In my opinion Windows photo gallery is a good program for a beginning photographer to use to touch up their photos. It may not have the widest range of the photo editing options, however, it is easier to navigate than many of the high-end programs.

First, choose the photo you would like to edit and open it in the Windows Photo Gallery Program.

By going to the black bar at the top of the screen and selecting the Fix option, I open up the editing pane on the right side of the window.

Because I want to do something specific to this image, I don’t really want to choose the Auto Adjust option. This option is meant to be a quick fix, although I find it really doesn’t fix most problems.

Adjust Exposure

This option allows you to decide how dark or light you want to make your photo. Clicking on this option opens a drop-down type menu in which you have a sliding controller for brightness and one for contrast.

Sliding the brightness controller to the right lightens my picture a bit.

Then sliding the contrast controller to the right a bit brings back some of the color.

Adjust Color

In this menu there are three sliding bars for; Color Temperature, Tint and Saturation. If you slide the color temperature bar to the left it brings out more of the blue hues in the photo, sliding it to the right brings out the reds. This makes the picture feel warmer or colder, hence the name. Because my picture already feels fairly cold I adjust the slider to the right.

The next bar adjusts the tint of the picture. Moving the slider to the left brings out more green hues and to the right is a pinkish color, neither of these particularly appeal to me so I leave this bar alone.

Last in this menu is Saturation. This bar adjusts how much color there is over all in your picture. Sliding it all the way to the left produces a black and white effect and all the way to the right gives you a color saturation right out of a cartoon. I like the overall natural variation in this photo so I am leaving this one alone for now as well.

Crop Picture

Under this menu is another drop down menu allowing you to choose a sized frame for easier framing of your photo or Custom frame where you are allowed to stretch the cropped area to meet your taste. I choose the 5 x7 frame because I want to set it up on my desk at some point. However, this does not meet my preference when it comes to the content of the picture. Luckily there is a Rotate Frame option. Using this I can perfectly frame in the area of the picture I want saved. 

Fix Red Eye

This option does not really apply to my photo either, however it is a handy tool to have in your arsenal. To use this feature you simply click the title Fix Red Eye then click and drag over the eye or eyes that need fixed.