The Windows Photo Gallery Viewer is a neat little photo editor that comes with the Windows VISTA OS (Operating System). The Windows Photo Gallery Viewer is far from being a full-featured digital darkroom but it’s a good place for those just starting out in digital photography to get his or her feet wet, to get a taste of what the digital darkroom is like.
Professional photographers and the advanced amateur photographers use some version of Adobe PhotoShop as a digital darkroom. PhotoShop is the Cadillac of the digital darkroom software packages. For the newbie, there are two problem with starting right off with Adobe PhotoShop, it’s very expensive and has a very steep learning curve. The neophyte is better off working his or her way up to pro software gradually. The WPGV (Windows Photo Gallery Viewer) is a great place to start to learn ones way around the digital darkroom for two big reasons. First, it came free as part of Windows VISTA, and, second; it’s very easy to master.
The WPGV is a minimalist-editing program but you can still do quite a bit with it.
When you first open WPGV, you will see a thumbnail of every picture that you currently have stored in your Picture folder.
To begin an edit with WPGV you need to select the photo that you want to work on and load it in the editor. To do that, simply double lick on the thumbnail of the image.
For this tutorial, we pick one of the photos of the kitties on the bed. Double clicking with the left mouse button loads the picture into the editing window.
The top menu bar is very intuitive, as you can see here
The very first thing that you want to do is make a working copy of the photo and save it under a different name. You always edit a copy, never the original, that way if you mess the edit up you can make a new working copy from the original. To make a copy we are going to pull down the file menu and left click on “Make Copy.”
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The save as dialog box opens. Since the photo we are making a copy of was named “Edit 1” we will name our copy “copy.”
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After renaming the photo, click save.
Left click on the “Back To Gallery” arrow.
Left click on pictures.
Left click on copy to open it in the edit window.
This picture shows three of my kitties-Furball, Precious, and Angel along with their “security” kitty. In our first edit, we are going to isolate Furball by using the cropping tool.
To do that we are going to left click on the “Fix” button on the top tool bar and then left click on “Crop Picture” icon in the tool box that opened on the right side of the editing window.
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In the “Crop Picture” dialog box, pull down the “Proportions” menu and select the size print that you will be making. In this tutorial, we will be printing 5X7 prints so we select 5X7.
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A rectangular cropping box appears in the edit window and 5X7 appears under “Proportions.”
Using the handles on the crop box we are going to isolate Furball.
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Being satisfied with this part of our edit, we are going to left click the “Apply” button, committing ourselves to the crop. The view in our editing window now becomes.
Now what do we need or want to do? Furball doesn’t suffer from any “Red Eye” but the picture could stand some color and exposure tweaking. You could start with the “Auto Adjust” tool, which adjusts both color and exposure together, automatically. Let’s try it by left clicking on the “Auto Adjust” icon.
The color seems true to life but the brightness and contrast could still stand a little more tweaking. Left click on the “adjust Exposure” button to access the “Brightness” and “Contrast” sliders.
In the “Adjust Exposure” dialog box, I left the brightness slider centered while nudging the “Contrast” slider slightly to the right of center.
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Finally satisfied, I pulled down the “File” menu and left clicked on “Rename” and named it crop 1. Now, if you return to the gallery view you will find your first crop edit under “crop 1.”
That’s all there is to it, really. Now go ahead and try it yourself. By the way, this program has some very good help screens if you need help along the way. All you have to do to access it is click on the little question mark in the upper right hand corner of the tool bar.
