TUESDAY’S TIP ~ Another way to edit your images in Microsoft Office Picture Manager

My “go to” program for editing pictures and documents that are JPG format, is Microsoft Office 2010 Picture Manager.  It’s easy, quick and efficient.  I even recently found out I can still use this program on my new HP laptop that has Windows 10.  Sadly, Microsoft discontinued the Picture Manager portion of their Office suite in recent versions.

BUT, if you still love and use this program as I do, here’s my newly discovered edit feature.  And, silly me, I thought I knew this program inside and out.  Just goes to show, we always have things to learn.

Today we are talking about those images that are too dark.  Let’s say you download an image that looks like this.  I don’t know about you, but I really don’t want this image attached to my Legacy file or anywhere else.


Once the image is opened in Microsoft Picture Manager (which is set as my default), you would select the “Edit Pictures” option.



Now choose “color” in the right hand column.



Now select “Enhance Color”



You see the grey wording underneath “enhance color?”  Once you click on the icon, those words turn dark, like this.



Just take your mouse and move over the image.  You’ll see a little round target kind of pointer show up.   It looks similar to this.

Once you see that target pointer, just click on any area that should be white.  BINGO!

Here is the result.  Compare it to the image at the top of my post.



Depending on the image, you’ll get different degrees of resolution.  I personally think this looks much better.

For the past 6 years I have used Adobe Photoshop Elements to make this kind of change.  However, it required an extra step because all my images automatically open in Microsoft Office Picture Manager.  I rotate and crop them in that program.  Now I can just stay there and perform this addition fix.

I wrote a previous post about making adjustments to the images we download.  Easy Document Editing

I hope you found this post helpful.  I just had to share this tip with you, in case, like me, you didn’t know this either.
 
Happy hunting,

Michigan Girl

Copyright ©  2010-2016   Diane Gould Hall

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.  NO USE WITHOUT PERMISSION

EASY DOCUMENT EDITING

TUESDAY'S TIPS

As genealogists we work with all sorts of documents & images.  Right?  Many times these documents or images are crooked, difficult to read or have extra borders around them.  When you are ready to work with these items (after downloading them from an online site or scanning), how do you go about "fixing" the problems?  Here are the questions:

1.  Do you buy an expensive photo editing software?

2.  Do you just leave them the way they are?

3. Do you use the programs that come with your computer?

Many people cannot afford to buy or don't want to have to learn to use programs like Photoshop, Photoshop Elements or Corel.  The learning curve on some of these programs can be daunting.

If you are like me, you want the documents that you attach to your ancestors files to look good.  Especially if you plan to use them in reports or share them with family or online.

Your downloaded or scanned document may look something like this.  It's not pretty, that's for sure.

  

Wouldn’t you rather that it looked like this?

Here is what I do with my images.  
I use Microsoft Office 2010.  This is a program can be purchased for $94.99 at the following site http://www.softwareking.com/O2K10HSPKC.html?gclid=CI7n7MCI4LoCFaQ9QgodUEAA

It is part of the Microsoft Office suite.  Many people are not aware that there is a photo editing software included with the office suite. 

(If you are using a Mac, I apologize.  I cannot speak to the programs included with a Mac.) 

You can go to any image in your computer, right click and choose “open with” and then choose Microsoft Office 2010.  Here’s a question – was this program called Microsoft Office 2008 or 2009, prior to this?  I don’t know.  What I do know is that I also used this program when I had Windows XP.  I am currently using Windows 7.

Once you have the image opened in the program you should see a screen like this.  Now click on "Edit Pictures"

 A new section will open up and look like this:

 
Now you will click on rotate first, as you want to straighten this item before cropping it. When you click on the ROTATE option it will open up a menu on the left.  Use the arrow in the "by degree" area to rotate the item either left or right.  TIP: You can actually select increments like 1.5 or 1.8 or -1.5 or -1.8 to get the item as straight as possible.  Now it looks like this:

To crop the item click on "Edit Pictures" in the top menu again.  Now select "CROP" from the menu on the right.  You will see corner brackets around the image.  Move them to crop your item and then BE SURE to click the OK button (located under the menu on the right) to finish the crop.  

TIP: If your image is too light click on the "AUTO CORRECT" in the top menu.

Please remember to SAVE your image or you will lose all your changes.  Now your image looks just like the second one I showed you at the beginning of this post.

I do hope this was helpful.  Play around with this program.  You can resize images or o adjust the color.  How about removing red eye from pictures?  This little FREE program has some very nifty features.  If you like it, set it as the default when you open any JPG or PNG image.  I don't work with TIFF or BMP or GIF files, so I will be honest and tell you that I don't know if the program works with them.  

Happy cropping,

Michigan Girl 

Copyright ©  2013   Diane Gould Hall