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Photo
Bug - Bring Out the Best in Your Photos
Want to make those holiday photos look more professional? Check out
Windows Live Photo Gallery photo-editing application. This no-cost
program (for Windows 7 and Vista) is feature packed without being
overwhelming.
 Importing your pictures into
the program direct from your camera, phone or storage device is
straightforward. Options allow you to group photos in order to set
prefix names as well as name destination folders to better organize
your gallery.
Once imported, you can then identify people in your photos using the
built-in face recognition program as well as classify your collection
by using geotag locations, descriptive text and captions.
(Face-recognition gains the smarts to start identifying people on its
own and allows batch-add to make the process even faster.)
Included are standard editing features like cropping, straightening,
exposure/colour correction as well as excellent red-eye and blemish
removal tools. These features allow you to put your best subject
forward and touch up of the flash photo “evil-eyes” or aid in the
removal of that tattoo you forgot to mention to your parents. If
photo-editing sounds too intimidating, use the Auto-Adjust feature that
applies selected corrections based on the computer’s analysis. All
editing features allow you to easily revert back to the original as
desired, so you can experiment without fear of ruining the original
photo.
For a bit more wow factor this program includes Photo Fuse, which
allows you to take the best of several group photographs and combine
the results into one great photo (a bonus for group shots where you
closed your eyes, or in cases where your nephew stuck out his tongue).
Look through several photos of the group, selecting the best shot of
each of your subjects from the different photos, and use Photo Fuse to
merge these into a single fabulous group shot. (Results may vary,
however when it works it will bring a brilliant smile to your face.
For spectacular scenery shots Windows Live also has an excellent
panorama photo stitching tool. This allows you to merge the several
shots you took off the deck at the cottage blending them into one
seamless “look at that beautiful view!” photo that will make your
friends jealous.
When it’s time to show off your collection, you can quickly find all
the photos of that special someone simply by pointing to their image in
the Quick Find section. If you want to narrow the search down to
pictures where both you and your spouse show up – not a problem – just
add both to the search criteria and presto, photos in which the lovely
couple appear are instantly displayed. The gallery also lets you view
by photo date, star ratings, and flagged status, or you can use a text
search to hunt a photo down by description.
Want to share? Photo E-mail will use your default email application to
either send a link to an online gallery, where friends can view photos
without having to download anything, or you can send it to them as a
regular attachment. Links to Social Media applications like Facebook,
YouTube, flickr and Windows Live Groups are built-in so publishing
tagged photos and videos is just a step away (now you can look forward
to seeing those early-morning shots that the kids took, after waking
you up at 5:30 AM on Christmas morning - well before you combed your
hair or got dressed - published for all the world to see, fun times!)
Windows Live Gallery is Available for download at http://explore.live.com/windows-live-photo-gallery?os=other.
For another good photo-editing program (for Windows or Mac) take a look
at Google’s Picasa program. You can download Picasa at http://picasa.google.com.
Feel free to contact me regarding any of your computer related issues -
(416) 640-2874 or email me at DMielke@FileBankIT.com.
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