iPhoto 5: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition

Chapter 6. Editing Your Shots

Straight from the camera, digital snapshots often need a little bit of help. A photo may be too dark or too light. The colors may be too bluish or too yellowish. The focus may be a little blurry, the camera may have been tilted slightly, or the composition may be somewhat off.

Fortunately, one of the amazing things about digital photographyis that you can finetune images in ways that, in the world of traditional photography, would require a fully equipped darkroom, several bottles of smelly chemicals, and an X-Acto knife.

OK, iPhoto isn’t a full-blown photo-editing program like Adobe Photoshop, but it does include a handful of tools, greatly enhanced in version 5, that you can use to improve your digital photos. This chapter shows you how to use each of the tools in iPhoto’s digital darkroom to spruce up your photos—and how to edit your photos in other programs if more radical image enhancement is needed.

Editing in iPhoto

You can’t paint in additional elements, mask out unwanted backgrounds, or apply 50 different special effects filters in iPhoto, as you can with editing programs like Photoshop and GraphicConverter. Nonetheless, iPhoto is designed to handle basic photo fix-up tasks in two categories: one-click fixes and advanced fine-tuning.

One-Click Fixes

These are the original iPhoto editing tools, the ones that were present in the previous version and are nearly idiot-proof:

• Enhance. With one click, this tool endeavors to make photos look more vibrant ...