Photos

The former Photo Viewer of Windows 7 fame is gone. In its place: the TileWorld app chosen Photos. Its job is to grab photo albums from everywhere fine photos are stored—your own Pictures folder, other PCs on your network and your OneDrive, and so on—and brandish them all in one place (Figure 4-33). Peculiarly if you lot accept a touchscreen, you lot'll discover Photos a graceful, fluid, lovely way to browse your shots.

In the Photos app, the button at the top-right corner lets you switch between text-tiles view (top left) and thumbnails view (lower right).Shown here for added excitement: the App bar.

Figure four-33. In the Photos app, the button at the top-right corner lets you switch between text-tiles view (top left) and thumbnails view (lower correct). Shown here for added excitement: the App bar.

In Windows 8.i, you tin even edit your pictures instead of just looking at them. (Only you can no longer view your Facebook and Flickr photos in Photos.

Navigating Photos

Information technology's not hard to get effectually. The next to the championship "Pictures library" lets y'all choose the source of the photos you're seeing: either your Pictures library or your OneDrive. Once you've burrowed to your destination, the button takes you back to the first.

Your Pictures Folder

Back at the desktop, backside the scenes of TileWorld, y'all have a Pictures folder. Whatever photos in this folder show up in the Photos app automatically.

Maybe there are pictures here already—perhaps because you lot upgraded a Windows vii motorcar to Windows eight. If non, maybe now is the time to motility your pictures into Pictures.

The Photos app can't show y'all pictures that lie in any other folder on your PC. It'southward the Pictures folder or cypher.

Tip

Well, actually, there's one exception. If you keep pictures in another folder and don't want to move them, yous can add that folder to the Pictures library , as described on Working with Library Contents.

Slurping in Photos from a Photographic camera

Photos tin import photos from a camera or a memory bill of fare, likewise. If y'all open the App bar (The App Bar), yous'll find the Import button. It'southward available at the Photos home screen or on whatsoever screen full of tiles or thumbnails—non when yous've opened an individual photograph.

The Import button brings in pictures from your camera, a USB wink drive, or some other drive. When you showtime select that push, yous're asked to choose the device you lot want to import from (Figure 4-34, inset). Once you select the name of your camera or memory carte, you get to choose which shots to import (Figure four-34, bottom).

You see the photos and videos on your card. New ones are selected and ready to import, but you can select or deselect them as you see fit. (Swipe down from a thumbnail if you have a touchscreen; right-click if you don't.) Name the folder for the new arrivals; then hit Import.

Figure 4-34. You come across the photos and videos on your carte du jour. New ones are selected and ready to import, but y'all can select or deselect them as you see fit. (Swipe downwardly from a thumbnail if you have a touchscreen; right-click if y'all don't.) Proper noun the folder for the new arrivals; then hitting Import.

Tip

Betoken to a thumbnail without clicking to run across a pop-up box of information almost that photo: date, size, and and then on.

When it's all over, Windows offers you an "Open folder" button so you tin come across the newly imported goodies in the Photos app.

Playing with Photos

The rules of Photos are uncomplicated:

  • By tapping or clicking, select a source, then an album within it, and then a photo within it . When yous've drilled down as far equally you tin go, the picture fills most of the screen.

  • To move through the photos, swipe horizontally (touchscreen), click the and buttons at the edges of the screen (mouse), or press the and keys (keyboard).

  • The App bar offers a "Slide testify" button that starts a slideshow of all photos in this batch.

    Tip

    You can interrupt the slideshow by tapping (if you accept a touchscreen) or past pressing the Esc primal (if you lot don't).

  • Send a photo to somebody by electronic mail or text message, or ship it into another app for editing. To practice that, tap Share on the Charms bar; run into The Charms Bar.

Zooming In, Zooming Out

When you've opened an individual photo, yous can overstate or shrink it in the usual ways:

  • Touchscreen : Spread two fingers apart on the drinking glass; pinch to zoom back out.

  • Mouse : Click the and buttons at the correct edge of the horizontal scroll bar to zoom in or out. Or plow the gyre cycle while pressing the Ctrl key.

  • Keyboard : Press Ctrl and the or keys.

