What's new in Live Photo Gallery
Thursday, June 10 2010
When will we see the new versions?
From what webDotWiz can gather, the new version of Hotmail will begin rolling out on 15 June. Now bear in mind there are a few hundred million Hotmail users, so don't expect to see the new Hotmail when you sign in on the 15th. Going on past rollouts, those who've signed up to Hotmail most recently get the new version first and those of us who've had Hotmail accounts for ten years or more are the last ones to get the new goodies. It's rumoured that the Office Web Apps will roll out alongside Hotmail (that's to be expected since Office Web Apps are a part of the new Hotmail).
The latest version of Windows Live Essentials - Live Mail, Live Messenger, Live Movie Maker, Live Photo Gallery, Live Sync and Live Writer - was announced on 3 June. According to those who know these things, a trial version of Live Essentials will become available towards the end of June and the final version will be ready for download by everybody later in the year.
Photo Fuse
Taking a photo of a group of people is fraught with problems: there's
that one person looking away from the camera, another person blinks when
you press the button, and somebody else is not paying attention to you.
Photo Fuse comes to the rescue by creating a composite photo from the
four or five photos you took of the the group.
Select the group of photos and choose Photo Fuse from the ribbon
menu. Now draw a highlight box around one of the problem people in your
photo and up pops a selection of that person's renditions in the group
of photos. Choose the best rendition and, hey presto, you've fixed that
problem. Continue the same steps for other problem people in your group
of photos and you end up with a photo that shows off the best of
everyone in the group photo.
You can also use Photo Fuse to get that perfect photo of a famous
landmark by taking out those people who walk across the scene just when
you think it's safe to click.
Face recognition and face detection
The current Live Photo Gallery has face detection and it's been harrowing to have webDotWiz insist on tagging people in your photos. With face recognition you'll be able to tag a person once and the new Live Photo Gallery will do its best to automatically tag that person with their name wherever it finds that face in all your photos. Phew, no more pestering from webDotWiz.
Retouch
Live Photo Gallery's auto adjust has been a favourite feature with everybody. The new Photo Gallery will also include a retouch feature so you can easily remove annoying blemishes from your photos (apparently you can remove people from your photos, too).
Live Movie Maker
As with the current version, Live Photo Gallery and Live Movie Maker work together. For example, you can create a movie from a selection of your photos in a few minutes by dragging and dropping the photos from Live Photo Gallery into Live Movie Maker and then choosing Auto Movie.
The new version of Live Movie Maker will have more themes and better editing tools to enable clipping of your own videos that you use in your own creation.
As well, we'll be able to upload our movies to our Live Skydrive from where we can share them with family and friends. As well, if you want, you can also upload your movies to Facebook or YouTube.