You stare at your Windows desktop every day. So why not make it your own? With a little know-how, you can make your desktop easier to read, more enjoyable to look at, and more useful. Read on for some tips.
Q: How can I create a desktop background from a personal photograph that I love? I’m using Windows 7.
A: That’s fairly easy, so long as you know the resolution of your monitor and you have a decent image editing program that allows you to crop an image to an exact size specification.
To find the resolution of your monitor, just right-click on your Windows desktop, and select Screen Resolution from the pop-up menu. The resolution will be listed in the resulting dialog box, in the form of 1024×768 — although your numbers may be different. Those numbers represent the number of columns and rows of pixels that make up the image on your screen. Write that number down.
Now it’s time to open your photograph in an image editor to make sure it matches the size of your monitor. If you don’t already have a decent image editor, download and install PhotoScape (http://www.photoscape.org), which is a free and very capable program for performing many simple and advanced alterations to photos. For the purposes of this explanation, we’ll assume you use PhotoScape. To use another application, just substitute the directions provided.
Load your image into PhotoScape, either by opening it from your hard drive or pasting it from the clipboard. Then select the Editor tab, and below the image you opened or pasted you’ll see a “crop” tab. Select that. Now from the Aspect Ratio/Size drop-down on the Crop tab, select Assign Ratio/Size.
In the resulting Crop dialog box, enter the resolution of your monitor in the Width and Height boxes. For example, if your monitor’s…