Removing Black Borders

Photo Story can remove black borders from your pictures by automatically cropping them. When you import pictures for your story, Photo Story checks all the pictures for a 4:3 aspect ratio, which is the relation of the width to the height of the picture. If any pictures do not have a 4:3 aspect ratio, Photo Story displays the Remove black borders button on the Import and arrange your pictures page.

Click the Remove black borders button to view the pictures with the black borders removed. You can choose whether to use the automatically cropped picture with the black borders removed, manually crop the picture, or use the picture with black borders. You can also choose to use all of the automatically cropped pictures without previewing them.

You can also manually crop any picture in your story after closing the Removing Black Borders dialog box. For more information about manually cropping your pictures, see Cropping your pictures.

To remove black borders and automatically crop your pictures

• On the Import and arrange your pictures page, click Remove black borders.

• In the Removing Black Borders dialog box, review the pictures in the Before and After boxes.

• Do one of the following:

  If you want to use the automatically cropped picture shown in the After box in your story, click Yes.
  If you want to crop the picture differently, in the Before box, drag a handle of the rectangle to the area of the picture that you want to appear and then click Yes.
  If you do not want to use the cropped picture shown in the After box and you want to move to the next picture in your story, click No.
   

• Repeat step 3 for each picture that appears, or click Yes to All to use the automatically cropped pictures without previewing them.

Notes

If changing the orientation of pictures is required, you should rotate the pictures before clicking the Remove black borders button . Removing black borders does not affect the original picture that is stored on your computer, a network folder, or the Internet. You can make additional edits to the pictures after removing black borders. You can save a project for your story at any time while working on the story by clicking the Save Project button. In the Save As dialog box, type a name for the project. You must save a project for your story to be able to edit it later. Projects created by using Photo Story 3 for Windows must use a .wp3 file name extension. Otherwise, Photo Story will not be able to open the file. By default, the project for your story is saved in your My Videos folder.