Photos

The quondam Photo Viewer of Windows 7 fame is gone. In its place: the TileWorld app called Photos. Its task is to take hold of photo albums from everywhere fine photos are stored—your own Pictures binder, other PCs on your network and your OneDrive, and and then on—and display them all in one place (Figure four-33). Especially if you take a touchscreen, you'll find 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 iv-33. In the Photos app, the push at the pinnacle-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 can even edit your pictures instead of merely looking at them. (Simply you can no longer view your Facebook and Flickr photos in Photos.

Navigating Photos

Information technology's non hard to become effectually. The next to the championship "Pictures library" lets yous choose the source of the photos yous're seeing: either your Pictures library or your OneDrive. Once you lot've burrowed to your destination, the button takes you back to the start.

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—mayhap because you upgraded a Windows 7 machine to Windows 8. If not, peradventure now is the time to move your pictures into Pictures.

The Photos app tin't bear witness you pictures that lie in any other folder on your PC. Information technology's the Pictures folder or naught.

Tip

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

Slurping in Photos from a Camera

Photos can import photos from a camera or a memory card, too. If you lot open up the App bar (The App Bar), you'll find the Import push button. Information technology'south available at the Photos home screen or on any screen full of tiles or thumbnails—not when you've opened an private photo.

The Import button brings in pictures from your camera, a USB wink drive, or some other drive. When you first select that button, you lot're asked to choose the device you lot want to import from (Figure four-34, inset). Once y'all select the name of your camera or retentivity card, 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 run across the photos and videos on your carte. New ones are selected and ready to import, only y'all can select or deselect them as you come across fit. (Swipe downward from a thumbnail if yous have a touchscreen; right-click if you lot don't.) Name the folder for the new arrivals; so striking Import.

Tip

Point to a thumbnail without clicking to see a pop-upwardly box of information about that photo: date, size, and and so on.

When it'south all over, Windows offers you an "Open folder" push and then y'all tin see the newly imported goodies in the Photos app.

Playing with Photos

The rules of Photos are simple:

  • Past tapping or clicking, select a source, then an anthology within it, and then a photo inside it . When you lot've drilled down as far as you can get, the motion-picture show fills about of the screen.

  • To motility 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 show" button that starts a slideshow of all photos in this batch.

    Tip

    You tin interrupt the slideshow by tapping (if you lot take a touchscreen) or by pressing the Esc key (if you don't).

  • Send a photo to somebody past email or text message, or send it into some other app for editing. To do that, tap Share on the Charms bar; encounter The Charms Bar.

Zooming In, Zooming Out

When yous've opened an individual photo, yous can enlarge or shrink information technology in the usual means:

  • Touchscreen : Spread 2 fingers apart on the 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 plough the scroll wheel while pressing the Ctrl central.

  • 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 continue to zoom out, you backtrack into the album or other batch from which the photo came. If you lot zoom out more , you shrink the anthology's thumbnails. You lot wind upwards with a mosaic view of your album that you can't get to whatsoever other way, the ameliorate with which to survey your drove.

Rotate and Crop

Once you've opened a photo to glorious total-screen size, open the App bar (swipe up, correct-click, or press +Z). Two frequently needed options are staring you in the pixels:

Rotate

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

Ingather

Cropping means shaving off unnecessary portions of a photograph. Usually, y'all ingather a photograph to improve its composition—adjusting where the discipline appears inside the frame of the movie. Often, a photo has more bear upon if it's cropped tightly effectually the bailiwick, peculiarly in portraits. Or mayhap you want to crop out wasted space, similar big expanses of background sky. You can even chop a one-time romantic involvement out of an otherwise perfect family portrait.

When you select the Crop button, a white rectangle appears on your photograph. Elevate inward on any corner. The part of the photo that Windows will eventually trim abroad is dimmed out. You can re-heart the photograph by dragging whatever office of the photo, inside or outside of the box.

If you lot tap the "Aspect ratio" push (also on the App bar), you get a choice of ix canned proportions: Foursquare, 3 x 2, 3 10 5, iv x 3, and so on. They make the app limit the cropping frame to preset proportions. (The "Lock screen" selection ensures that your cropped photo will exactly fit your figurer'southward Lock screen.)

The Constrain characteristic is specially important if you plan to order prints of your photos. Prints come only in standard photo sizes: 4 ten six, 5 x 7, eight x 10, then on. Limiting your cropping to one of these standard sizes guarantees that your cropped photos will fit perfectly into Kodak prints.

