7.1. Resizing Photos
While the crop functionality described previously
works well for what it is, you often will want to resize a photo for
specific needs. Perhaps you want to create something that correctly
fits the resolution of your screen so it will make a good desktop
wallpaper. Or maybe you want a version that is more appropriate for the
small screen on your smart phone or other portable device. Whatever the
reason, you can easily resize photos in Photo Gallery ... if you know
the trick.
The thing is, Resize isn't an option that appears
overtly anywhere in the Windows Live Photo Gallery user interface.
Instead, you need to right-click on an individual photo thumbnail to
find the Resize option. When you select this, you'll see the Resize
dialog shown in Figure 41.
To use Resize, select a size from the size
drop-down, which includes various presets such as small, medium, and
large. Or, input a pixel value into the Maximum Dimensions edit box.
The value you enter here will be applied to the largest of the image's
horizontal and vertical dimensions. For example, suppose you have a
3328 × 1872 image, which is a widescreen six-megapixel photo. If you
set the Maximum Dimensions value to 1920 and click Resize and Save, the
resulting photo will be resized to 1920 × 1080.
7.2. Creating Panoramic Photos
If you've ever vacationed in a scenic spot, you've
probably engaged in an age-old ritual that's common to so many with a
camera: you take a series of panoramic shots, moving from one side to
the other, as you pan around to take in the entire view. The problem
is, when you get home and copy those pictures to the computer, they're
all disjointed, and it's not clear that they fit together at all.
High-end photography tools like Photoshop have offered a way to stitch
these photos back together again into a single very widescreen shot.
And now Windows Live Photo Gallery offers this functionality as well.
The trick, of course, is to find two or more shots
that can be visually connected in this fashion. Once you've done this,
select them in Windows Live Photo Gallery, click the Make toolbar
button, and choose Create Panoramic Photo from the drop-down menu that
appears. Windows Live Photo Gallery will composite the photos and then
prompt you to save the resulting combined image, using a standard
Windows Save As dialog that's been renamed to Save panoramic stitch.
Select a name and location for the resulting file and click the Save
button to save the results.
At this point, Windows Live Photo Gallery will
commit the newly stitched photo to disk, leaving the originals as-is,
and display the new photo, as shown in Figure 42. As you can see, the stitching effect is usually seamless.
The one issue you'll have with stitched panoramic
photos is that you will have to trim some excess black space in order
to arrive at a normal, rectangular image. Just click the Fix toolbar
button and then use the Crop photo tool in the Edit pane to do so.
NOTE
Panoramic photos are usually too wide to make
for good desktop wallpapers ... unless you have multiple monitors.
7.3. Editing with Other Applications
Although the basic editing features in Photo Gallery
should satisfy many people's needs, there are many other photo editing
solutions out there, and you may want to use them to edit photos
instead. A number of alternatives are available, including desktop
applications like Adobe Photoshop Elements and Google Picasa, and you
can access them directly from within Photo Gallery, which is pretty
handy.
The key to doing so is the Open button on the Photo
Gallery toolbar. If you don't have any third-party photo-editing
applications installed, you will see Paint, Windows Live Photo Gallery,
and Windows Photo Viewer listed in the resulting drop-down menu when
you click this button. But if you installed a third-party application,
it should appear in the list as well, as shown in Figure 43.
This way, you can edit a photo in the application you like the most,
while still using Photo Gallery's excellent management capabilities to
perform other photo-related tasks.
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What if your application doesn't appear in the Open
with drop-down menu? You can add it easily enough: simply select Choose
program from the Open with drop-down menu and then click the Browse
button to find it on your hard drive. When you've accessed a program in
this fashion, it will be added to the drop-down list.
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