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Power Guide to
Photo Editing
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T R I C KS
Top Photo-Editing Tips
Dashing off your photos by e-mail? Follow our essential tips to prepare your digital
images before you send them. Your recipients will be glad you did.
B Y D AV E J O H N S O N
Digital camera in hand, you mingle with friends and family at
a party or get-together. As you take a few pictures, though, they
all approach you, one by one—and beg for copies.
Wait a minute. That wasn’t part of the plan! Now you need to
turn around and e-mail shots from this photo collection. And
when you sit at your PC later and examine the images, you realize that they’re not your best work. Some are crooked, others
have Omen-esque red-eye. Others are dark and murky—guess
the flash didn’t fire.
degree at a time, and most programs have this feature hidden
somewhere in the Edit or Image menus. Look for an option to
rotate the picture and enter a very small value, like one degree
to the left or right (depending upon which way you need to
adjust the photo).
Don’t worry, though. Here are ten quick and easy ways to fix
your photos and make them look so good you won’t have any
qualms when you click Send.
In Paint Shop Pro, click Image, Rotate and check the radio button beside Free. Then enter your small value. If that doesn’t fix
the problem, undo your edit (choose Edit, Undo) and try again
with a different number. You can rotate your photo by fractions
of a degree, like 0.7 or 1.4 or 2.5. When you experiment, always
undo your last rotation and try again from the original version;
if you pile rotations on top of rotations, you can create noticeable “glitches” or blurriness in your photo.
1. Stop Looking Sideways: Rotate the Picture
3. Crop Away the Background
Cameras don’t take square pictures; they take rectangular ones.
To frame a scene that’s taller than it is wide, you probably
turned the camera on its side before you snapped the shutter
release. That’s great, but don’t send those sideways pictures to
your friends. Turn them right side up first.
In your mind’s eye, the picture may have been a shot of your
nephew’s birthday cake. But now that you see it on your PC,
you realize that you didn’t zoom in very far—so you’ve taken a
picture of half the room as well. Use your image editor’s cropping tool to cut away the unwanted part of the picture and isolate just the meat of the scene.
You can rotate your sideways pictures in almost any imageediting program. In Paint Shop Pro (find.pcworld.com/37073),
open the picture and choose Image, Rotate and turn it to the
left or the right by an even 90 degrees. If you have Windows Me
or Windows XP, it’s even easier. Just double-click a picture to
open it in the Windows Picture and Fax Viewer. Then click the
Rotate Clockwise or Rotate Counterclockwise buttons at the
bottom of the screen.
In most image editors, the cropping tool lives in the tool palette
and looks like a picture frame. Click the cropping icon and, as
you hold your cursor down at a starting point, use the tool to
draw a rectangle inside the picture. Arrange the crop mark to
re-compose your photo and discard the unwanted background.
To do this in Paint Shop Pro, draw your rectangle, then click
the Crop Image button in the Tool Option box that floats
around on the screen.
2. Seasick? Straighten the Picture
4. Shine Some Light in the Darkness
In the rush to take a photo, we don’t always get the camera perfectly level—and that adds up to photos in which the horizon is
slightly askew, as if you had shot the pictures from a sailboat.
Fear not. Crooked digital photos are nearly as easy to straighten as picture frames hanging on your wall. (And they’re more
likely to stay straight after you fix them, too.)
All you need is an image editor that lets you rotate pictures a
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Is your photo too dark? A slight underexposure can ruin an
otherwise great photo, so punch up the brightness a bit to give
it some life. Try your image editor’s gamma control—a tool
that’s designed to brighten the darkest parts of the picture
without “overexposing” the parts that are already bright. If your
image editor offers gamma control, you’ll usually find the feature in menus like Colors or Image. Some programs, such as
Microsoft Photo Editor, let you access the tool (Image Balance)
from the toolbar.
In Paint Shop Pro, choose Colors, Adjust, Gamma Correction.
