Mother’s Day is coming up and not missing a beat, the Windows Live team sent me an email encouraging me to see how easy it is to edit my favorite photos using Windows Live Photo Gallery.
I’m totally sure it is. But the thing is, I’m just not up for getting off the couch at the moment. Luckily, I have Windows Media Center and my remote in hand. So I’m just gonna pull up a pic of the kiddos, here…
Rotating pictures is one of the more common tasks, which is probably why it is an option on the menu that pops up when I hit the More Info button on my remote. (If your at your PC, this comes up with a right-click).
We took this shot on a recent trip to NYC. It’s outside the Museum of Natural History. As you can see, it was one of those terrible days for photography – a washed out sky and light that made everything see like the color of dirty porcelain.
I select Picture Details, then Touch Up to see if I can improve this at all.
I always Crop the photo first, before adjusting the contrast, so that the final contrast is based on what’s actually in the photo, and not on what has been cropped out.
Using the up, down, left and right buttons on my remote, I can zoom the crop in and out and move it around on the picture. When I want to check it out, I select Preview.
After looking at this vertically, I decided that the line of people waiting around behind my kids was a more interesting element to play off of than the tall pillars of the museum, so I changed the orientation of the crop box and adjusted it until I liked it.
Then I hit the Contrast button, which automatically adjusts the contrast for me, and then I saved the changes.
And, Voila!
Not bad at all. We have a photo-printer attached to our Media Center, so I can just hit Print on the Picture Details page and…
I’ve seen some remotes that even have a Print button right on them. Now I just need a button to activate a robot of some sort to roll over to the printer and get the photo off of it and bring it to me on the couch.
Maybe in the next release.
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New to Windows Media Center? Start here. or here.Or even here.
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