up and adjustment of you photos.
  1. Auto Adjust. This feature will examine the photo and automatically adjust its brightness, contrast, color, and tint with a click of the button.
  2. Adjust Exposure. This option expands thus giving you two choices; brightness and contrast. Each can be manually edited by the use of its' own slide bar.
  3. Adjust Color. Here this tool expands to three options, color, tint, and saturation. The color choice lets you change to cooler or warmer colors. The tint lets you put in more accurate color to the individual picture. Finally, saturation which determines if the images colors are virtually gone (grayscale) or a deeply rich color.
  4. Crop Picture. In my opinion this is a must. I seem to always have a picture that needs to be trimmed and rotated. This is the tool that will do it.
  5. Fix Red Eye. Red eye removal works quite well. Most digital camera, today, have this feature built into them. I would first have the camera set for red eye removal. Then use this feature it your subjects still have red eye.

Note: At the bottom of the menu on the right side is an undo edit button. This is just in case your edit did not look so good. You can start over from the beginning.

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