You can raise the gamma as high as 1.3 or 1.4 in many pictures
before the scene gets too washed out. But whatever level you
choose, be sure to keep an eye on the evolving picture as you
experiment with each setting.
Open your image editor and resize each picture first. In Paint
Shop Pro, choose Image, Resize and shrink the photo down to
about 640 by 480 pixels. If you have an older digital camera that
takes pictures at this size to begin with, don’t worry about
resizing—they’re ready to send. (Windows XP will automatically resize photos when you send them from the pop-up
menu. The original pic remains intact and unreduced.)
8. Create Easy File Names
5. Zap the Red-Eye
Using your camera’s flash can sometimes cause the dreaded
red-eye effect. If your photos look like they’re filled with
demonic partygoers, you can zap the red-eye out of your shots
automatically in many image editors. In Paint Shop Pro,
choose Effects, Enhance Photo, Red-Eye Removal, then zoom
in on the red eyes and create a circle of color directly over the
red spot.
If you have a basic image editor, like Irfan Skiljan’s IrfanView
or Microsoft Paint, that doesn’t have an auto-correction tool,
just zoom in on the eyes and paint over the red with a naturallooking shade of black or blue.
Remember that you don’t have to be Picasso to eliminate redeye convincingly. When you zoom back out, the eyes will be
small enough that your brushwork should look more than adequate. The important thing is to paint over the red.
6. Would You Like Text With That Photo?
You can add a caption to identify the people in the picture, the
location, or the date of the event using almost any image editor.
Find the Text tool in your program’s tool palette. In most programs, the icon is often the letter A or T. Enter the text you want,
and set the font and text size to your liking. Look for a fat font,
because skinny ones are often hard to read in a digital picture.
Some paint programs, like Paint Shop Pro, require you to click
on the photo in the spot where you want the text to appear
before you can type your caption. Other programs, like Adobe
PhotoShop Elements, let you type directly on the picture.
Either way, don’t forget about the Undo tool if the text doesn’t
turn out exactly the way you like.
7. Make Your Pics E-Mail-Friendly
When your photo is finally ready to send, be considerate to
your recipient by resizing it for e-mail. If you attach a bunch of
huge 3-megapixel images to an e-mail message, you can bog
down your recipient’s in-box with a huge file. The message will
take a long time to send and receive as well.
After you download your digital pics, you’ll probably end up
with file names consisting of zeros and other random digits or
letters. When sending your photos as attachments, be sure to
rename the files so that they make some sense. “SteveWithCake.jpg” is instantly recognizable, while “00000203l.jpg”
looks like something that belongs in some obscure folder deep
inside your computer’s system files.
Speaking of attachments, how your friends and family receive
your photos at the other end is another matter. Preferences
vary. Some people prefer an attachment rather than a direct
paste of your photo in the body of the e-mail message; images
pasted into the e-mail can be too hard to tinker with at the other
end. Consider this before you paste the photo into the e-mail.
(Even better: Ask people what they prefer.)
Remember that even if you do send your photos as attachments, images often get pasted into the e-mail automatically at
the other end if your recipient’s e-mail program is configured
for HTML mail.
9. Do a Rehearsal: E-Mail Yourself
If you want to make sure your friends will speak to you again
after they receive your first set of digital pics, why not e-mail
the batch to yourself? It never hurts to do a run-through, until
you get the hang of it. You’ll get to see first-hand what your
photos look like at the other end.
If your e-mail program hangs while you’re trying to open your
message, then you know that something is up. Just go back
and see if some resizing will solve the problem.
10. Make a Slide Show
The great thing about digital photos is how much freedom you
have to create the perfect package for your friends and family.
You can send single images, a group of photos, or even a complete slide show, with music and text.
If you want to make a multimedia slide show out of your
photos, give a program like PhotonShow (find.pcworld. POWER GUIDE
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T R I C KS
com/37097) a spin. The basic version, at $29, is inexpensive,
but it lets you combine your digital images with a wide assortment of clever backgrounds and slide-show themes.
