With this release, Windows Live Photo Gallery becomes more of a full-fledged consumer photo editing tool/organizer on a par with the Apple’s iPhoto ($79 Direct, 4 stars), Google’s Picasa (Free, 4 stars); it even matches some of Adobe Photoshop Elements’ power ($99.99 direct, 4 stars). The new big-ticket features in Windows Live Photo Gallery 2011 are face recognition and geotagging, but the application as a whole feels more polished and powerful than earlier incarnations.
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Windows Live Photo Gallery Images : Installation Choices
Windows Live Photo Gallery Images : Start Importing
Windows Live Photo Gallery Images : Import Groups
Windows Live Photo Gallery Images : Home View
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Interface
Windows Live Photo Gallery’s new release now feels more like a full-blown image editing application than it has in any previous version, yet manages to maintain its ease of use for general consumers. The main window is now adorned with an Office-like ribbon toolbar across the top; and the new Find tab lets you filter by keyword, rating, date, face, and more. Below the ribbon is a three-panel interface, showing your folders on the left, the images in the middle, and actions like tagging and editing in a right pane.
As in more advanced photo apps like Lightroom, double-clicking an image in Windows Live Photo Gallery brings it up, and doing so again returns you to gallery view. At the bottom right, there are rotate image arrows, next and previous buttons, and a zoom slider that lets you size both thumbnails and single image view to whatever zoom level you want (the mouse wheel can also be used for zooming). Holding the left mouse button lets you pan around the photo, which I found to be a very fluid way of navigating images.
Specifications
Type
Personal, Professional
Free
Yes
OS Compatibility
Windows Vista, Windows 7
More
I do wish the left panel offered a Last Import option the way iPhoto does. The Find tab, however, can fill this role; it lets you limit the gallery view by date, month, or year taken, as well as by the people in the pictures, star ratings, and flagged status. You can also click the binocular icon to search within those results. If the default interface doesn’t suit you, you can customize it by adding or subtracting options from a quick access toolbar located either below the ribbon or up in the window border to save viewing space.
Photo Importing
The import experience is just what you’d want. As you import, you can group photos by date and time, add tags, add the date to filenames, and now set a base file name. Raw camera files are supported, but only if you’ve installed your camera manufacturer’s codec in Windows. Fortunately, gallery tells you if you need to do this, and it even takes you to the camera manufacturer’s download site.
I found working with large raw files slower in Windows Live Photo Gallery than in pro-level apps like Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 ($299 Street, ), and unlike iPhoto and Picasa image adjustments didn’t work with raw images.
Photo Editing
All the expected photo adjustments are on offer: cropping, red-eye fixing, straightening, exposure, color correction, and even noise reduction. Buttons let you apply fixes automatically, but a “Fine tune” button offers deeper control (such as an adjustable histogram, highlights, shadows, sharpness, and color temperature). This version adds a new tool: Blemish removal, which worked excellently in my testing, as did the red-eye fix.
An Auto-adjust option lets you configure what you want fixed—any combination of exposure, color, NR, and straightening. It did a mostly good job on my test images, never drastically exaggerating brightness or other factors, as some editors occasionally do. The editing is non-destructive, so, at any point, you can revert to the original. A new batch edit lets you apply fixes to a bunch of selected images at once, but it only works with the auto-fixes—color, exposure, straightening, and noise reduction—not with the fine-tuning.
Jazzing Up Photos
Gallery doesn’t offer frivolous frames, doodads, or wild effects to embellish your pictures the way some tools like Roxio do. Instead, it gives you a few tools for tasteful effects: Sepia, cyan, and black and white. The app’s panorama-stitching feature has long been impressive for a free tool; iPhoto or Picasa still don’t offer an equivalent ability.
An innovative new Photo Fuse option lets you get everyone’s best look in group photo composited from multiple shots. It’s sort of a companion to the application’s panoramic stitch tool, and comparable to what you find in Adobe Photoshop Elements. My results were intriguing but not perfect—some people ended up with big hair, or worse, two ears on one side of the head.
Photo Gallery now joins Elements, iPhoto, and Picasa in offering a retouching tool for blemishes. It worked beautifully at correcting skin discolorations in my tests, and more simply than Picasa’s, which requires you to select a source and target area.