How to take the perfect picture, every time

There can be no doubt that digital photography has transformed our lives. Can’t remember when you took that shot of the kids at the park? Windows has it sorted. Want to instantly find your favourite pictures? No worries. Exposure a little dark? Yup, that’s no problem too. Windows Photo Gallery will turn you into that pro snapper you’ve always wanted to be.

When it comes to taking great pictures, keep things simple. Taking portraits of your loved ones needs a quick peek at the background to see what’s there first. Washing lines, telegraph poles or a busy street will take the focus away from your subjects, so try an area where there’s a neutral background, such as bushes or walls. You could even get them to sit down and shoot from above to use the ground as a cleaner background.

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Good landscape pictures don’t have to be taken at exotic locations; it’s just a matter of composing more effectively. Keep the framing clean and try to include some interesting foreground, such as rocks or flowers, to help lead your eye into the picture. Crouch down to take the shot and position the horizon towards the top third of the frame to create balance. Why not combine these methods and use the family as foreground?

Adding tags

You’re back from your hols and it’s time to save all those amazing pictures you’ve taken. That could be a couple of hundred shots, so thank goodness Windows Vista automatically sticks your pictures neatly in a subfolder within your Pictures folder after you’ve connected the camera, as well as downloading any software or required codecs if you shoot RAW files.

The power of Windows Photo Gallery becomes apparent when you get the option to tag pictures as they’re imported. This adds a plain English description to your photos that allows you to organise and find them while using Windows Vista.

So let’s say you’ve just returned from two weeks in the Algarve and are importing your holiday photos. Choosing ‘holiday’ as a tag during import will attach the word to all the images. Clicking on Recently Added Files will show the pictures you’ve just imported, where you can add more tags using the Add Tags feature on the right-hand Info pane. Tagging ‘Algarve’ to them all would be useful, as that’s where they were taken.

From then on you can add loads of other tags to individual pictures, such as family members’ names or famous Top Bar is where you can control the way you want to view, sort and group your pictures while the Zoom function in the Slide Show controls adjusts the size of thumbnails so you can easily check the composition and exposure.

Editing

No picture is ever finished without some form of editing. Images straight from a camera will need some tweaking and Windows Photo Gallery provides the corrections and enhancements you need.

Highlighting an image and clicking the Fix button brings up five adjustment options. Although the Auto Adjust does a fair job we’d recommend having a go manually for full control. Whacking up the Contrast or Brightness using the Adjust Exposure button instantly improves a bad or flat exposure along with Saturation in the Adjust Colour menu. While you’re in there, have a fiddle with the Colour Temperature and Tint sliders: increasing the Colour Temperature gives your images a warm and appealing hue.

It’s never been easier to perform crops on pictures, and you can try all this without destroying your original picture by using the Undo feature at the bottom of the Adjustment pane. Even after saving your image, by clicking Back to Gallery in the top left you can still return to the original picture years later by opening it in Fix and clicking Revert.

Find an audience

Getting your photos seen by others is very much on the menu in Windows Vista. Emailing, printing, burning to data disc or video DVD and making a professional slideshow or movie is all handled from Microsoft Photo Gallery.

Printing is easier than ever, with options ranging from full-page pictures to a contact sheet. Windows Photo Gallery makes online printing so painless it may soon be your first choice, especially when most online print stores can slap your pictures onto anything from T-shirts to mouse mats.

For showing granny in Canada her granddaughter’s first Christmas, email is usually the best method. One click on the Email button and you get to choose the physical size of photos you want to send, before opening your email program, creating a new message and attaching them.

If your picture presentation requires a little more refinement then clicking the Burn button in the top bar and selecting Video DVD will open the wizard to walk you through making a truly professional-looking DVD-style slideshow, with menus that work on DVD players or an Xbox. Open the pictures you want to include by clicking the Make a Movie button in Windows Photo Gallery.

Remember, you can use most of the amazing features in Windows Photo Gallery for your home movie clips too, so it’s no surprise that Microsoft has taken the clever decision to throw them both in the same melting pot, where the image (moving or still) really is everything.