Photos

The old Photograph Viewer of Windows 7 fame is gone. In its identify: the TileWorld app chosen Photos. Its job is to catch photo albums from everywhere fine photos are stored—your own Pictures folder, other PCs on your network and your OneDrive, and so on—and display them all in one place (Figure 4-33). Peculiarly if you have a touchscreen, yous'll discover Photos a graceful, fluid, lovely manner 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-correct corner lets you switch between text-tiles view (summit left) and thumbnails view (lower right). Shown hither for added excitement: the App bar.

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

Navigating Photos

Information technology's not hard to get around. The side by side to the title "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 yous back to the commencement.

Your Pictures Folder

Back at the desktop, behind the scenes of TileWorld, you lot take a Pictures folder. Any photos in this folder show upwards in the Photos app automatically.

Maybe at that place are pictures here already—perhaps because you upgraded a Windows 7 machine to Windows 8. If not, possibly at present is the time to move your pictures into Pictures.

The Photos app tin can't show you pictures that lie in whatever other folder on your PC. It's the Pictures folder or nothing.

Tip

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

Slurping in Photos from a Photographic camera

Photos can import photos from a camera or a retention bill of fare, too. If you open the App bar (The App Bar), you'll observe the Import button. It's available at the Photos home screen or on any screen full of tiles or thumbnails—not when you lot've opened an individual photo.

The Import button brings in pictures from your photographic camera, a USB flash bulldoze, or another bulldoze. When you starting time select that button, you're asked to choose the device yous desire to import from (Figure 4-34, inset). Once you select the proper name of your camera or memory carte du jour, you get to choose which shots to import (Effigy 4-34, 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 four-34. You encounter 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 downwards from a thumbnail if you have a touchscreen; right-click if you don't.) Name the folder for the new arrivals; then hitting Import.

Tip

Bespeak to a thumbnail without clicking to see a popular-up box of information near that photograph: date, size, and then on.

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

Playing with Photos

The rules of Photos are simple:

  • By borer or clicking, select a source, then an anthology inside it, and so a photo inside it . When you've drilled downwardly as far as you can go, the picture fills well-nigh of the screen.

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

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

    Tip

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

  • Send a photograph to somebody by e-mail or text message, or ship information technology into another app for editing. To exercise that, tap Share on the Charms bar; run into The Charms Bar.

Zooming In, Zooming Out

When yous've opened an individual photo, y'all can enlarge or compress it in the usual ways:

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

  • Mouse : Click the and buttons at the right edge of the horizontal scroll bar to zoom in or out. Or turn the scroll cycle while pressing the Ctrl central.

  • Keyboard : Printing Ctrl and the or keys.

When zooming gets complicated is after you lot've restored a photo to its original fit-the-screen size. If you go along to zoom out, you backtrack into the album or other batch from which the photo came. If you zoom out more , you compress the anthology's thumbnails. You wind up with a mosaic view of your anthology that yous can't go to any other way, the better with which to survey your drove.

Rotate and Crop

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

Rotate

Tap this push to rotate the photo 90 degrees. Continue tapping until the photo is upright.

Ingather

Cropping means shaving off unnecessary portions of a photo. Usually, y'all crop a photo to improve its composition—adjusting where the subject field appears within the frame of the picture. Often, a photo has more impact if information technology's cropped tightly around the subject, specially in portraits. Or maybe you want to crop out wasted infinite, similar big expanses of background sky. You can even chop a former romantic involvement out of an otherwise perfect family portrait.

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

If you lot tap the "Aspect ratio" button (as well on the App bar), you get a choice of ix canned proportions: Square, iii x two, 3 x 5, 4 x 3, and and so on. They brand the app limit the cropping frame to preset proportions. (The "Lock screen" choice ensures that your cropped photograph will exactly fit your computer's Lock screen.)

