If the photo you need to illustrate your document requires some correction, don't worry. Word 2010 has a great new Editing tools to fine tune photographs. This is a section of a document that we created earlier and here two photos and some of the surrounding text. When I click on one of the photos, the Picture Tools Format tab appears, and there are some tools here that will help you adjust even a relatively bad photograph like this one.

In this photo, if I didn't necessarily know it was a tree, especially when it was on its side, I wouldn't easily be able to tell that, and yet this is the photo of the tree that we need to use that sits near the gate at our company headquarters. So we'd like to take this photo that somebody gave us at the last minute and correct it. There are two types of corrections. One is called Sharpen and Soften, and the other is a combination of Brightness and Contrast. Now, you can actually set Brightness and Contrast separately, but this is a better way to do it with this tool.

If I wanted to set it separately, I could right-click, and I could choose to Format picture, and I'll find, for example, that I have a choice to work on my Picture Color and do picture corrections in Brightness and Contrast, here are separate. But I'm going to use them together in this single control that works very well. First, let's take a look. This is the current photo as it is now, and as we move to the right, we actually get brighter. So simply notice just moving and increasing the brightness 20% and then 40%, now I can tell there's a tree, and it's quite crisp.

My Contrast is in the vertical dimension, so I can decrease my Contrast, and you'll notice that the photo gets lighter, but somehow less crisp, or I can increase my Contrast. So it appears that increase in Brightness and perhaps even a decrease in Contrast works very well to turn this picture into that picture. Having made that choice, I can now still go back and choose to Sharpen this picture if I wish. Here's a softer look, a blurrier look.

50% softer, 25% softer. Here's my original. And here it is, 25% sharper and 50% sharper, and you'll notice that even at 50% sharper, in this size, on this page, that actually makes this photo look better. Watch again: a little blurry, sharper, even sharper yet. So I could choose either of these very comfortably. I think I'll choose 25% sharper.

So with one tool, I can adjust Sharpness and Brightness and Contrast. Again, we can right-click though and choose format picture and access these tools independently all on one page. There are my Presets here. My Preset Gallery is here, so if I wished, I could find a sharpness that was not quite 50%, but more like 35%. And notice that that is sharper, not sort of the surrealistic sharpness that 50% was, and not the almost sharp enough of 25%.

So a reason to sharpen and soften in the dialog box is to enter values that aren't there in the Presets. The same thing is true here with Contrast. I actually thought that perhaps a slightly lower contrast would be even better. And I can move towards that. I can say well how about splitting the difference or close to that at 30%? A little more than 25, but not anywhere close to 50. And I have to wonder if slightly more bright would also be good. And I can make those adjustments here.

If you know when you are using the Presets, that you're having a hard time choosing, for example, between decreasing Contrast by 40% or by 20%, that's a good clue that perhaps 30& is the correct answer. So you can open the Format Picture dialog box and make those more precise adjustments to your image. In Word 2010's Picture Editing features, Sharpen and Soften, Brightness and Contrast help you create great illustrations for your documents, even when the photos and images that you're working with are far from perfect.