When everything looks good, select Apply. Yous take ane concluding choice to make on the App bar: "Salvage a re-create" (you wind up with both cropped and uncropped photos) and "Update original" (yous wind up with simply one copy—the cropped 1). Or "Undo," significant "Never mind."

Truth be told, Rotate and Crop were in the original Windows 8, as well. The new stuff doesn't announced until you hit Edit (likewise on the App bar).

Editing Photos: The Mini Photoshop

The Photos app: It's not just for looking at pictures anymore. Now it'south also for fixing them. In Windows 8.1, an impressively complete suite of photo-editing tools awaits. These tools tin can prepare the brightness, contrast, and color of your pictures, and even add special effects like selective blur and vignetting (where the photograph corners are misty white to draw the eye to the subject).

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

Ready? Go along hands and feet within the tram at all times.

Tip

As you piece of work, keep in mind that you can zoom in for better particular work. Touchscreen : Spread 2 fingers on the glass. Mouse : Press Ctrl every bit you turn the wheel, or click the and buttons on the screen. Keyboard : Press Ctrl+plus and Ctrl+minus.

Also, equally you lot piece of work, keep in heed that the Undo button is e'er at your control, and it always reverses the last editing step—it's a rubber net, and information technology's 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 4-35. In the new Editing fashion, yous become v primary buttons at the left side; each one summons a different set of "button dials" on the right side. The App bar gives you everything you need to disengage, cancel, or preserve the changes.

Car fix

When you select this button (on the left), six thumbnail versions of your photograph appear at right. Each offers Windows' vision of what the motion-picture show might await like when it'due south touched up in a dissimilar way: a trivial brighter, a footling darker, a little contrastier, black-and-white, and so on. Select the ane you desire.

Bones fixes

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

  • Rotate, Crop . These piece of work merely as described on the previous pages.

  • Redeye . Red-eye is a common problem in wink photography. This creepy, possessed look—devilish, glowing-blood-red pupils in your subjects' eyes—has ruined many an otherwise keen photo.

    Red-eye is acquired past light reflected dorsum from optics. The brilliant light of your flash illuminates the ruby-red retinal tissue at the back of the eyes. That's why ruby-red-center issues are worse when y'all shoot pictures in a dim room: Your subjects' pupils are dilated, allowing even more calorie-free from your flash to accomplish their retinas.

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

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

    Photos's Retouch brush lets you practice the same thing with your own photos: paint abroad scratches, spots, hairs, and other small-scale flaws. Information technology doesn't cover the imperfections you're trying to remove, only blurs them out by softly blending them into a small-scale radius of surrounding pixels (in other words, you can't use it to whiten teeth).

    Once you've clicked Retouch, your cursor sprouts a round brush. Notice 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 correct side are the first advent of Photos's button dials . Figure 4-36 shows the idea.

Many of the new photo-editing controls rely on these

Figure iv-36. Many of the new photo-editing controls rely on these "button dials," like the Effulgence one shown hither. When you tap or click it, the push itself becomes a handle—a white round handle. You tin drag information technology either counterclockwise (in this case, making the photo darker, as shown at center) or clockwise (making the photo brighter, equally shown at bottom). The unexpected part is that you can drag all the way effectually from the zero point, in either direction.

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

  • Contrast . If your photo looks apartment, and then use this effect to bring out details. It makes the dark parts of your photo a petty darker, and the lite parts a piffling 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 one time might have been unsalvageably overexposed or underexposed photos into usable shots.

    For example, suppose you've got a photograph looking good, except that you don't take any detail in murky, dark areas. Plow the Shadows handle clockwise, and presto! A world of detail emerges from what used to exist virtually black.

Color

Digital cameras (and scanners) don't e'er capture colour accurately. Digital photos sometimes have a slightly blue or dark-green tinge, producing dull colors, lower contrast, and sickly looking skin tones. In fact, the whole thing might have a faint greenish or magenta cast. Or perhaps you but desire to take colour adjustment into your own hands, not simply to get the colors right, but also to create a specific mood.

Here are the tools at your disposal:

  • Temperature . This dial adjusts the photo along 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 wink.

  • Tint . Similar the tint control on a color Television set, this slider adjusts the photo's overall tint along the red-green spectrum. Adjusting this slider is helpful for correcting peel tones and for compensating for difficult lighting situations, like fluorescent lighting.