When zooming gets complicated is after you've restored a photo to its original fit-the-screen size. If yous proceed to zoom out, you backtrack into the album or other batch from which the photograph came. If you zoom out more , you lot shrink the album'south thumbnails. Y'all current of air up with a mosaic view of your album that y'all can't go to any other fashion, the ameliorate with which to survey your collection.

Rotate and Crop

One time you've opened a photograph to glorious full-screen size, open the App bar (swipe up, right-click, or press +Z). 2 often needed options are staring you in the pixels:

Rotate

Tap this button to rotate the photograph 90 degrees. Keep borer until the photograph is upright.

Ingather

Cropping ways shaving off unnecessary portions of a photo. Usually, you crop a photograph to improve its composition—adjusting where the subject appears within the frame of the picture. Often, a photo has more impact if information technology'southward cropped tightly around the subject, especially in portraits. Or maybe you want to crop out wasted space, similar big expanses of groundwork sky. Yous tin even chop a former romantic involvement out of an otherwise perfect family portrait.

When you select the Ingather button, a white rectangle appears on your photo. Drag inward on any corner. The part of the photograph that Windows volition eventually trim away is dimmed out. Y'all tin can re-center the photo by dragging any part of the photo, inside or exterior of the box.

If y'all tap the "Aspect ratio" push button (also on the App bar), you get a selection of 9 canned proportions: Square, iii 10 two, 3 x five, 4 x 3, and so on. They make the app limit the cropping frame to preset proportions. (The "Lock screen" choice ensures that your cropped photo will exactly fit your computer's Lock screen.)

The Constrain feature is peculiarly important if you plan to club prints of your photos. Prints come only in standard photo sizes: 4 10 6, 5 x 7, 8 ten x, and so on. Limiting your cropping to 1 of these standard sizes guarantees that your cropped photos volition fit perfectly into Kodak prints.

When everything looks good, select Apply. Yous have 1 concluding choice to brand on the App bar: "Save a copy" (you wind up with both cropped and uncropped photos) and "Update original" (you wind up with only one re-create—the cropped ane). Or "Undo," meaning "Never listen."

Truth be told, Rotate and Crop were in the original Windows viii, as well. The new stuff doesn't appear until you hit Edit (likewise on the App bar).

Editing Photos: The Mini Photoshop

The Photos app: It'due south non just for looking at pictures anymore. Now it'southward as well for fixing them. In Windows viii.1, an impressively complete suite of photo-editing tools awaits. These tools can fix the brightness, contrast, and color of your pictures, and even add special effects like selective blur and vignetting (where the photo corners are misty white to depict the eye to the subject field).

To begin, open the photo that needs help. Open up the App bar; select Edit to open up the editing wonderland shown in Figure 4-35.

Set up? Continue hands and feet within the tram at all times.

Tip

Equally you work, go along in heed that you can zoom in for better item work. Touchscreen : Spread two fingers on the glass. Mouse : Press Ctrl as yous plough the wheel, or click the and buttons on the screen. Keyboard : Printing Ctrl+plus and Ctrl+minus.

Also, as you work, keep in mind that the Undo button is always at your command, and information technology e'er reverses the last editing stride—it'south a rubber net, and it'due south hiding in the App bar.

In the new Editing mode, you get five primary buttons at the left side; each one summons a different set of

Effigy four-35. In the new Editing mode, you get 5 principal buttons at the left side; each one summons a unlike gear up of "button dials" on the right side. The App bar gives you lot everything you need to undo, cancel, or preserve the changes.

Car set up

When you select this button (on the left), six thumbnail versions of your photo appear at right. Each offers Windows' vision of what the motion-picture show might look like when it's touched upwards in a different mode: a little brighter, a petty darker, a lilliputian contrastier, black-and-white, so on. Select the one you desire.

Basic fixes

This left-side button produces iv adjustments on the correct:

  • Rotate, Crop . These work merely every bit described on the previous pages.

  • Redeye . Carmine-eye is a mutual trouble in flash photography. This creepy, possessed look—devilish, glowing-red pupils in your subjects' optics—has ruined many an otherwise slap-up photograph.

