Windows 8.1: The Missing Manual

Editing Your Shots

Straight from the camera, digital snapshots often need a little bit of help. A photo may be too dark or too light. The colors may be too bluish or too yellowish. The focus may be a little blurry, the camera may have been tilted slightly, or the composition may be somewhat off.

Fortunately, Photo Gallery lets you fine-tune digital images in ways that, in the world of traditional photography, would have required a fully equipped darkroom, several bottles of smelly chemicals, and an X-Acto knife.

In Photo Gallery, you can’t paint in additional elements, mask out unwanted backgrounds, or apply 50 different special-effects filters, as you can with editing programs like Photoshop and Photoshop Elements. Nonetheless, Photo Gallery handles basic photo fix-up tasks, many of which work with a single click.

All Photo Gallery editing controls are hanging out on the Ribbon’s Edit tab, which appears automatically when you double-click a photo thumbnail to open it.

You exit Edit mode by clicking “Close file” (top right of the window) or by tapping the Esc key.

Ways to Zoom

Before you get deeply immersed in the editing process, it’s well worth knowing how to zoom and scroll around, since chances are you’ll be doing quite a bit of it.

• Maximize. One way to zoom is to change the size of the window itself. Maximize Photo Gallery to enlarge the image.

• The Size pop-up menu. Use the Size slider (lower right) to zoom in or out.

  Note

  The icon beside the Size slider means “Fit the photo in the window ...