Fixing Your Photos
No matter how good your photography skills, mistakes happen. Your photo might be rotated the wrong way, or the image includes some extra, unwanted material (such as a thumb). The Photos app can help here, but only just: The app comes with just two tools for fixing your photos—one for rotating photos and another for cropping out unwanted elements. The next two sections provide you with the details.
Rotating a Photo
All digital cameras enable you to rotate the camera to pictures that are either wider than they are tall (this is called landscape orientation because the typical shot would be a wide landscape) or taller than they are wide (this is called portrait orientation because the typical shot would be a picture of a person). If you find that you have a photo that isn’t being displayed with the correct orientation, you can use the Photos app to rotate the photo into the correct position. Here are the steps to follow:
- Run the Photos app and open the Pictures library.
- Open the folder that contains the photo you want to rotate.
- Double-click the photo to open it.
- Right-click the screen (or swipe up from the bottom edge of your touchscreen) and then select Rotate. The Photos app rotates the photo 90 degrees clockwise.
- Repeat step 4 until the photo is in the correct orientation.
Cropping Out Unwanted Elements
Despite your best efforts, you might end up with a photo that includes some unwanted element near the edge of the photo. It might be a tree branch that you didn’t notice, a person who walked into the frame at the last second, or a bit of a finger that accidentally covered part of the lens.
Fortunately, you can get rid of these eyesores by cutting them out of the photo using a process known as cropping. With this technique, you specify a rectangular area of the photo that you want to keep. Anything outside that rectangle is removed from the photo. Here’s how it works:
- Run the Photos app and open the Pictures library.
- Open the folder that contains the photo you want to crop.
- Double-click the photo.
Right-click the screen (or swipe up from the bottom edge of your touchscreen) and then select Crop. The Photos app displays the cropping rectangle on your photo, as shown in Figure 7.7.
Figure 7.7. Use the cropping rectangle to specify the area of the photo that you want to retain.
- Drag the corners of the rectangle to set the area of the photo that you want to preserve.
- Select Apply. The Photos app crops the photo.