Absolute Beginner's Guide to Microsoft Windows® XP Media Center®

■ Sharpen or Blur—This option is useful for sharpening up

an out-of-focus photo, or blur the image slightly to soften

the picture. This is done by means of mov-

ing a single slider bar. Drag it to the right

to increase the sharpness of the picture;

drag it to the left to blur the picture.

■ Learn More—This option appears in

many of the menus. Choose it to view

detailed instructions and background

information on the task you are

attempting.

Cropping, Resizing, and

Creating Cutouts

The Crop or Rotate menu item in Picture It! offers

the following choices:

■ Rotate—Although this feature provides

essentially the same functionality avail-

able in the My Pictures interface or in the

Windows XP Explorer window for My

Pictures (see Chapter 19), it does so with an enhanced, easy-to-use thumbnail

view (see Figure 20.5).

CHAPTER 20 CUSTOMIZING THE MY PICTURES EXPERIENCE WITH PICTURE IT!

269

FIGURE 20.4

This detail from

the lower right

of the Picture It!

main screen

shows the Zoom

controls.

As good as the photo-

enhancement tools in

Picture It! and similar

programs are, they can’t

work miracles on bad

photographs. All they have to work

with is what the image contains. If

the image was shot too dark, too

bright, out of focus, and so on,

don’t expect the program to be able

to put in detail that wasn’t captured

by the lens in the first place. The

digital darkroom techniques are

pretty impressive, but even they

can’t turn a rotten photo into a

great one.

caution

■ Crop Canvas—A very useful tool missing from the basic photo-enhance-

ment options covered in Chapter 19, the Crop feature lets you pare away the

extraneous portions of your image to emphasize the subject. You can drag a

rectangular shape over the photo to indicate how you want it cropped, or

choose another shape, such as a heart or a star (see Figure 20.6).

270

ABSOLUTE BEGINNER’S GUIDE TO MICROSOFT WINDOWS XP MEDIA CENTER

FIGURE 20.5

From the Rotate

menu, Picture It!

displays three

small thumb-

nails, offering

previews of how

the photo will

look after it’s

rotated.

FIGURE 20.6

Simple cropping

can emphasize

the subject and

trim away

unwanted por-

tions of your

image, or you

can crop using

one of almost 70

shapes.