    Red-heart is caused by light reflected back from eyes. The bright light of your flash illuminates the blood-reddish retinal tissue at the back of the optics. That's why ruddy-heart problems are worse when y'all shoot pictures in a dim room: Your subjects' pupils are dilated, allowing even more than calorie-free from your wink to reach their retinas.

    When you select this push button, your cursor becomes loaded with a red dot. Employ it inside each eye that has the problem. (Zoom in if necessary.) The app turns the crimson in each eye to black.

  • Retouch . Sometimes an otherwise perfect portrait is spoiled by the tiniest of imperfections—a stray hair or a hideous blotch, for example. Professional person photographers routinely remove such imperfections—a procedure known equally retouching, for clients known as cocky-conscious or vain. (Kidding!)

    Photos's Retouch brush lets you exercise the aforementioned thing with your ain photos: pigment away scratches, spots, hairs, and other minor flaws. It doesn't encompass the imperfections you're trying to remove, just blurs them out by softly blending them into a small radius of surrounding pixels (in other words, y'all can't use it to whiten teeth).

    Once you've clicked Retouch, your cursor sprouts a round brush. Observe the imperfection and "paint" over it, either by dabbing or dragging to blend it with the surrounding portion of the photo.

Light

When this button is selected (left side), the buttons on the right side are the first appearance of Photos's button dials . Effigy 4-36 shows the idea.

Many of the new photo-editing controls rely on these

Figure 4-36. Many of the new photo-editing controls rely on these "push dials," like the Brightness one shown hither. When y'all tap or click it, the button itself becomes a handle—a white round handle. You tin can drag it either counterclockwise (in this example, making the photo darker, as shown at center) or clockwise (making the photo brighter, as shown at lesser). The unexpected part is that you can drag all the way around from the zero point, in either management.

  • Brightness . Adjusts the overall exposure of the photograph, making all of it lighter or darker.

  • Contrast . If your photograph looks apartment, then employ this effect to bring out details. It makes the dark parts of your photo a little darker, and the light parts a picayune lighter.

  • Highlights, Shadows . The Highlights and Shadows dials are designed to recover lost detail in the brightest and darkest areas of your photos, turning what in one case might have been unsalvageably overexposed or underexposed photos into usable shots.

    For example, suppose you've got a photo looking skillful, except that you don't have any detail in murky, nighttime areas. Turn the Shadows handle clockwise, and presto! A globe of particular emerges from what used to be nearly black.

Colour

Digital cameras (and scanners) don't e'er capture color accurately. Digital photos sometimes have a slightly bluish or greenish tinge, producing irksome colors, lower dissimilarity, and sickly looking skin tones. In fact, the whole thing might take a faint light-green or magenta cast. Or perhaps y'all just want to take color adjustment into your own hands, not only to become the colors correct, simply also to create a specific mood.

Hither are the tools at your disposal:

  • Temperature . This dial adjusts the photo forth the blue-orange spectrum. Dial clockwise, for example, to warm up the tones, making them more orangeish—a handy technique for breathing life dorsum into subjects who have been bleached white with a flash.

  • Tint . Like the tint control on a color TV, this slider adjusts the photo'southward overall tint along the ruddy-dark-green spectrum. Adjusting this slider is helpful for correcting pare tones and for compensating for hard lighting situations, like fluorescent lighting.

  • Saturation . When you increment the saturation of a photo's colors, you make them more vivid; y'all make them "pop." Y'all can also improve photos that have harsh, garish colors by dialing downwardly the saturation, so the colors expect a trivial less intense. (Boosting the saturation is often a bad idea for pictures of people , though; peel can wind up looking really weird.)

  • Color raise . Here's a weirdie. This 1 lets you boost just one colour in the photo—all the reds, for example, or all the dejection. If yous want, you lot can really goose just the heaven, or bring out the yellows in a field of flowers.

    Once you've selected this button, tap or click a spot in the photograph that displays the color that needs boosting; a pin appears there, equally though you'd marked a spot on a map. At present plough the button punch to make all patches of that color go brighter or dimmer.