The Constrain feature is especially of import if you plan to gild prints of your photos. Prints come only in standard photo sizes: 4 x half dozen, 5 x 7, 8 x 10, and and 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. You have one final choice to make on the App bar: "Save a copy" (you air current up with both cropped and uncropped photos) and "Update original" (you air current upwards with only 1 re-create—the cropped one). Or "Undo," pregnant "Never mind."

Truth exist told, Rotate and Crop were in the original Windows viii, besides. The new stuff doesn't appear until y'all hit Edit (likewise on the App bar).

Editing Photos: The Mini Photoshop

The Photos app: It'south not merely for looking at pictures anymore. Now it's too for fixing them. In Windows viii.ane, an impressively consummate suite of photo-editing tools awaits. These tools can fix the brightness, contrast, and color of your pictures, and even add special furnishings like selective blur and vignetting (where the photo corners are misty white to draw the heart to the subject).

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

Ready? Continue easily and feet within the tram at all times.

Tip

Equally you work, proceed in listen that y'all tin zoom in for better detail work. Touchscreen : Spread 2 fingers on the glass. Mouse : Press Ctrl as you turn the wheel, or click the and buttons on the screen. Keyboard : Press Ctrl+plus and Ctrl+minus.

Also, as yous work, continue in mind that the Undo push is ever at your command, and it ever reverses the concluding editing stride—information technology'south a rubber net, and it'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

Figure 4-35. In the new Editing mode, you go five primary buttons at the left side; each 1 summons a different set up of "push button dials" on the correct side. The App bar gives you everything you demand to undo, cancel, or preserve the changes.

Auto fix

When you select this button (on the left), six thumbnail versions of your photo appear at right. Each offers Windows' vision of what the picture might look like when it's touched upward in a different way: a fiddling brighter, a little darker, a picayune contrastier, black-and-white, and and then on. Select the ane you want.

Basic fixes

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

  • Rotate, Ingather . These work only as described on the previous pages.

  • Redeye . Crimson-eye is a common problem in flash photography. This creepy, possessed wait—devilish, glowing-scarlet pupils in your subjects' optics—has ruined many an otherwise great photo.

    Blood-red-eye is caused by lite reflected back from eyes. The bright light of your flash illuminates the blood-cherry-red retinal tissue at the back of the eyes. That'southward why ruby-red-eye problems are worse when you shoot pictures in a dim room: Your subjects' pupils are dilated, assuasive even more lite from your flash to reach their retinas.

    When y'all select this push, your cursor becomes loaded with a crimson dot. Apply it within each eye that has the problem. (Zoom in if necessary.) The app turns the red in each middle to black.

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

    Photos's Retouch castor lets you lot exercise the aforementioned thing with your own photos: paint away scratches, spots, hairs, and other modest flaws. Information technology doesn't cover the imperfections yous're trying to remove, but blurs them out by softly blending them into a small radius of surrounding pixels (in other words, you tin can't use it to whiten teeth).

    In one case you've clicked Retouch, your cursor sprouts a round brush. Find the imperfection and "paint" over information technology, either by dabbing or dragging to blend information technology with the surrounding portion of the photo.

Lite

When this button is selected (left side), the buttons on the right side are the first appearance of Photos'due south 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 "button dials," like the Brightness one shown here. When you tap or click it, the button itself becomes a handle—a white round handle. You lot can elevate it either counterclockwise (in this case, making the photograph darker, as shown at center) or clockwise (making the photo brighter, every bit shown at lesser). The unexpected office is that you can drag all the style around from the zero point, in either management.

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

  • Contrast . If your photo looks flat, so use this event to bring out details. Information technology makes the nighttime parts of your photograph a fiddling darker, and the light parts a little 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 once might accept been unsalvageably overexposed or underexposed photos into usable shots.

    For instance, suppose you lot've got a photograph looking practiced, except that you don't have whatever detail in murky, dark areas. Turn the Shadows handle clockwise, and presto! A globe of item emerges from what used to exist nearly black.

