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Photo Editing - Tutorial 1. Colours and Cropping.

You may already have some digital photos taken with a camera, or have scanned in an image and saved it to the hard drive. Now we are about to begin some very basic photo editing with MS Photo Editor. This usually comes supplied with MS Office, but it is not always obvious where it is installed!

Begin by searching for the file PhotoEd.exe. The icon looks like this - . Right-click on it once and choose "Create Shortcut". Then highlight the shortcut and choose Edit -> Cut from the file menu.

Right-click anywhere on the Desktop and choose Paste. Now we are ready to begin! Photo Editor looks like this -

Open the photograph you want to work with. I've chosen one of a childrens' Nativity Play, although you wouldn't know to look at it! The picture was taken in a very dark Church, at a distance of approx. 150 feet, so even with an optical zoom of x6, the results are not that brilliant.

The first thing to do is correct the brightness. Use the "sun" icon and you'll see a slider bar like this -

The next stage of the process is to cut out some of the unwanted background, so that the focal point is on the actors. To do this, we will use the crop icon and just draw a rectangle round the bit you want to keep.

Now why not experiment with the Effects menu? This is what our picture looks like as a study in Chalk and Charcoal -

Once you are confident with the basic editing functions of Photo Editor (which is, after all, VERY basic) you may wish to progress to something rather more sophisticated. Some popular packages are Adobe Photoshop Elements, Jasc Paint Shop Pro and MGI Photosuite, but there are many others. Although they may look different, they all do much the same thing and in many cases, even the tool icons are identical.

Continue on to Tutorial 2... Learn to repair old scanned photos, and apply a sepia effect.