iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Chapter 8. Editing Your Shots

You can’t color-correct photos, paint in additional elements, mask out unwanted backgrounds, or apply any special effects filters in iPhoto, as you can with editing programs like Photoshop and GraphicConverter. Nonetheless, iPhoto is designed to handle seven basic photo fix-up tasks:

• Enhance. With one click, this tool endeavors to make photos look more vibrant by tweaking the brightness and contrast settings and adjusting the saturation to compensate for washed-out or oversaturated colors.

• Cropping. The cropping tool lets you cut away the outer portions of a photo to improve its composition or to make it the right size for a printout or Web page.

• Retouch. This little brush lets you paint out minor imperfections like blemishes, freckles, and scratches.

• Brightness/Contrast. These sliders can tone down bright, overexposed images or lighten up those that look too dark and shadowy. While the Enhance button takes an all-or-nothing approach to fixing a photo, the Brightness and Contrast controls let you make tiny adjustments to the settings.

• Red-Eye. This little filter gets rid of one very common photo glitch—those shining red dots that sometimes appear in a person’s eyes as the result of flash photography.

• Black & White. Turns your color photos into moody, black-and-white art shots.

• Sepia. Makes new photos look faded and brownish, for that old-time daguerreotype look. It’s the only new editing tool in iPhoto 4.

For anything beyond these simple touch-up tasks, ...