Microsoft Photo Story – Editing your pictures

Creating a digital slideshow can be a fun experience. One part of doing so may include using simple editing procedures to make your pictures look more bright and colorful. Microsoft Photo Story 3, a digital slideshow creator, allows you to make minor corrections to individual pictures in your slideshow. Other blogs in this series have discussed organizing, importing, and arranging pictures for your slideshow.

Editing pictures

On the “Import and arrange your photos” screen (see screenshot near the end of this blog), you will see five little buttons below the picture display window. They look like this:

Here’s a brief description of what each button does for you. Just a reminder, that any changes you make do not affect the original photo stored on your hard drive. The changes are only used in the photo slideshow you are creating.

Automatically adjusts the color levels. Adjusting the color help make the colors more vibrant. I sometimes use this feature, but it can be addicting if you’re like me and aren’t a very good photographer. Maybe I should check out our Photography blog here on Families.com.

Automatically applies red-eye reduction. This feature is nice when it works, but I have difficulty getting it to remove red-eye glare on pictures of babies (I don’t know why–well, I have my own theory).

These two buttons rotate the picture, either left or right. For example, if you took a portrait style picture (e.g., you turned the camera lengthways to take a photo of a standing person) and want to turn it on its side, you could use these two buttons. Rotating pictures may either add black borders or remove them, depending on the original size of the pictures.

This button takes you to a menu where you can adjust colors, apply red-eye reduction, rotate and crop photos, and add effects all at once. The main reason I use this menu is to crop pictures. Cropping involves adjusting the size of the picture by cutting off the margins. You can also apply a cropping like feature when you use transitions between pictures later in the process, so you may not need to crop pictures here.

Removing black borders

If you have a picture that has borders, you will see an extra button appear when the photo is selected (see screenshot below).

If you use the “remove black borders” function, Photo Story tries to adjust the picture for you by cropping out the black borders. For example, my picture of the Texas state flag has black borders on the top and on the bottom. After selecting to remove the borders, I am presented with a before and after screen. I can choose to accept or decline the automatic adjustments that Photo Story proposes (screenshot below).

Now that you have edited your pictures, you can move on to adding titles and special effects. We’ll cover those topics in the next blog.