Color

Digital cameras (and scanners) don't ever capture color accurately. Digital photos sometimes take a slightly bluish or light-green tinge, producing tedious colors, lower contrast, and sickly looking pare tones. In fact, the whole thing might accept a faint dark-green or magenta cast. Or peradventure you but want to take colour aligning into your own easily, non only to get the colors right, but besides to create a specific mood.

Here are the tools at your disposal:

  • Temperature . This dial adjusts the photograph along the blue-orangish spectrum. Dial clockwise, for case, to warm up the tones, making them more orangeish—a handy technique for breathing life back into subjects who have been bleached white with a flash.

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

  • Saturation . When you lot increase the saturation of a photo's colors, yous make them more than vivid; y'all make them "pop." You can besides ameliorate photos that have harsh, garish colors past dialing downward the saturation, so the colors look a little less intense. (Boosting the saturation is often a bad idea for pictures of people , though; peel can wind upwardly looking really weird.)

  • Color raise . 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 want, you tin can actually goose just the sky, or bring out the yellows in a field of flowers.

    In one case you've selected this button, tap or click a spot in the photo that displays the color that needs boosting; a pin appears there, equally though you'd marked a spot on a map. Now turn the push button dial to make all patches of that color get brighter or dimmer.

Effects

Photos comes with two built-in special effects, each intended to describe the viewer'southward eye to the subject of the photograph. Yous won't need them often, but now and then, they striking the bullseye:

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

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

Saving the editing

All of this editing ends the same mode. Open the App bar once again and cull "Save 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

Likewise hiding on the App bar: the Ready As push. Its shortcut carte du jour lets you slap the current photograph 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 eight machine, the 1 that bears the current time. Here's i easy way to change information technology 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. Just using this control, 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 be much fun if your screen were the just identify you could see them. Fortunately, the Photos app is happy to zap them abroad to your adoring fans electronically.

Selecting photos

The first step is telling Photos which pictures you want to transport. To do that, drill downward until you're looking at the thumbnails of some batch. Then, for each photograph you desire to include, practice this:

  • Touchscreen : Flick downward on the thumbnail.

  • Mouse : Right-click the thumbnail.

  • Keyboard : Apply the arrow keys to highlight a thumbnail, and then printing the key.

Tip

You can remove a thumbnail from the current selection past using the aforementioned technique a second fourth dimension.

In each case, the thumbnail sprouts a colored outline, and a checkmark appears in its top-right corner. Yous tin can repeat the procedure for another photo, and another, until all the ones you want are checkmarked.

Note

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

To practise that, you don't accept to revisit the earlier thumbnails. Instead, just open up the App bar and employ the "Clear choice" push button. Now no photos are selected in whatever album.

Sharing selected photos

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

The options hither vary; if y'all've installed a program with beefier editing tools, like Microsoft's ain Fresh Paint, its name appears here, too.

But for sure you'll notice Mail, which means yous tin can send photos by electronic mail, directly from Photos. A new panel appears, showing an outgoing message; the photos are attached. Address it, type a subject line and maybe a bulletin, so hit the push button to send it.

OneDrive Options

Your complimentary online OneDrive disk is a handy intermediary for photos that shuttle between computers or phones (see the box on Photos from Other PCs). So information technology'southward no surprise that Microsoft made information technology piece of cake to transport photos from Photos to your online OneDrive—if nothing else, it'due south a great way to dorsum them up.

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

Printing Pictures

Y'all can, of form, print out photos so that you can hang them amply on the wall or hand them proudly to admirers.

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

Open the first photograph you want to print so 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, you tin specify how many copies you lot want and how you want the photograph printed—upright (portrait orientation) or sideways (landscape). The "More settings" button reveals boosted options specific to your printer, similar paper blazon and print quality.

When everything looks skilful, hit the Impress button.

Become Windows 8.1: The Missing Transmission at present with the O'Reilly learning platform.

O'Reilly members experience alive online training, plus books, videos, and digital content from most 200 publishers.