You can add voice narration and MP3 music to your show; the
program also lets you tweak images with red-eye removal, color
adjustment, rotation, and sharpening tools. When you’re done,
you can load the completed slide show onto a Web site where
others can view it, or copy the show onto a CD-R disc and mail
it to friends and family.
If you have a ton of photos—and you’re reluctant to clog up
your recipients’ e-mail in-boxes—consider trying one of the
many Web services that let you post your photos online for all
to see. Ofoto (www.ofoto.com), Shutterfly (www.shutterfly.
com), and Picturetrail (www.picturetrail.com), for example,
offer basic photo-sharing services for free.
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C R E AT I V E G I F T S
Make Your Own Digital Photo Gifts
Here’s how to create a digital photo collage, a custom greeting card, and a mock
magazine cover.
B Y D AV E J O H N S O N
If you think about it, your digital camera is a gift-making
machine. Everyone loves photos, and they’re always a popular
present. So why not surprise that special someone with a picture
that you took yourself?
But don’t just tie a bow around an 8-by-10-inch print and leave it
at that. If you put a little thought into it, you can cook up some
really clever and thoughtful digital photo gifts. Just imagine how
much more fun a photo collage or custom-made photo greeting
card would be. Or try something totally wacky: Create a framed,
make-believe magazine cover featuring your guest of honor!
In this article, we explain how to tackle each project using Jasc’s
Paint Shop Pro 7.0 (free trial, $99, find.pcworld.com/37073). If
you use another editing program, such as Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0 (free trial, $99 to buy, find.pcworld.com/37100), for
instance, that’s okay—the steps are very similar. So fire up your
image editor and make some truly memorable gifts. No one can
accuse you of giving the same old run-of-the-mill presents ever
again!
Make a Photo Collage
Why a collage? Because it’s fun—fun to make and fun to get.
People have been making custom photo collages for eons—long
before computers came along. There are all sorts of ways to make
a collage, but this particular technique makes the photos look
like they’ve been torn right out of your photo album. You can go
a step further and add captions too.
1. Start by creating a blank page in Paint Shop Pro by choosing
File, New or pressing Ctrl-N. Enter the dimensions in the New
Image dialog box. Since you’ll probably want to print this as an 8by-10-inch photo, using the drop-down menu, change the units
to inches, and enter 8 for width and 10 for height (or the other
way around, depending upon how you plan to orient the page).
Set the resolution to 200 (that’s the resolution of most ink jet
printers). Click OK. You’ll come back to this blank page later.
2. Now it’s time to start assembling photos. Paint Shop Pro
makes it easy to see all the photos in a single folder at a glance:
Choose File, Browse (or press Ctrl-B) and use the folder list on
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the left to locate the pictures you want.
3. When you find your first photo, click it, hold down the left
mouse button, and drag the picture onto any blank part of the
Paint Shop Pro screen. (Don’t place your photo in the new image
page you created in the first step.) Your photo should show up
in front of you a moment later.
4. Now it’s time to crop the picture down to size. This is the cool
part of the collage: Instead of a using bunch of rectangular photos, you’re going to cut them up so that they look like you
trimmed them with scissors. Click the Freehand button in the
toolbar (it looks like a lasso). Next, to make sure it’s set to Freehand mode, right-click anywhere on the toolbar, select Tool
Options, and in the dialog box that appears, set the ‘Selection
type’ to Freehand. Now click anywhere on your photo, and while
holding down the left mouse button, drag the pointer around the
part of the image that you want to put in the collage, completing
the crop by encircling the image. (Either end the trace near
where you started it, letting the program finish the loop, or drag
over the trace line from the outside of the crop, letting the program remove any “cuts” inside the crop.) And don’t worry if your
lines looked jagged—you want things to look hand-done.
5. Another magic touch: Choose Selections, Modify, Feather and
set the Feather Value to about 5 pixels, then click OK. This will
create a slight blend effect so the edge of the picture blurs into
the background.
