Win­dows 7 Logon Screen — Your Pho­tos Here?

When you have a love of pho­tog­ra­phy, you want to see your best images as much as pos­si­ble. For those, like me, who spend most of their work­ing day in front of a PC or Lap­top you can always set your wall­pa­per to dis­play your favorite image. With Microsoft Win­dows 7, you can even con­fig­ure that image to auto­mat­i­cally change fre­quently, or use images from an inter­net feed.

While this is a big improve­ment over Vista & XP, there are still some tweaks and adjust­ments which in my opin­ion should be built in, and could be done with­out com­pli­cat­ing the over­all user expe­ri­ence, such as the Win­dows Logon Screen, and in the case were you have dual mon­i­tors. Thank­fully, oth­ers have stepped in to fill this gap…

Win­dows Logon Screen

As seen in the image above, I have set my logon screen to use one of my favorite images using Tweaks.Com Logon Screen Changer.

Tweaks.Com Logon Screen Changer

So sim­ple, but for bet­ter look­ing images, ensure that you crop them to the same aspect ratio of your screen, say 1920 x 1080. Oth­er­wise, the image will look dis­torted when the screen is locked.

Dual Mon­i­tor Support

Two main require­ments here:

• Dif­fer­ent images on each screen
• Stretch one image across both screens

Dis­play­Fu­sion from Binary Fortress achieves both of these with ease, and much more besides. It’s a free down­load with a “Pro” option.

Dis­play Fusion — Dual Mon­i­tor Support

Desk­top Collage

Some­times when one photo is not enough, a col­lage is a great alter­na­tive. Google Picasa, which I have men­tioned pre­vi­ously, makes the cre­ation of col­lages very easy. You can see an exam­ple of that in the Dis­play Fusion image above.

Why Is Your Lap­top Screen Blue?

A lit­tle note about the white bal­ance of the photo of my lap­top at the top of this post. The image is bal­anced using an Expodisc for the pre­vail­ing light, but the image on the screen of the lap­top is still extremely blue. Why is this? The secret is in the top right… I am using a Pan­tone Huey with Room Light Cor­rec­tion enabled. It is alter­ing the pro­file, and hence the white bal­ance of the screen for the pre­vail­ing light as well. The two white bal­ance cor­rec­tions together… well, it doesn’t look great! Here is what I see normally:

Will The Real White Bal­ance Please Stand Up?