Managing Your Photos in Windows

Fix Your Photos

Nothing spoils a photo like red eyes. Or poor exposure. Or a stranger who wandered
into the edge of your shot at the last second. Fortunately, it’s a snap to repair these
and other common photo frights. All you need is Windows Live Photo Gallery, a free
program that lets you organize, share, and fix your photos.

To fix a photo, follow these steps:

1. Click on the photo that needs improvement.

2. Click the Fix button  in the toolbar
at the top of the Photo Gallery window.

3. Click the desired “fix” from the six options listed
in the right pane.

If you have Windows Vista, you’ve got Windows Photo Gallery, a basic photo editor and organizer. If you have Windows XP, you’ve got some basic file management tools that help you organize your photos. Either  way, you can do more (for free) with Windows Live Photo Gallery, which is what we’ll be using in this guide. Be sure to go ahead and open the program. You can download it at windows live.com/explore. The first time you run Windows Live Photo Gallery, the
program automatically scans your computer for photos (and videos). If the snapshots you want to fix are actually
still stored on your camera, connect your camera, click File, and then Import from a camera or scanner. Follow
the instructions to copy your photos into Windows Live Photo Gallery.

Photo Gallery offers six ways to tweak your photos, starting with Auto Adjust. One click and Photo Gallery finds the best exposure and color settings for your photo, then removes the red-eye (if appropriate). You can also fine-tune your photo yourself by selecting an individual element. For example, if you click Adjust Exposure, you’ll see sliders for adjusting the brightness, contrast, shadows, and highlights. This setting also displays a histogram, a graph that shows the brightness
levels across the photo. You can click and drag either of the two histogram “handles” to modify the photo’s brightness.
Click Adjust color to modify your photo’s color temperature, tint, and saturation, again using sliders that you drag left and right. Click Adjust detail to add sharpness to a blurry photo, but keep in mind that the more sharpness you add,
the grainier the photo will appear. If you want to cut away a portion of your photo or adjust its composition, click Crop photo. Photo Gallery superimposes a frame you can drag wherever you like and resize using any of the eight handles. You can also choose from common sizes (such as 4×6 and 8×10).  Click Apply to crop the photo to whatever frame size you’ve created or selected. If your photo suffers from red-eye, click Fix red eye, then use your mouse to draw a rectangle around the eye you want to fix. Presto: no more red. Experiment! You can always click Undo if you don’t like your latest change. To ditch all your changes in one fell swoop, click File, and then Revert to original.

Create a Panoramic Shot :

Suppose you’re standing at the edge of the Grand Canyon. Unless you’ve got the widest wide-angle lens known to man, you’ll never be able to capture its awesome grandeur in a single shot. Fortunately, you can get the big picture by snapping multiple side-by-side photos, then stitching them together with Windows Live Photo Gallery.

Taking photos for a panoramic shot is simple. All you need to do is stand in one spot and snap a series of photos that overlap slightly. Once you’ve imported your photos into Windows Live Photo Gallery, it’s a simple process to turn them into a panorama:

1. Select all the photos you want to stitch together.

2. Right click.

3. Click “Create a panoramic photo”.

Now sit back while Photo Gallery turns your separate snaps into a single panoramic view, which you can then crop, print, share, or modify like any other photo.

Send Your Photos :

When you want a quick and easy way to share photos with friends and family, nothing beats e-mail. Windows Live Mail includes great tools you can use to turn your latest batch of snaps into an eye-catching gallery, complete with captions,
frames, and backgrounds. You can send full-size versions of your photos or quickly reduce the resolution so your photos will upload faster on slow Internet connections.

The first thing you need to do is download Windows Live Mail. It’s free, just go to windowslive.com/explore. Now, here’s how to create a Photo E-mail in Windows Live Mail:

1. Click the arrow next to the New button, and then click Photo e-mail. (You can also press Ctrl-Shift-P.)

2. Windows Live Mail creates a new e-mail and opens an Add Photos box. Find the photo(s) you want to send
by navigating to the folder(s) that contains them.

3. If you want to select multiple photos at a time, hold down the CTRL key while clicking each thumbnail.

4. Click Add to add the selected photos and navigate to another folder to find more, or click Done if you want to send only the currently selected photos. After clicking Done, you’ll see your photos in the body of the e-mail message. You can click any photo to add a caption or apply a frame. After you apply a frame, you can click Border color to select a different frame color.