6. Choose Edit, Copy (or press Ctrl-C) and then close the photo
you just clipped, since you don’t need it anymore. Click the blank
collage image you created in the first step and choose Edit, Paste,
As New Layer (or press Ctrl-V). The cropped photo will appear
in the scene. Drag your image around until it’s more or less
where you’d like it.
7. You can even resize the image you’ve just pasted into your col-
lage page. Choose Image, Resize (or press Shift-S), and change
the number in the ‘Percentage of original’ section of the Resize
dialog box. Also be sure to uncheck the ‘Resize all layers’ option
at the bottom. If your image is way too big to fit in the collage, for
instance, try resizing it to 50 percent and click OK. Since you’ve
pasted the image into the collage using the ‘Paste, As New Layer’
command, the current picture is always the top layer, and the
one you can resize. When you add another picture, that one will
then be on top and therefore resizable.
8. Next, it’s a simple case of lather, rinse, and repeat. Just return
to the Browse window, drag another picture into a blank spot on
your Paint Shop Pro screen, then edit, crop, paste, and resize it in
your collage screen. Do this for every picture you want to add to
the collage.
9. If you want to, add captions. Wait until all the pictures are posi-
tioned in the collage before you add your captions. That way,
you’ll have a better idea where to place the text and you’ll see how
much space is available. Start adding a caption by clicking the
Text button in the toolbar (the icon with the letter A). Click the
spot where you want your caption to appear—say, under or
beside the photo—and you’ll see the Text Entry dialog box. Type
your caption, select a font and size—fatter fonts often look better—then click OK to make your text appear.
10. You can move the text around the screen later and even
resize it by grabbing the text’s handles in the center—but only
as soon as you lay it into the image. If you add anything else to
your picture, the text becomes permanent and you can’t move
it around anymore.
11. That’s all there is to it. When you’re done, save the file and get
ready for printing your collage. You might want to make a test
print on regular ink jet paper, but print the final one on glossy
photo paper (about a dollar per sheet). The pictures will look their
best, and they’ll be more resistant to fading. Let your collage dry
for at least ten minutes (away from direct sunlight) before you
handle it. Mounting your print behind glass or plastic will also
help prevent fading over time.
the New Image dialog box. Remember to set the resolution to
200, and click OK.
2. Your greeting card is going to be a “quad fold,” which means
you’ll fold the page in half one way, then in half again the other
way, to make your finished card. In order to know where each
quadrant of the card is on the page, you need to mark the sheet
with fold lines. Choose File, Preference, General Program Preferences from the menu and click the Rulers and Units tab.
Change the Ruler Display Units to Inches and click OK. Then
choose View, Rulers or press Ctrl-Alt-R. The page should now be
bordered by rulers that you can use to divide the page.
3. Click the Draw button in the toolbar (it looks a little like a
pencil). You’re going to draw two straight lines on the page. Start
by positioning the mouse pointer halfway down the page, right
next to the 5.5-inch point in the vertical ruler. Hold down the
Shift key on the keyboard, then click and drag the pointer to
the right, across the page. You should get a perfectly straight
line that divides the page in half. Now do it again, using the horizontal ruler: Position the pointer 4.25 inches across the page,
hold the Shift key, then click and drag a line down through the
middle of the page.
4. Now that you have identified the four quadrants of the page, it
helps to know which is which. The bottom left is the back of the
card, and the bottom right will be the front of the card. The upper
left corner is the inside right portion of the card and the upper
right is the inside left—but both of the upper portions are upside
down. That means you’ll need to flip anything you put in those
two parts of the card so they’ll be right side up when the card is
printed and folded.
5. From here, making the card is a snap. Just add pictures and
text, following the steps for the photo collage (see “Make a Photo
Collage” on page 5), and paste other graphics if you like, as well.
