Laptops All-in-One Desk Reference For Dummies- P24 pps

✦ Sorting through hundreds or thousands of images to separate the print-able wheat from the digital chaff ✦ Editing your images to improve color, brightness, contrast, and composition ✦

Table 2-1 (continued)

Ellipse Draw a perfect circle or an elongated ellipse

Click in the image to set a starting point and then drag the pointer to expand it; to draw a circle, hold down the Shift button while moving the pointer

Polygon Make a shape with any number of sides, from

triangle to dodecagon (a 12-sided shape) and beyond Pick a color, drag the pointer to create a straight line, and then click each point where you want to add a side When done, double-click

to turn off the tool To create sides with 45- or 90-degree angles, hold down the Shift key while making sides

The Color Palette comes with 24 colors plus black and white However, you aren’t limited to those colors; double-click the palette to expand the choices to 48

Figure 2-9:

You can work with the basic colors of the Paint palette

Create custom colors by moving an onscreen selector or manually entering color or hue information

Book III Chapter 2

Manipulating Images 205

And you can go further, defining your own colors:

1.Choose the Define Custom Colors menu

2.Click into a set of colors

3.Choose an approximate shade

4.Use the slider to adjust its appearance

Or type values into the Red, Green, and Blue boxes; in this way you can

• Look up a color value in a reference book

• Specify to a colleague that the particular shade of blue you want to use is created using 96, 57, and 251 in RGB values

Windows Photo Gallery

Digital photography is one of those modern technologies that has zoomed from Flash Gordon sci-fi to products so common and simple that even a college-educated adult can be taught to use them See Figure 2-10 (In fact, the once-booming industry of film-based photography has dried up; you have to go out of your way to find a laboratory to develop film and make prints.) The advantages of a digital camera are immediately evident to anyone who uses one

✦ The cameras are microcomputers all by themselves

✦ They can focus by themselves, choose the proper exposure, and other-wise capture what you see

✦ The images are available immediately — starting on the screen that most cameras have, and continuing when you upload the digital files to

a computer

✦ When the images are loaded onto your laptop, you can use its much more powerful processor with advanced image-editing software to adjust

• Exposure

• Brightness

• Contrast

• Color intensity

• Picture size

✦ You can perform other tricks that go way beyond the antique world of film:

• Sharpen the pixels that make up the image

• Change colors to hues not seen in the real world

• Ship them from one computer to another (or to a cell phone or a per-sonal data assistant or to a television screen) over the Internet nearly instantly

✦ The cost of taking a picture is close to zero You never have to buy film

or pay for its processing; if you choose to keep your images in electronic form you don’t even need to pay for prints

As a professional photographer, I add one more wrinkle to that equation: I used to keep a casual running calculation of the cost of each picture I snapped But now that I work entirely in the digital world, I have no hesita-tion shooting a few dozen versions of the same photo I can try overexpo-sure, underexpooverexpo-sure, a different focus, a different lens When I’m done for the day, I can look at 150 images and find the one or two that I want to keep All I’ve spent is a few penny’s worth of battery power

What’s the hard part?

✦ Sorting through hundreds or thousands of images to separate the print-able wheat from the digital chaff

✦ Editing your images to improve color, brightness, contrast, and composition

✦ Organizing your images and finding them when you need them

Figure 2-10:

Windows Photo Gallery delivers basic photo editing

Book III Chapter 2

Manipulating Images 207

A free solution in Windows Vista

Windows Photo Gallery is offered as one of the “free” components delivered with Windows Vista (You can download and use another version of the pro-gram, called Windows Live Photo Gallery, with Windows XP or Windows Vista.) This program offers many of the basic photo-editing tools that are part of entry-level programs like Adobe Elements:

✦ Auto adjust A computer-directed set of adjustments to brightness,

con-trast, and exposure This setting works with most images that are already close to how you’d like them to appear

✦ Adjust exposure Manual sliders to increase or decrease brightness,

contrast, or both

✦ Adjust color Manual sliders to set color temperature, tint, or saturation.

