We're only a couple of months away from Windows Vista, the first major overhaul of Microsoft's operating system in over five years. In that time, digital photography has virtually replaced film photography, so it's worth thinking about the cool stuff that awaits digital photographers in Vista.
I started to discuss all the photo features last week. Read on for details about Vista's photo editor.
Yes, Vista includes an actual photo editor--and no, I'm not talking about the Paint accessory we've all known and loved since the early 90s.
But hang on, there's no need to toss your copy of Adobe Photoshop into the fireplace quite yet. Windows offers only a handful of essential photo editing features. What's it does offer, however, is useful because you can do simple touch-up work without needing to launch a big editing program.
Vista's image editor is part of the Photo Gallery. To get there, you'll select a picture and click the Fix button in the toolbar. In the Fix module, you'll see a pane with commands for color and exposure adjustment, cropping, and red-eye removal.
The Auto Adjust feature offers a convenient one-click way to snap your photos into proper exposure and color. You can also fiddle with a variety of sliders--there's even a saturation control that you can use to make black-and-white versions of your pictures. In addition, the crop tool has presets for all the common print ratios, like 4 by 6 and 8 by 10.
Now for the part that might take some getting used to: There's no Save button. When you navigate from the editor back to the Gallery, or when you close the program, your changes are saved automatically. That's convenient--but I've already seen it scare some folks. "What if I don't want to save over my original photo?" is a common lament. Well, no worries. You have two options. First, there's a duplicator built into the Gallery; you can easily make a copy of any photo and edit that, leaving the original undisturbed. Second, the Photo Gallery has a sort of "digital negative" feature built in. When you change a photo, it automatically backs up the original image somewhere deep in the bowels of your hard drive. At any time--a day or a year later--you can go back to your photo and tell Windows to Revert to Original.
I think you'll find that the Photo Gallery is a great way to organize and play with your photos. It's a dramatically better experience than trying to mess with your photos in the old My Documents folder.
But what of My Documents? Is it still around? Kind of. You'll probably be pleased to know that all the "Mys" are gone from Windows in Vista--My Pictures is now just Pictures, for example. Personally, I always cringed at the Mys, so it's a nice improvement. But yes, you can still get to your photos the old fashioned way, via the Pictures folder, if you want to.
So how does Vista help you simply enjoy your photos--you know, by looking at them? Well, for starters, even the Windows photo viewer is different. Remember the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer from Windows XP? Of course you do; you probably use it all the time to see your photos. Here's one key improvement: The new Vista viewer opens a new copy of itself every time you double-click a picture, so you can easily compare photos side by side.
Vista also features a dramatically improved slide show. The slide show can take advantage of a handful of "themes" that present the photos in different ways. The Travel theme, for instance, animates the pictures so they slide across the screen in interesting ways. It even positions several photos on screen at once, side by side in little virtual photo frames. The effect is quite pretty. In an interesting twist, the slide show can also show videos, so your digital camera's video capture feature will start to get a lot more use in Vista.
The Photos screen saver can take advantage of the slide show themes. Since I've been testing Vista, I can't tell you how many times I've come home to find my family staring at my computer's screen saver, captivated by the snazzy animations, the random photo selections, and the occasional video clips. My wife says that watching the screen saver is an enjoyable way to see old photos that she forgot we even had. One last goodie: You can configure the Photos screen saver so it only shows certain pictures according to tags and star ratings.
Hot PicsGet published, get famous! Each week, we select our favorite reader-submitted photo based on creativity, originality, and technique. Every month, the best of the weekly winners gets a prize valued at between $15 and $50.
Here's how to enter: Send us your photograph in JPEG format, at a resolution no higher than 640 by 480 pixels. Entries at higher resolutions will be immediately disqualified. If necessary, use an image editing program to reduce the file size of your image before e-mailing it to us. Include the title of your photo along with a short description and how you photographed it. Don't forget to send your name, e-mail address, and postal address. Before entering, please read the full description of the contest rules and regulations.
Michelle writes: "Recently, I became fascinated with infrared photography. After several months, I've had a bit of really satisfying luck. I cross the bridge in this photo every day on my way to work. I knew that clouds look particularly striking in infrared, so I tried shooting the bridge on a particularly cloudy day. I like the end result; all the contrast seems spectacular."
Michelle took the photo with a Canon EOS 10D with an infrared filter mounted on the lens.
Congratulations to Peggy and to everyone else who won a Hot Pic of the Week last month. Keep those entries coming!
See all the Hot Pic of the Week photos online.
Dave Johnson
