Presented by Jeff Hensel April 12, 2018
Attendees: 17
Windows 10 has included a FREE Photos app for basic photo viewing and editing. Fortunately it has greatly improved and now very useful.
I’ve spoken about the Photos app in Windows 10 before and stated it was a good app but a rudimentary one at that. This is no longer the case.
The Photos app has greatly improved and will improve some more with the Windows Update coming in April of 2018.
In fact, the Windows Photos app is now similar to Google Photos.
Be that as it may, we’ll look at this app and see how we can do some common and desired things with photos.
Don’t worry. You will NOT need to be a computer expert to do these things.
The app is FREE and included with Windows 10
No need to download, it’s already there.
Although the Photos app can do quite a bit, we’ll look first at some basic but desired capabilities.
The Photos app can find ALL of the photos on your computer but you will need to tell it where to look.
Photo editing can be complex because one can do so much with most photo editor apps. We’ll only look at two basic things. Making photos darker or lighter and cropping unwanted things to better show off the subject of the photo.
Slide shows are good things to see a group of photos quickly and easily. You can save a slideshow to share with friends and family. The Photos app does this nicely.
And lastly, I’ll do a “live” demonstration on how to do these things. We’ll go slow and allow much time for questions.
Click Start, scroll down to the ‘”P’s”
This has been a feature seen many years ago in Google’s Picasa program.
It is also available in Google Photos and Microsoft’s Photo Gallery program and even Apple’s Photos App.
Some many times we see that important portions of our photos are either too dark or too light. Although we can’t really fix a small portion of the photo and leave the rest the way it is, we can adjust the photo so the most important portion (the subject) is clear and easy to see.
We are only talking about light and dark here. There are many other aspects of photo editing but that is for another day.
I must point out however, blurry pictures cannot be made clear with this software or most photo editing software. Photos are blurry because we move the camera or smartphone at the moment of taking the picture.
A slideshow is simply a group of photos and viewing them one after the other. A slideshow can be made to run automatically revealing one photo after the next until finished.
One can then save this slideshow, or group of photos into a single file for later viewing or sharing.
Improvements can be made to the slideshow by adding pleasant transitions between photos and even have music playing in the background.
Let’s take a look at using the Photos app to look at photos from a single folder.
We’ll edit them and save them.
Then we’ll produce and quick slideshow.
There are multiple ways to edit photos with the Photos app.
- Open the Photos app and then find the photos. Or, go to the desired photos using File Manager and double –click on one and let the Photos app open the photo.
- Find our Photos. File Explorer. Right-click a photo to notice what app Windows will use to open a photo and we’ll see how to choose the desired app.
- We’ll scroll through the photos to have a look.
- Next we’ll go back to the beginning and edit a few of the photos and save the changes.
- First we’ll lighten some and darken some.
- Then we’ll crop a photo to focus on the subject.
- Lastly we’ll create a slideshow.
After right-clicking on the photo, choose Open With and select the Photos app.
Choose Edit and Create at the upper right of screen.
Then choose Edit.
Select Adjust to see the Light and Color adjustment sliders.
After the adjustments are done, choose Save or Save a copy.