Introduction

This guide shows you how to easily convert a color picture to a black and white picture using Windows Photo Gallery in Windows Vista.

Before You Start Editing

Before you start editing digital photos there are a few things you need to know.

• Most digital cameras save pictures in JPEG format which uses lossy compression. Every time you save a picture with lossy compression you lose some of the detail. This is the nature of lossy formats.
• To prevent losing too much data make all your edits before saving the picture.
• When you edit a picture in Windows Photo Gallery the original version of the picture is saved in %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows Photo Gallery\Original Images and is kept there forever. If you ever need to revert back to the original version of the picture it’s there. You might want to periodically browse to that folder and delete pictures you have backed up if you edit a large number of pictures to save disk space.

  Hint: You can easily navigate to the Original Images folder by right-clicking the start button, click Explore, then paste %LocalAppData%\Microsoft\Windows Photo Gallery\Original Images in the address bar, and then press Enter on your keyboard to go directly to that folder.

• Always use the highest resolution possible when taking digital pictures. This enables you to resize and crop pictures without losing detail.

Turn Color to Black and White

1. Open the picture you want to turn black and white in Windows Photo Gallery.
2. Click Fix located at the top center of Windows Photo Gallery.
3. Click Adjust Color on the right.

   ^[1]

4. Drag the Saturation setting all the way to the left.

   ^[2]

5. Click the Next (Right Arrow) button located at the bottom center of Windows Photo Gallery to save the picture in black and white.