  • Saturation . When y'all increase the saturation of a photo's colors, you make them more than brilliant; you make them "popular." You tin can also improve photos that take harsh, garish colors by dialing down the saturation, and then the colors look a niggling less intense. (Boosting the saturation is often a bad idea for pictures of people , though; skin can air current up looking actually weird.)

  • Color enhance . Here's a weirdie. This one lets y'all heave just one color in the photo—all the reds, for example, or all the blues. If you lot desire, you can really goose just the sky, or bring out the yellows in a field of flowers.

    Once you lot've selected this push button, tap or click a spot in the photo that displays the color that needs boosting; a pivot appears in that location, as though you'd marked a spot on a map. At present turn the push button dial to brand all patches of that color get brighter or dimmer.

Effects

Photos comes with two built-in special effects, each intended to depict the viewer's middle to the bailiwick of the photo. You won't need them frequently, just now and and then, they hit the bullseye:

  • Vignette . This upshot whites out the corners of the photo, creating an oval-shaped, softly faded frame effectually the center. The more yous turn the button punch, the more the whiteness encroaches toward the middle.

  • Selective focus . Tap or click the office of the photo that you want to exist in focus. The rest of the image gets softly blurred, as though taken with an expensive camera by someone who knew what he was doing.

Saving the editing

All of this editing ends the same manner. Open the App bar once again and choose "Save a copy" (preserve the edited photo as a duplicate of the original); "Update original" (brand changes to the original); or "Cancel" (discard all your edits).

Slapping a Photograph onto the Lock Screen or Photos Tile

Likewise hiding on the App bar: the Set As button. Its shortcut card lets you slap the current photo onto either of these billboards:

  • Lock screen . That's a reference to the big photo that appears when you lot first wake up a Windows 8 machine, the one that bears the current time. Here'south 1 easy way to change it to a photo of your ain.

  • App tile . Usually, the paradigm that represents Photos on the Showtime screen changes every few seconds. It rotates through different pictures. But using this command, y'all can stamp the selected photograph onto that tile for all time. (The tile no longer rotates through photos.)

Selecting and Sharing Photos

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

Selecting photos

The showtime pace is telling Photos which pictures yous desire to send. To practice that, drill down until you're looking at the thumbnails of some batch. Then, for each photo you desire to include, practice this:

  • Touchscreen : Picture show downwardly on the thumbnail.

  • Mouse : Correct-click the thumbnail.

  • Keyboard : Employ the arrow keys to highlight a thumbnail, and and then press the key.

Tip

You can remove a thumbnail from the current selection by using the same technique a second time.

In each instance, the thumbnail sprouts a colored outline, and a checkmark appears in its top-right corner. Yous can repeat the procedure for another photograph, and another, until all the ones y'all want are checkmarked.

Note

You can't select photos from 2 unlike folders at once. Windows complains and asks that you deselect the earlier grouping.

To do that, you lot don't have to revisit the before thumbnails. Instead, just open the App bar and employ the "Articulate selection" button. Now no photos are selected in any album.

Sharing selected photos

Once you've chosen the photos you desire to share, open the Charms bar (The Charms Bar). Hit Share.

The options here vary; if y'all've installed a plan with beefier editing tools, like Microsoft'due south own Fresh Paint, its name appears here, too.

Simply for sure you'll find Mail, which means you can send photos by e-mail, directly from Photos. A new console appears, showing an approachable message; the photos are attached. Address it, blazon a subject line and maybe a message, so hit the push to transport it.

OneDrive Options

Your complimentary online OneDrive deejay is a handy intermediary for photos that shuttle between computers or phones (see the box on Photos from Other PCs). So it's no surprise that Microsoft made it easy to ship photos from Photos to your online OneDrive—if null else, it's a great fashion to back them up.

In Photos, make sure you lot're viewing your OneDrive pictures (use the popular-up carte du jour at height 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 desire to copy to your OneDrive, and (again on the App bar) striking Copy to OneDrive.

Printing Pictures

You lot can, of class, impress out photos so that you can hang them amply on the wall or manus them proudly to admirers.

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

Open up the first photo y'all want to print and then that it's filling your screen. Open the Charms bar (The Charms Bar); choose Devices; choose your printer.

Photos shows you a preview of the printout-to-be. On this screen, yous can specify how many copies yous desire and how yous want the photograph printed—upright (portrait orientation) or sideways (mural). The "More settings" button reveals boosted options specific to your printer, like newspaper type and print quality.

When everything looks skilful, striking the Print push button.

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