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The smart photo editor

To edit a photo, either just click any previously uploaded photos in your Module Store, or upload a new one as described above. This takes you to the Smart Photo Editor that looks like this;

This is where all the main photo processing controls are. You can see the photo you just selected at the top of the screen. Its vital statistics are immediately below the picture. Under this there are 5 tabs that display 5 sets of controls.

Cropping

I want to crop this picture to show only the woman on the left, and to crop the edges a bit to remove the black edges. The photo is cropped by selecting the second 'crop & margins' tab and setting margin values in from the edges of the image. In this case I want to lose most of the right half of the picture so I set a large right margin. I can specify the margins in two ways, either as pixels or as a percentage. The latter is probably easier, and in this case I guess it's about 40% of the way in from the right margin, so I set a value of 40. For the left and bottom margins I want to crop a tiny amount so I set those to just 2%. Click Preview Changes and the image is cropped. Cropping usually requires a bit of trial and error.

Once I've cropped my photo I want to set a margin around the outside of the photo. This prevents text from touching the photo which always looks better on the web page. Here's the final result.

For the best quality it's always better to reduce pictures rather than enlarge them. Note the guidelines given earlier about what size images should be. With the Smart Photo editor you can re-size images in two ways - either by entering a percentage scale factor (where 100% is the original size of the uploaded photo) or by entering the exact pixel width you want the image to be. The photo above has been re-sized to be exactly 250 pixels wide.

Rotating

You can rotate the image by any angle, although if you rotate anything other than 90 degrees you have to get the background colour right. See this example;

The Stawberry image is rotated by 15%

If this photo is placed on a web page that does not have a white background you can see there would be white sections around the image. This is because JPG images are always rectangular and when you rotate a photo it rotates within the normal rectangle bounds. Therefore it's necessary to set the background color to match that of your web page in order to make the photo appear a seamless part of the page. You can do this by selecting the 'color effects' tab. The color options will be described later.

© Charles Moir 2002