Introduction

You’ve seen those beautiful pictures on the internet commonly used as backgrounds and wondered “How did they get those pictures to look so good?” Well, aside from a professional camera, and special lenses those pictures are probably fixed up a bit using photo editing software.

This guide shows you how to use Windows Photo Gallery for Windows Vista to exaggerate the colors of your digital pictures to make them look more vibrant.

Before You Start Editing

Before you start editing digital photos there are a few things you need to know.

• Most digital cameras save pictures in JPEG format which uses lossy compression. Every time you save a picture with lossy compression you lose some of the detail. This is the nature of lossy formats.
• To prevent losing too much data make all your edits before saving the picture.
• When you edit a picture in Windows Photo Gallery the original version of the picture is saved in %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows Photo Gallery\Original Images and is kept there forever. If you ever need to revert back to the original version of the picture it’s there. You might want to periodically browse to that folder and delete pictures you have backed up if you edit a large number of pictures to save disk space.

  Hint: You can easily navigate to the Original Images folder by right-clicking the start button, click Explore, then paste %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows Photo Gallery\Original Images in the address bar, and then press Enter on your keyboard to go directly to that folder.

• Always use the highest resolution possible when taking digital pictures. This enables you to resize and crop pictures without losing detail.

Exaggerating Colors

1. Open Windows Photo Gallery.
2. Find a picture you want to edit and open it in Windows Photo Gallery.
3. Click Fix at the top center of Windows Photo Gallery.
4. Expand Adjust Color by clicking it located on the right side of Windows Photo Gallery.

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5. Slide the Saturation setting to the right between ¾ and all the way to the right to exaggerate the colors of the picture.

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6. Click the Next (Right Arrow) to save the picture when you’re finished.