Give a Custom Greeting Card
Hallmark doesn’t have a monopoly on greeting cards—not anymore, at least. Now that digital photos and ink jet printers have
become popular, you can make your own in no time. If you have
access to a greeting card design program like Hallmark Card Studio Deluxe (programs start at $20, find.pcworld.com/37103) or
American Greetings CreataCard ($15, find.pcworld.com/37106),
you can use one of those program’s design templates. You just
change the text and insert your own photos. But you can make
your own cards using an ordinary image editor like Paint Shop
Pro, too—just follow these steps:
1. Create a blank 8.5-by-11-inch page in Paint Shop Pro. With-
in the program, choose File, New or press Ctrl-N. Then enter
the dimensions (8.5 inches wide and 11 inches high) in
6. If you want to place a digital image on the cover of the card, for
instance, choose File, Open (or press Ctrl-O) and locate an image
on your hard drive. After you open the picture, choose Edit, Copy
(or press Ctrl-C) from the menu and then click the greeting card
image to select it. Choose Edit, Paste, As New Layer (or press
Ctrl-V), and the picture should appear in the card. You can click
and drag the picture to position it in the lower-right quadrant.
7. Is the image too big? Choose Image, Resize (or press Shift-S)
from the menu, and uncheck the ‘Resize all layers’ option in the
Resize dialog box. Look for the ‘Percentage of original’ box and
enter a number to resize the image—try 50 percent, for
instance—and click OK. The picture should now be smaller. If
you are happy with the results, move on; if not, choose Edit,
Undo (or press Ctrl-Z) and try again.
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8. Anything you put in the upper quadrants will need to be rotated 180 degrees so it’s upside down on screen. To do that, choose
Image, Rotate from the menu (or press Ctrl-R) and make sure
that the ‘All layers’ option is not selected. Set the Rotate dialog
box to spin the currently selected text or graphic by 180 degrees
(left or right doesn’t matter). Click OK, and the object will now be
upside down.
9. After you’ve added all the text and digital images you need to
complete the card, you’re almost ready to print. First choose File,
Page Setup and make sure that the ‘Fit to page’ option is selected. Click OK. Right before you print, erase the two fold lines by
drawing over them with a paintbrush that’s set to the card’s background color. You won’t need them anymore, and the card will
look better without them.
10. Print out a test page on regular paper, just to make sure every-
thing lines up properly. When you’re ready to make the final
print, try using cardstock made especially for printing greeting
cards. If you can’t find that, you can use paper advertised as
“heavyweight” ink jet paper. HP’s $9 Matte Greeting Cards pack
(find.pcworld.com/37109), for example, gives you 20 foldable
sheets and 20 envelopes.
Create a Snazzy Magazine Cover
This is one is always a big hit, and it’s very easy to do. If you’ve
got a nice photo of someone, make it the cover story of a magazine all about that person. For Mother’s Day, for instance, why
not make Mom Magazine and stick a picture of her on the
cover? When you’re done, just print it out on glossy paper
using your ink jet printer, and put the finished photo in a
frame. Here’s how to do it.
1. Select the photo you want to use as your cover photo, and load
the image into a new Paint Shop Pro screen. Your picture
should be at least 2 megapixels (3 is even better) to make a sharp
8-by-10-inch print.
2. The first order of business is to add a border around the
photo to give it a magazine-like format. A solid red border, for
example, will give it a Time magazine look. In Paint Shop Pro,
start by right-clicking the color palette (it’s on the right side of
the screen) on a red tone. That’ll change the current background color to red.
3. Choose Image, Add Borders and enter a border dimension in
the Add Borders dialog box. Leave the box beside Symmetric
checked. Set the size of the border to a number between 60 and
100 pixels—the right size depends upon the image you’re using.
Click OK, and you’ll see a red border appear around the image.
If you think the border is too large or too small, choose Edit,
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Undo from the menu (or press Ctrl-Z) and try again.
