A Photo Album for Your Family

Moms and dads, if you have just entered the world of parenthood or expect to do so soon, it is high time to start a photo album for your child. Zoner Photo Studio 11 will help you not only with your virtual album, but also with preparing and printing photos for your children’s grandma, their aunt, and all the other loved ones who just can’t get enough of your kids.

Contents:

• How to download photos from your camera and organize them into folders
• How to easily edit your photos
• How to automatically fix your photos
• How to automatically fix color temperature
• How to fix red-eye problems
• How to add flair using Envelopes
• How to easily publish your photos
• How to publish your photos at Take’n’Share

Organizing Photos on Your Computer

Zoner Photo Studio can download photos from your camera and organize them into folders.

In order not to lose yourself in your downloaded photos later on, you need to organize them into folders. When you use Acquire | Copy from Device to download photos, then Zoner Photo Studio can sort your pictures into folders by when they were taken.

If you already have some disorganized photos from the past on your computer, you can easily get the mess cleaned up using Organize | Sort Pictures [Ctrl+O], which will sort your pictures and videos for you into folders by date. You can rename a folder with a “date” name by selecting the folder and pressing F2. This is a great way to add some descriptive text after the date. Always leave the date at the beginning, however, so your photos will be sorted by date.

Tip: Back up your photos to a different folder to avoid the risk of erasing them or damaging them during edits. Create a backup folder where you will always drag in copies of your photo folders after each time you finish downloading. Hold down the [Ctrl] key while dragging, so that a small plus sign appears by your mouse cursor. When you do this, you will be copying the folders, not moving them... and copying is what you want to do.

If you are like most people, each of your digital shoots has a whole lot of photos. For this reason, it can be smart to remove the truly bad ones once you’re done downloading. When you have several pictures of the same scene and you are not sure which is the best, then you can get good use out of Organize | Compare Pictures. Compare Pictures lets you view pictures of your choice side by side at the same zoom level so you can keep only the good one—the one with no blurring, no closed eyes or weird faces for either the children or the parents, etc.

Editing Photos

Once you make a habit of the steps we talked about above, you should have an idea of where your photos are on disk and should also have a backup of them, so we can now get started editing with no worries—make a mistake? Just restore from backup! Zoner Photo Studio 11 has many photo enhancement tools, but just for starters try Quick Fix, which you can reach using Edit | Adjust | Quick Fix, or the Quick Fix buttons in the Browser and Editor. Quick Fix enhances your photos without needing guidance from you.

To remove tinting from pictures taken under artificial lighting (that is, bulb lighting), use Adjust Color Temperature. This function, too, is under Edit | Adjust. If automatic color temperature correction does not help, then try color correction based on marking a neutral color: use the eyedropper to mark a white area that contains the tinting that you wish to remove.

To remove red-eye problems, use the red-eye removal tool in the Editor. (To easily switch to the Editor, you can use the Editor button that is shown when you are in the Browser or Viewer.) The left edge of the Editor window contains the main toolbar, which offers various editing tools. When you click this toolbar’s red-eye button , the “Options” toolbar at the top of the Editor starts showing red-eye correction options. To retouch human, rather than animal, eye color problems, first make sure that the first of these buttons is clicked—the one with the bucket and the red eye. Then click the red part of the eye in the picture. If you want to adjust how the program reduces red-eye, you can—just use the numeric controls in the Options toolbar.

Zoner Photo Studio also offers many other effects that you can use to add verve to your photos. One popular effect is Envelopes, found under the Effects submenu. You can use Envelopes to frame pictures in black-and-white or color frames—ovals, hearts, and much more.

We could write much more here about editing photos in Zoner Photo Studio. The program contains many retouching tools, for example, and many other tools for making perfect edits to your photos. Some of these will be covered in our next tutorial.

Publishing Photos

Once you have edited your pictures, you can use Zoner Photo Studio 11 to print them out using templates, or to make Web photo galleries for your children and family. You can also run slideshows from right inside of Zoner Photo Studio or use it to create DVD presentations that your friends and relatives are sure to love.

Tip: Now you can easily use Zoner Photo Studio to share photos with your friends and family on a photo sharing community. Create your own family photo album for free at http://www.takenshare.com/

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