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Now let's go ahead and look at some preference settings that are going to help us work throughout this tool. I am going to come up here to the Edit menu and then we are going down to Preferences. Now if you are using a Mac, you would go underneath the Microsoft Expression Media tab and select Preferences from that menu.

So what we are going to do, we are going to go under the Preferences here and we are just going to select General, first of all, and in here there are a couple of things that we need to pay attention to, for instance, right here at the top, we want to make sure that we have Auto Save turned on. That way we have an automatic kind of back up system working for us, as we work throughout this tool.

I am going to go ahead and have Auto-save changes, set to every 5 minutes, if you want it more frequent, you can certainly do so, that's going to slow down performance a little bit. But 5 minutes seems to be a decent interval for me, so I am going to keep it there. Now if you didn't want it to do it that often, you could enter in any value you wanted to, 10-15 minutes, anything like that but I am going to keep mine at 5. And the other thing that I want to look at down here, are the Dimensions, and the Resolution.

Now in Dimensions, it's automatically set to Pixels and I recommend setting this to Pixels because Pixels are the universal unit of measurement when you are talking about images and that's just going to help everyone understand and use a universal unit instead of centimeters versus inches and things like that, so it's really going to help kind of make things even across the board for everyone using this.

Now Resolution, we also want to make sure that we have this at Pixels/Inch, that's another standardized unit of measurement especially when you are talking about print media. So we want to keep that there so that everybody kind of knows exactly what you are talking about, when you are working with these files. Now, of course, if you are an International user and you are not using our standards of measurement here in the States, you can go ahead and switch this to Pixels/Centimeters which is what they use for the different types of measurements on images. So if that's your choice, go ahead and change that as well.

I am going to leave this at Pixels/Inch for now and the last thing I will take a look at here is the dates. Now by default it's set to Short. I actually prefer working with the Long dates; it just gives you a little bit more of a detail look at what the date is on a certain file. But for the purposes of demonstration and for screen constraints, I am going to leave this on Short. So if you are working on a computer that might have a smaller work area, you might want to switch that back to Short, just so you have a little bit more space to work with and you can maximize that screen real estate while working inside of this tool.

I am going to go ahead now and click OK to commit to those changes and now we are going to go back to the Preferences menu again, we are going to go to Edit, Preferences and this time we are going to choose Media Rendering. Now inside of Media Rendering, I am going to click on the Raw tab and at the top you have this Rendering option available to you, that says Use embedded preview if available. What that means is, is that Expression Media is just going to take the embedded raw preview of the file, that preview that came straight off your camera and use that as the preview for that file, inside of Expression Media.

Now I am not going to choose to do that because I think I get a better preview with what media generates for me, here inside of the interface. So I am going to go ahead and turn that off but if you want to you can use that, it's certainly quicker to use the embedded preview and it's really not that big of a difference. It really doesn't affect the image that much but it just going to give you more detail to look at and it's just an overall better way to do your files if you let media render this for you.

The other thing we can take a look at here is the Photo C

Now let's go ahead and look at some preference settings that are going to help us work throughout this tool. I am going to come up here to the Edit menu and then we are going down to Preferences. Now if you are using a Mac, you would go underneath... click to read more