4. It’s time to add a title. You can call it Super Mom, Kristin Today,
or anything else that strikes your fancy. Click the Text button in
the toolbar and click in the upper half of the picture, more or less
where the title should end up. The Text Entry dialog box will
open. Set the text to Vector and check the Antialias option. Type
a title, then select it with your pointer and adjust the font style,
size, and color to taste. If you move the dialog box out of the way,
you should be able to see the text change in the image. Don’t
worry about the exact placement, because you’ll get to fix that in
a minute. When it looks good, click OK. When the dialog box is
gone, you can drag the text around the screen and even change
its size. Move the pointer over the center of the text, then click
and drag to move it. You resize the text by grabbing a corner. If
you want to get fancy, you can even slant the text by clicking and
dragging the small box to the right of the center of the text.
5. From here, it’s all up to you. You might as well go to town on
it. Add some cover lines to your magazine to make it look more
like a real publication. You can inspect your favorite magazines
to get a good sense of what looks right. Use any attention grabbers you want, like “Mom’s 10 Hottest New Cookie Recipes,” or
“Jeremy’s Street Hockey Adventure.” Add an issue date and a
price (your magazine isn’t free, after all!), too. If you’re ambitious, you can even photograph the bar code from a real magazine with your digital camera and paste it into the lower left or
right corner of the cover.
6. When it’s done, print it on glossy photo paper. This kind of
paper usually runs around a dollar per sheet, but the final print
will look much better than if you use regular ink jet paper. Then
frame the cover. Whoever receives your gift is sure to love it. GET ORGANIZED
Take Control of Your Digital Photos
Wrangling with countless photographs on your hard drive? Follow our tips to
organize the chaos.
B Y D AV E J O H N S O N
Digital cameras let you take pictures with impunity. You no
longer have to buy film, think in terms of 24-exposure photo sessions, or pay to process any of the crummy shots lurking in your
camera. That probably means you’ve started taking more photos
than ever before.
That’s great, but all this photography has a downside: Your hard
drive probably looks like a digital version of the back of your
garage. It’s filled with hundreds--perhaps thousands--of photos.
Some are titled, but many others still say stuff like
DSC030256.jpg. Some of them live in logically named folders;
others are strewn all over the place, virtually impossible to find.
Here are ten tips that will help you thoroughly organize your
digital photograph collection. So when Uncle Ned asks you for
a picture from his cat’s 2001 birthday party, you’ll be able to find
it in seconds.
1. Let’s See—Was It DSC044653 or DSC044654?
In the field that appears under ‘Search for files or folders
named’ (Me) or ‘Named’ (98), type *cat* (note the asterisks
before and after the search term). Of course, your search results
could include other files, like your Word and text files, with the
word cat in the title.
If you know the file extension, you could add, say, .jpg to the
search term. If you don’t, you can type in all possible graphics
file extensions, separated by commas and with the search
term in front of each of them, as in *cat*.jpg, *cat*.bmp,
*cat*.gif, *cat*.tif.
But make sure you rename your pictures right away. If you procrastinate, you’ll end up with hundreds of images to rename, and
it’ll never get done.
Nothing—and we mean nothing—will help you get organized
faster than simply renaming your photos. When you download
images from your digital camera to the PC, they usually come
with file names that only an alien’s mother could love. As soon as
you move a set of images to the PC, right-click the first file,
choose Rename, give it a meaningful name, and do the same for
the rest. Later, you’ll be able to search for that file by part of the
name.
2. Save Time With the Batch Tool
If you have a lot of pictures to rename at once, it can get tedious.
You might want to try batch-renaming—a way to give files new
names in bulk, instead of one at a time (see Save Time With the
Batch Tool, below).
What good is that? If you don’t have time to rename every image,
at least you can name them all after the trip you just took (like
“Yellowstone”) so they’ll be easy to find when you do get around
to renaming or editing them.
Try this once your picture files are renamed for easy searching:
If your system runs Windows XP, click Start, Search, choose the
Pictures, music, or video option, and enter the word cat in the
‘All or part of the file name’ box. Windows will display thumbnail
images of every picture on your hard drive that includes the term
cat in the title.
