This tutorial is aimed at photography amateurs/newbies, and outlines how photographs can be manipulated, touched-up and changed using the Windows Photo Gallery Viewer, the standard image viewer and editor that comes with Windows Vista. Much of the information here is also relevant to Microsoft Office Picture Manager.

Real pros use Photoshop. There’s no doubt that pretty much whatever can be done to an image can be done using it. The sheer volume of articles and tutorials available on this site alone for Photoshop is evidence enough of its popularity and status among photography enthusiasts and professionals.

For those of us with less than perfect computers, however, it is also slow to load and run. Photoshop is a huge, hulking beast – expensive and dauntingly complicated for the uninitiated. I hardly need mention that it is also expensive, for the photography amateur (who may just want to touch-up/improve their photos a little bit, not embark on major photographic surgery), Photoshop (and its myriad of features) is unnecessary.

If all you want to do is tinker with your photos and make them look a bit nicer, then Windows Photo Gallery Viewer, the default picture viewer that comes with Windows Vista, does the job.

It goes without saying that WPGV lacks the refined complexities of Photoshop and other programmes of that ilk (you can’t reduce ISO noise on WPGV, nor can you apply a “hot plastic filter” or start messing around with layers), but WPGV does nicely for simple touching-up and image enhancement. And it is fast, straightforward and easy.

In brief, here’s what WPGV has:

• All the usual file management options (loading, saving, etc…)
• An option to change the tags and date of images
• An “auto adjust” feature which (purportedly) fixes exposure and colour automatically.
• Options to adjust brightness, contrast, colour temperature, hue and saturation of images
• Image cropping (i.e. cutting bits off the sides)
• Red-eye reduction
• Options to print, email and export images to other image editing programmes.
• A gallery (to see all the images in one folder or a viewing history)

How to Fix and Touch-Up Photos

Let’s assume that we all know how to load it, and we are familiar with what a “File” menu looks like, and get straight down to business. Load up your image, and click on “Edit” at the top - a sub-menu should appear to the far right.

Starting at the top we have Auto Adjust, a fine ally for the lazy and wimpish but (no doubt) the object of scorn for hardcore professionals. Auto Adjust does what it says on the tin, if your photo is obviously too dark then it’ll brighten it (and vice versa), and it might have a go at livening up some of the colours in the photo too. If you don’t like the changes Auto Adjust makes, you can always simply Undo them (down at the bottom). This is Auto Adjust at work (before and after):

 

Next down the list we have Brightness/Contrast (anyone who has ever owned a television will know what these do). To risk stating the Absolutely Obvious, Brightness controls how light or dark the image is, if your picture is underexposed (i.e. too dark) then slide the bar to the right, if it is overexposed (i.e. too light) then slide the bar to the left. If you only need to do it a little bit then your photo will be fine, but drastic swoops to the right or left will result in the image quality deteriorating (it will appear blotchy or grainy).

 

Contrast affects how stark the difference is between dark and light in the photo, and often has the effect of brightening colours. Most photos, in my humble opinion, could use a touch more contrast.

After Brightness/Contrast, we have Adjust Colour. The first option is Colour Temperature, put simply if you go to the right then the image will get redder, and if you go to the left it will look bluer. Sometimes photos will come out of a camera looking unnaturally red (this happens with some light-bulbs) or unnaturally blue (an issue with certain types of fluorescent light), so Colour Temperature is a quick-fix for this (if it’s too blue then simply pull the bar right – red and blue kind of cancel each other out). You can give people-photos warmth by bumping up the colour temperature a little bit, although if you go too far then they come out looking sunburnt.

 

After Colour Temperature we have Hue, which is (arguably) less useful. Sliding to the right we get more purple, and sliding to the left we get more green. It’s possible that some nature/wildlife photos might benefit from messing around with the Hue, but it is rare that anyone would want a photo to look more purple (for instance).

Finally, we have Saturation – a fun thing to play around with. Colour saturation is a complex science, but for all intents and purposes here we can say that if you go further to the left the colours become duller (to the furthest left we get a black and white image), and further to the right the colours get brighter. Many photos will benefit from a bit more Saturation, they make the colours brighter and richer (and if you are taking nature photos you can go nuts with it, making a dull yellow flower look like a bright yellow one).

After Adjust Colour then we get Crop Image. Essentially, here you are able to cut out the bits of the photo that you don’t want (although not in the sense of removing a specific element of the picture, that’s a Sisyphean ordeal which will require Photoshop). Cropping means chopping bits off the top, left, right and bottom sides of the photo. If you have a picture of two people, say, and you only want the person on the left then you can “cut out” the other person, so to speak. When you click on Crop Image, the areas of the image that will be cropped (i.e. cut out) appear darker, you control the size of the area that you want to keep by clicking on the black accentuated corners of the brighter box. While you can choose any shape for your new photo to be (this is the “Personalised” option in the crop box), WIV also offers the option of predetermined size ratios, such as A4 (useful if you want to print it on an A4 sheet of paper, obviously).

So there you have it: a breif run-through of the photo editing options offered by the Windows Photo Gallery Viewer. Again, you can’t do all the fancy editing that you can do in Photoshop; but if all you want to do is tinker with your photos and make them look a bit nicer, then Windows Photo Gallery Viewer is the photo editor for you.