Effects

Photos comes with two built-in special effects, each intended to depict the viewer's eye to the subject of the photo. Y'all won't need them ofttimes, only now and so, they hit the bullseye:

  • Vignette . This consequence whites out the corners of the photo, creating an oval-shaped, softly faded frame around the center. The more than you plough the push button punch, the more the whiteness encroaches toward the eye.

  • Selective focus . Tap or click the part of the photograph that you want to be in focus. The remainder of the image gets softly blurred, equally though taken with an expensive photographic camera by someone who knew what he was doing.

Saving the editing

All of this editing ends the same way. Open up the App bar again and choose "Salvage a copy" (preserve the edited photo as a indistinguishable of the original); "Update original" (make changes to the original); or "Cancel" (discard all your edits).

Slapping a Photograph onto the Lock Screen or Photos Tile

Also hiding on the App bar: the Gear up As button. Its shortcut menu lets you slap the electric current photo onto either of these billboards:

  • Lock screen . That'southward a reference to the large photo that appears when you first wake up a Windows eight machine, the ane that bears the current fourth dimension. Here's one easy way to change information technology to a photo of your own.

  • App tile . Ordinarily, the image that represents Photos on the Start screen changes every few seconds. It rotates through different pictures. But using this command, you can stamp the selected photo onto that tile for all time. (The tile no longer rotates through photos.)

Selecting and Sharing Photos

Photos wouldn't exist much fun if your screen were the only place you could see them. Fortunately, the Photos app is happy to zap them abroad to your adoring fans electronically.

Selecting photos

The start step is telling Photos which pictures you want to ship. To practise that, drill down until you lot're looking at the thumbnails of some batch. Then, for each photo yous want to include, exercise this:

  • Touchscreen : Flick downward on the thumbnail.

  • Mouse : Correct-click the thumbnail.

  • Keyboard : Employ the arrow keys to highlight a thumbnail, and so printing the primal.

Tip

You lot can remove a thumbnail from the electric current selection past using the same technique a 2d fourth dimension.

In each case, the thumbnail sprouts a colored outline, and a checkmark appears in its tiptop-right corner. You lot can repeat the procedure for another photo, and another, until all the ones y'all want are checkmarked.

Note

You can't select photos from two unlike folders at once. Windows complains and asks that y'all deselect the earlier group.

To do that, you don't have to revisit the earlier thumbnails. Instead, just open up the App bar and utilise the "Articulate selection" button. At present no photos are selected in any anthology.

Sharing selected photos

In one case yous've chosen the photos y'all want to share, open the Charms bar (The Charms Bar). Hit Share.

The options here vary; if you've installed a program with beefier editing tools, similar Microsoft's own Fresh Paint, its proper name appears here, too.

Only for sure you'll find Mail, which means y'all can send photos by email, direct from Photos. A new panel appears, showing an outgoing message; the photos are fastened. Address it, type a field of study line and possibly a message, and so hit the push button to send it.

OneDrive Options

Your costless online OneDrive deejay is a handy intermediary for photos that shuttle between computers or phones (come across the box on Photos from Other PCs). And then it's no surprise that Microsoft made it easy to transport photos from Photos to your online OneDrive—if nothing else, information technology'due south a great way to dorsum them upwardly.

In Photos, brand sure y'all're viewing your OneDrive pictures (use the pop-up menu at pinnacle left). Open the App bar; choose "Add files." The File Picker appears (The File Picker). Navigate to your Pictures folder, select the shots y'all want to copy to your OneDrive, and (again on the App bar) hit Copy to OneDrive.

Printing Pictures

Y'all can, of course, print out photos and so that you tin hang them handsomely on the wall or hand them proudly to admirers.

Start past opening the Pictures tile in Photos. (You can't print pictures from online accounts or ones that alive on other computers—simply ones that are actually on your computer.)

Open the first photo you desire to print then that it'south filling your screen. Open the Charms bar (The Charms Bar); choose Devices; choose your printer.

Photos shows you a preview of the printouthoped-for. On this screen, you tin specify how many copies you want and how yous want the photograph printed—upright (portrait orientation) or sideways (mural). The "More than settings" push reveals boosted options specific to your printer, like paper blazon and print quality.

When everything looks good, hit the Impress push.

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