If you have an earlier version of Windows, you can still perform
batch operations on photos, but you’ll need a specialized program like ACDSee from ACDSystems (free trial, $50 to buy,
find.pcworld.com/37112) or Jasc’s Image Robot (free trial, $90
to buy, find.pcworld.com/37115).
If you have Windows 2000, Me, or 98, you can’t drill down to
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search images as easily. You’ll have to do things the old-fashioned way. Click Start, Search, For Files or Folders (Me) or Start,
Find, Files or Folders (98).
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If you’re in a hurry but want to label your photos before you forget, you can rename them all in a single batch if your system
runs Windows XP. Select the images, right-click, and choose
Rename. Type a new name for the images and press Enter.Windows renames all the selected files, but also attaches a different
number at the end of each name to tell them apart.
Both programs let you make the same changes to a large batch
of photos, so you can go off and do something else while your
PC toils without you. Other image editors also offer this feature, such as the full version of Adobe Photoshop ($609,
find.pcworld.com/37118).
3. Rotate the Easy Way
Even simple stuff like rotating pictures sideways can be a pain if
you have a lot of photos. Windows XP makes it a snap to rotate
many pictures at once through a technique called batch processing. Here’s how: In Windows XP, open a folder that includes
some digital images and select several of them. (To select photos that aren’t adjacent to each other, click each photo while holding down the Ctrl key.) Now right-click the selected images, and
you should see the option to rotate them clockwise or counterclockwise. Choose one, and Windows will do the rest.
Windows 2000, Me, and 98 don’t offer the batch-rotation trick,
but you can rotate your photos in an image-editing program,
such as Jasc’s Paint Shop Pro ($109) or Adobe Photoshop Elements (free trial, $99 to buy). In Paint Shop Pro, click Image,
Rotate; in Photoshop Elements, select Image, Rotate Canvas,
then choose 90° CW or 90° CCW.
6. Slim Down Your Photos
Do your photos need to go on a diet? It depends on how you plan
to use them. If all you ever plan to do is attach your pictures to email messages or paste them into digital documents and online
photo albums, you’re wasting a lot of hard drive space by keeping
images in their 3-megapixel glory. Reclaim gigabytes of storage
space by resaving them as 640-by-480-pixel photos. You can do
that by hand in an image editor like Jasc’s Paint Shop Pro
(choose Image, Resize, then enter the pixel size you want in the
Resize dialog box), or automate the process with a program like
Jasc’s Image Robot, which can batch-convert hundreds of images
into a different size and file format while you go watch TV.
Just remember: Don’t throw away your high-resolution original
images if you think you may need them for a different purpose
some day. If you might want to print particular photos at 5 by 7
inches or bigger, for instance, keep the high-resolution versions
around—you’ll need them.
For additional tips on how to make your images e-mail-ready, see
“Top Photo-Editing Tips” at find.pcworld.com/36755.
4. Be Ruthless: Delete the Trash
7. Danger! Don’t Hurt the Originals
When it comes to digital photos, we all become terrible packrats,
saving pictures of people without heads and images that contain
ghostlike blurs that we suspect might be someone’s toddler from
back in the Reagan era. If you want your digital photo collection
to be useful, you need to mercilessly discard the terrible shots—
all those that appear out of focus and just poorly composed.
The real joy of owning a large digital photo collection only
becomes apparent when you can easily find photos anytime you
need them. You can choose a photo of your sister’s baby at holiday time and turn it into an edible gift—like cookies with photographic frosting at Club Photo (www.clubphoto.com), for
instance, or print enlargements of photos you took at your parent’s 50th wedding anniversary on your ink jet printer.
If you have half a dozen photos of your cousin’s new home, pick
the best two and throw away the rest. If you’re honest with yourself, you’ll agree that your photo collection is more useful, easier to search, and less intimidating to maintain if it’s pared down
to a reasonable size.
