Digital Photo Tip.

Microsoft Photo Editor is a basic imaged editing program that is part of Office Tools. MS Photo Editor is easy to use and is handy for basic photo and image manipulation tasks such as resizing and lowering the resolution of digital photos.

Resize an Image - you can resize an image BUT REMEMBER, if you have a small image and you want to resize larger, the image may become pixelated or distorted because the resolution is too low to allow for resize. It's much better to have a large image that you resize smaller. 

1. Open Microsoft Photo Editor

2. From the File menu (or open icon), choose Open. Navigate to where you have your photos or images stored. Click on the one you want to open.

3. From the Image menu, choose Resize

1. You can enter width & height numbers or you can use percentages to resize. You can also select which unit of measurement to use - inches, centimeters or pixels.

2. Do NOT check Allow distortion unless that is what you want. If you leave it blank, you can type in a number in the width and have it auto calculate what the height should be without distoring the image.

Change the Resolution of an Image - Resolution is the number of pixels in an image. A higher number correlated to a higher quality of image. Sometimes you want to decrease the resolution of an image to lower the file size. REMEMBER, you can decrease the number of pixels in an image but you can't  increase pixels without distortion or pixelation.

1. Open Microsoft Photo Editor

2. From the File menu (or open icon), choose Open. Navigate to where you have your photos or images stored. Click on the one you want to open.

3. From the File menu, choose Properties

4. Resolution will be listed. If it says 300, you can drop that to 150 and still print the photo (on a printer, 300 is needed for press products). If you drop the resolution to 72, this photo can be used to display on monitor or projector in PowerPoint or on the web. The photo will not print very sharp at this resolution.

Important Note: You must always save the file with a new name. If you overwrite the original file you can never recover it to the original condition.