Color temperature is the warmth or coolness of the overall appearance

of colors; think of the difference between the light from an incandescent bulb and a fluorescent; or the change in the feel of colors between midday and sunset Adjusting the saturation is like adding more color to the electronic paint set

Setting color saturation all the way off effectively creates a black-and-white or grayscale image

✦ Fix red eye This isn’t a cure for disease; rather, it can, in many cases,

remove the bright red spots that appear in human eyes when an elec-tronic flash reflects back to the camera

You can crop an image to remove Uncle Ned, or change its shape to fit a monitor or a picture frame

The primary purpose of Windows Photo Gallery is to prepare your images —

in a basic way — for these types of things:

✦ Displaying in an onscreen slideshow

✦ E-mailing to friends and family

✦ Sending to a service bureau for prints

✦ Burning a CD or DVD with copies of your pictures The video DVD feature of Windows Photo Gallery is available only in Windows Vista Home Premium or Windows Vista Ultimate versions of the operating system

✦ One feature that’s absent from Windows Photo Gallery is the ability to change file formats (from JPG to TIFF, for example) (Despite this, the program can open and work with images of either type, as well as BMP and PNG formats.)

✦ You can’t adjust the image resolution or its printable size For these sorts of functions — very important to some users — you need to pur-chase a graphics-editing program

Now the good news: Windows Photo Gallery can function as the equivalent

of a graphics database If you assign tags to your images, you can use the

program to search for all photos that meet a particular criteria For example, you could create the following tags: family, travel, Europe, cruises, and “the time Janice got seasick.”

After applying tags, you can search for any one particular image or an entire group that shares the same tags A picture of Janice, seasick on a cruise in Europe, would probably turn up in a search for any of the tags I identified earlier; a search just for tags of Europe should turn up the same picture, as well as other images taken on land having nothing to do with cruises (or Janice) The search function doesn’t require that images be kept in any particular folder; the program searches all hard discs and other storage media installed within or attached to your laptop

An evolving version of Photo Gallery

In late 2007, Microsoft introduced Windows Live Photo Gallery, a free upgrade

or replacement to Windows Photo Gallery that adds functions and can be installed within Windows XP as well as Windows Vista See Figure 2-11 Among its enhancements is the ability to convert a limited number of file for-mats from one type to another: JPG to TIFF, for example It also adds a new file format, WMPHOTO (with a filename extension of WDP) for use with new features related to the world of Windows Live

A new feature is Publish, which allows use of your images with Windows Live Spaces and other services (such as Flickr) that establish and maintain social networking or image and video sharing sites on the Internet

Who Knows Where the Time Goes?

Back in the olden days, many of us kept our calendars on the wall; some of

us even had secretaries who kept our schedule in a leather-bound desktop book Ah, life was simpler then

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Who Knows Where the Time Goes? 209

Today, most of us live lives scheduled down to the minute, and we have to keep track where the time goes all by ourselves The calendars are off the wall and in our pockets on personal data assistants and advanced cell phones, and on our laptops

As part of Windows Vista, Microsoft introduced Windows Calendar This tool includes a full set of tools for recording your appointments, issuing invita-tions to other meeting participants, and reminding us to get it in gear when

we need to run down the hall or out to the airport It can also maintain a per-sonal to-do list; hold on while I make a note to set one up

You can set up a personal or business calendar so you can coordinate your entries with other family members or coworkers With permission, you can check someone else’s calendar — or they can check yours — to set up meet-ings or travel

For example, all the members of a family could have their own calendar run-ning under Windows Vista on a single machine Mom or Dad could check in to find out the kids’ little league and ballet lesson schedules; the kids could find out what time the ‘rents are due home so that they can clean up the evidence

Figure 2-11:

Windows Live Photo Gallery extends image management features onto the Internet

In an office, a set of Windows Calendars could be shared amongst members

of a specific workgroup or department, or the calendars could be kept pri-vate from each other but allow a supervisor to find out what’s going on and when people can meet The manager can reach in and place a claim on a time slot for all the members of the department

The Calendar system can — and should be — protected by a strong pass-word that you give only to those you want to have access And if someone leaves your workgroup, change the password immediately

As part of Microsoft’s introduction of its Windows Live online facilities, you

can publish the calendar online This serves two purposes:

✦ It allows you to consult your schedule from your laptop (or from any other Internet-capable device) as you travel

✦ It allows you to give permission to others to consult or even change your calendar from afar

You can store it on a server at your office or at your Internet service provider; consult your technical support desk for advice on how to do this

Or you can use a public network (Microsoft would like users to use its Windows Live site) for this purpose

Windows Calendar data is stored in the iCalendar format, which a number of other applications also use This means you can interchange calendars even

if someone else is using different programs to develop them

Chapter 3: Windows Maintenance Utilities

In This Chapter

Keeping your laptop’s mind and body clean and neat

Healing what’s broken

Dealing with device driver demons

Recycling, defragging, and other healthy habits

Are you the sort of person who buys a new car and then keeps it like a museum piece for the rest of its life, vacuuming out every donut crumb, checking the air pressure in the tires weekly, and changing the oil every 2,999 miles before proceeding one inch farther down the road? Or do you let the pizza boxes pile up in the back seat, let the air slowly leak out of the tires, and allow the engine oil to turn to sludge?