5. Organize Your Life With Folders
Windows gives you a great place to store your pictures—a folder
that’s actually called My Pictures. However, packing thousands
of images into one big folder is a lot like storing several years’
worth of tax receipts in a single size-11 shoebox.
There’s an easier way: Open My Pictures and right-click anywhere on the folder background. Choose New, Folder and give it
a name appropriate for your current batch of photos. Make as
many folders as you need (you can make folders within a folder)
and drag your photos (and folders) around into logical places. If
you file your photos by criteria like year, event, subject, and topic,
they’ll be extremely easy to find anytime you need them.
Compressing photos you’re only going to use for e-mail or other
online purposes is fine, but for all other images, remember not
to delete, resize, color-adjust, or otherwise mess with the original
images. You’ll want them pristine for the next project, so only
save changes to copies of your originals. (Use your image editor’s Save copy as option—if it has one—from the File menu to
make sure you don’t overwrite your original.) Remember this
step, and you won’t be kicking yourself in decades to come.
8. Get a Fancy Photo Manager
When you need to find a certain picture in a hurry, rifling
through folders and waiting for thumbnail images to gradually
appear on screen can be the slowest way to track it down.
Instead, consider using one of the many excellent programs that
are available for managing your photos. Jasc’s upcoming Paint
Shop Photo Album (formerly known as After Shot,
find.pcworld.com/37124) and Adobe’s Photoshop Album ($50,
find.pcworld.com/37127) are two excellent alternatives.
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GET ORGANIZED
Paint Shop Photo Album lets you enter multiple keywords for
your photos for easy text-based searches, so you can search
for a photo even if you don’t remember its exact title. Photoshop Album, on the other hand, uses visual “tags” that you
associate with photos. You can link photos to tags based on
places, people, and events, which helps you track down a photo
in seconds just by clicking the right tags. Clicking the ‘Thanksgiving’ and ‘Family’ tags, for instance, would display just the
photos with those criteria.
Want to get organized without spending any money? Try
Preclick Photo Organizer, a free download. This basic program
will help you locate and sort your photos.
9. Show Off Your Pictures
When it’s time to share your pictures with friends and family,
don’t just copy a handful of them to a CD-R or floppy disk and
send it off—make something with a bit of panache. Programs
like PhotoParade Maker (starting at $20, find.pcworld.com/
37133) and PhotonShow ($49, find.pcworld.com/37097) let you
grab a bunch of photos and painlessly incorporate them into a
fun slide show that plays right on the desktop. You can add your
favorite MP3 tunes as a soundtrack and specify titles, captions,
closing credits, and other elements. Depending on which program you choose, these presentations can usually be sent to
friends and family via the Internet or on a disc. The original
images stay safely on your PC for use in other applications.
10. Save Your Hard Drive!
Who said you need to keep all of your digital images on your
PC’s hard drive? We certainly didn’t. Archive your old photos on
CD-Rs using your computer’s CD-RW drive, especially if your
PC’s hard drive is on the small side. Don’t use CD-RWs; they’re
more expensive, and you might accidentally erase important pictures, since those discs can be reused. Storing stuff on CD-R is
about as close to permanent as you can get in the computer business, but even CD-Rs get damaged. Make yourself two copies if
you want to play it extra safe.
Most CD writer software—like Roxio’s Easy CD Creator ($100,
find.pcworld.com/33842) and Ahead Software’s Nero ($69,
find.pcworld.com/36710) make it easy to copy a huge number of
images to CD-R for posterity. Label the disc and store it on a
nearby shelf for easy reference, then delete the original images
from your PC. CD copies of your images will also come in handy
if you ever have a hard-drive failure—at least your precious
images will survive.
For more tips on how to enhance your expertise with your
digital camera, sign up for PC World’s Digital Focus, my weekly
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POWER GUIDE
newsletter (find.pcworld.com/36857). For back issues, go to the
Digital Focus archive (find.pcworld.com/37136). Also check
out find.pcworld.com/37139 to download some shareware
image-editing utilities.