Windows Live Photo Gallery
Andrew Gould
Registered Users Posts: 190 Major grins
I normally do my postprocessing in Photoshop, and my workflow always starts RAW to 16 bit TIFF (Adobe Camera RAW), but lately I've been making great use of the tools available in Windows Live Photo Gallery, which can be downloaded free from Microsoft if you're running Windows XP or Vista. This has more features than the standard Windows Photo Gallery that's already installed in these operating systems. Just do a Google search on "Windows Live" to find it.
The "Fix" tools can often do an amazingly good job, correcting exposure, colour balance and vertical/horizontal alignment all at once. The noise reduction and sharpen tools are really quite amazing, too. I've been using these latter two with great success on high ISO images. I'm even beginning to prefer the sharpen tool to Photoshop's Smart Sharpen for web images. It's so simple and effective. They must have some really advanced technology, as the noise reduction and sharpen tools have just one sliding control each. No radius and amount for sharpen, then, but the result looks perfect every time. Best of all, the changes are non destructive, and it is possible to reverse everything.
By the way, my use of the above came about because I was getting totally sick of Adobe Bridge constantly crashing on me, even though (on Vista) I have 4GB of RAM, and have carefully disabled everything unnecessary in the operating system. When I found that the standard Windows Photo Gallery would not recognise or play the videos I occasionally take with my compact Canon G10, I did a seach and found that Windows Live Photo Gallery would.
I still do my batch renaming with the free FastStone Image Viewer, though, as this Windows program does not do that. It's a bit of a patchy solution, but the best I've come up with to date. FastStone, by the way, claims to be colour managed, but it doesn't work at all in this respect. Windows (Live) Photo Gallery is colour managed automatically, so if you have a colour managed system as I do, you'll be delighted to see that colours are exactly the same in the Windows Gallery as in Photoshop.
Another great feature is that Windows (Live) Photo Gallery is even better than Adobe Bridge for tagging photos. You can add tags to a single photo or to multiple galleries (or selected photos within them) by selecting the galleries in the browser pane while holding down Control.
Minus points for Windows Live Photo Gallery are: slide show stretches and distorts image (so just click to advance, instead), background is only white in full screen -- which is not true full screen, but is big enough. Still worthwhile using for the reasons I state above, though. Not a reason to give up on PS, of course, but a very useful additional tool.
The "Fix" tools can often do an amazingly good job, correcting exposure, colour balance and vertical/horizontal alignment all at once. The noise reduction and sharpen tools are really quite amazing, too. I've been using these latter two with great success on high ISO images. I'm even beginning to prefer the sharpen tool to Photoshop's Smart Sharpen for web images. It's so simple and effective. They must have some really advanced technology, as the noise reduction and sharpen tools have just one sliding control each. No radius and amount for sharpen, then, but the result looks perfect every time. Best of all, the changes are non destructive, and it is possible to reverse everything.
By the way, my use of the above came about because I was getting totally sick of Adobe Bridge constantly crashing on me, even though (on Vista) I have 4GB of RAM, and have carefully disabled everything unnecessary in the operating system. When I found that the standard Windows Photo Gallery would not recognise or play the videos I occasionally take with my compact Canon G10, I did a seach and found that Windows Live Photo Gallery would.
I still do my batch renaming with the free FastStone Image Viewer, though, as this Windows program does not do that. It's a bit of a patchy solution, but the best I've come up with to date. FastStone, by the way, claims to be colour managed, but it doesn't work at all in this respect. Windows (Live) Photo Gallery is colour managed automatically, so if you have a colour managed system as I do, you'll be delighted to see that colours are exactly the same in the Windows Gallery as in Photoshop.
Another great feature is that Windows (Live) Photo Gallery is even better than Adobe Bridge for tagging photos. You can add tags to a single photo or to multiple galleries (or selected photos within them) by selecting the galleries in the browser pane while holding down Control.
Minus points for Windows Live Photo Gallery are: slide show stretches and distorts image (so just click to advance, instead), background is only white in full screen -- which is not true full screen, but is big enough. Still worthwhile using for the reasons I state above, though. Not a reason to give up on PS, of course, but a very useful additional tool.
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