Editing Your Photos in Windows Photo Gallery

The Photos app in Windows 8.1 doesn’t support editing your photos, and it’s well worth looking through the Microsoft Store to find photo-editing apps that you can use. If you see Adobe Photoshop Touch available, this is always an excellent purchase.

However, if you have downloaded the Windows Essentials Suite, Windows Photo Gallery offers some easy to use and really quite powerful photo-editing tools. You can double-click/touch a picture to open it in editing mode, and you will see that the Ribbon at the top of the window changes to an Edit tab. There are many controls to choose from, but I want to detail the ones you are most likely to use.

• The Manage section includes controls for rotating the image. 

• The Organize section allows you to add and manage tags. These can be used to make it easier to search for specific images. 

• The Adjustments panel is where the editing tools can be found. 

• Auto adjust will attempt to intelligently edit the brightness, contrast, rotation, and other aspects of the photograph. 

• Crop allows you to trim the image down to a smaller size, removing unwanted items from the main focus of the picture. 

• Red eye will help remove the red eye effect caused by some cam‐ eras. You can click/touch on the red in people’s eyes to have it intelligently removed. 

• Fine Tune gives you more control over the adjustments made by the Auto adjust feature. 

• Revert to Original is a very useful feature if you have made changes to a picture that you did not intend to make or that changed the photo in an unwelcome way. When you edit a photo using Windows Photo Gallery, a backup of the original image is made automatically. At any time, you can click/touch the Revert to Original button to restore that original image and undo any changes you have made.