QuickTip: Improve Your Digital Photos with One Click

There's no question that the advent of digital photography has made me a better photographer. Besides the fact that I can take tons of pictures without worrying about film processing costs, I can also see immediately how the picture turned out so can make adjustments and try again if I'm not happy with the results.

However, no matter how good I think my pictures turned out on the first try, they can usually be improved—often dramatically—with some adjustments to their brightness and contrast. And you don't need Photoshop to do it.

For the example below, I'm going to show screenshots using Windows Photo Gallery, which comes with the Vista operating system. Then I'll give the steps for doing the same thing with Microsoft Office Picture Manager, which is an accessory with Office 2003 to 2007. (Note that if you have Windows XP or earlier, but NOT Office installed, you won't have Picture Manager.)

Windows Photo Gallery

Open Windows Photo Galler. The easiest way to do this is simply to find the image you want to edit through My Computer or Windows Explorer and double-click it. The photo will then open in the application. Alternatively, you can go to Start > All Programs and you'll find Windows Photo Gallery up near the top, before all the folders.
Go to File > Make a Copy and save a version of the image with a new name. The reason for this is because, if you don't make a copy, the program will automatically save the picture with the changes you made when you close it, even if you decided you didn't like the changes. (Of course, you can always use the Undo option before closing it to revert to the original version.)
Click the Fix button to open a new panel with multiple options.
Click Auto Adjust.

That's it! You can see the picture looks a lot crisper with the adjustments that the program made. Now, sometimes you might not like the auto adjustments, so you can play around with the individual settings underneath that button until you're happy with the results. You can also use them to create some nice effects.

Note: Under Adjust Color, if you move the Saturation slider all the way to the left, it will make the image black and white.

Office Picture Manager

You can open Picture Manager by right-clicking on the file in My Computer and selecting Open With > Picture Manager or by going to Start > All Programs > Microsoft Office > Microsoft Office Tools > Microsoft Office Picture Manager.
Go to Picture > Auto Correct. You don't need to worry about making a copy of the file because you'll be prompted to save it after making changes so you can give it a new name at that time if you don't want to overwrite the original.
If you want to make manual adjustments, you can choose various options from the same menu.

Tip: If you want to make your pictures smaller, say for e-mail purposes, I wrote an earlier post that explains how to do that as well: Resize Images with Office's Built-In Graphics Editor

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