If you’re the first type of owner, your car is going to last longer, operate more efficiently, and hold on to its value for a much longer period of time If you’re not, your car will slow down day by day and one morning refuse to start at all It’s pretty much the same thing with laptop computers Not the part about the engine oil and the air in the tires: The stuff about the importance of keeping everything in tip-top mechanical condition and how if you don’t one day, the machine won’t go

Keep in mind three very important concepts about personal computers:

✦ Every time you use your laptop — saving a file, deleting a file, installing a program, making a change to a setting, or connecting to the Internet — you leave the machine in a different condition than it was before you started Files are moved from place to place on the hard disk drive, they become fragmented (more about this later), and miscellaneous pieces of temporary files are scattered about hither and thon (think of them as donut crumbs)

✦ Microsoft regularly issues updates, security patches, and repairs to cur-rent versions of Windows One way or another they’re acknowledgments

of the fact that the operating system was less than perfect when first released and (more disturbingly) has been the subject of malicious

attacks by hackers ever since Those are the facts, and I’m not intending

to join the small chorus of Microsoft-maligners The world isn’t perfect, and some of its occupants are unpleasant folk

✦ The makers of other programs and utilities regularly update or repair their products Based on the settings you establish for products you install within your operating system, these new bits of code are either automatically sent to your laptop over the Internet and installed or you receive notification that updates are available

In general, you should configure your antivirus and other security utilities so that they’re automatically updated; this helps your system fight off the latest viruses and other malware floating out there on the Internet and in e-mail As far as other programs, you can make your own decisions regarding updates

Maintaining Windows and Applications

We have this imperfect world with imperfect operating systems and nasty people trying to cause you and your machine trouble And we have a machine that, if left unattended, will not-so-gradually lose its new-computer smell and begin to slow down and eventually resemble a box of bricks What can you do to keep your computer’s operating system and software in tip-top condition?

Happily, Microsoft and most other software makers do a pretty good job of keeping their products up to date But as a user you have to make sure your machine is properly configured to accept updates, and you need to be vigi-lant about seeking them out and managing them I discuss methods for Microsoft updates in Book II

The most efficient way to maintain your software is to register your software with the maker and establish an Internet connection to their support system Although in theory you may be able to have updates and patches sent to you

by postal mail on disc, that avenue is rapidly closing; today, most manufac-turers assume that all users have a connection to the Internet that can be used to maintain software

As an example, Adobe offers occasional updates to its powerhouse products such as Adobe Creative Suite or individual elements like Adobe Photoshop Since this is a mature (though still improving) product, the updates are usu-ally less focused on fixing bugs and more on adding compatibility with new file formats or integrating with features added by Microsoft to its operating system See Figure 3-1

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Maintaining Windows and Applications 213

Nearly every laptop now on the market includes an Ethernet port for a wired connection to the Internet, or a WiFi adapter for wireless communication

Most offer both If you don’t have Internet service at your home or office, a public library or school may offer free service or you can rent time at an Internet café The software for Internet connection is built into Microsoft Windows

I’ve always marveled about how veterinarians (and pediatricians) make their initial diagnosis of health problems with their patients After all, neither pup-pies nor newborns can tell the doctor, “I’ve got a pain in my right ear.” The vets and the baby docs both have to start out with external observations (poking, prodding, and magnifying scopes) If that does not provide a defini-tive answer, then there are blood tests, X-rays, and even invasive

exploratory surgery

Enough with the blood and guts stuff Computers are not humans, nor the other way around; one of the ways in which machines are in some ways superior to animals is that in many instances they are capable of giving themselves a checkup and sometimes even healing themselves

Modern laptops equipped with current versions of Windows include a wide range of tools that report on their hardware and software configuration, their vital signs, and can often warn about impending problems

One huge hole in the ability of a computer to report on its own condition: It must be able to start up and run at least the lowest level of its built-in “boot”

hardware or go a bit further to load the basics of the operating system If the hardware can’t start, we’re no better off at initial diagnosis than a veterinarian trying to figure out what is wrong with a listless lizard

Figure 3:1:

The Adobe Updater checks for recommend ation modifi-cations to your installed software once a month