Skip to Content
iLife '04: The Missing Manual
book

iLife '04: The Missing Manual

by David Pogue
September 2004
Beginner
664 pages
20h 17m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Cropping

iPhoto’s cropping tool is a digital paper cutter. It neatly shaves off unnecessary portions of a photo, leaving behind only the part of the picture you really want.

You’d be surprised at how many photographs can benefit from selective cropping. For example:

  • Eliminate parts of a photo you just don’t want. This is a great way to chop your brother’s ex-girlfriend out of an otherwise perfect family portrait, for example (provided she was standing at the end of the lineup).

  • Improve a photo’s composition. Trimming a photo allows you to adjust where your subject matter appears within the frame of the picture. If you inspect the professionally shot photos in magazines or books, for example, you’ll discover that many pros get more impact from a picture by cropping tightly around the subject, especially in portraits.

  • Get rid of wasted space. Huge expanses of background sky that add nothing to a photo can be eliminated, keeping the focus on your subject.

  • Fit a photo to specific proportions. If you’re going to place your photos in a book layout or turn them into standard size prints (Chapter 10), you may need to adjust their proportions. That’s because there’s a substantial discrepancy between the aspect ratio (length-to-width proportions) of your digital camera’s photos and those of film cameras—a difference that will come back to haunt you if you order prints. The following discussion covers all the details.

How to Crop a Photo

Here are the steps for cropping a photo:

  1. Open the photo ...

Become an O’Reilly member and get unlimited access to this title plus top books and audiobooks from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers, thousands of courses curated by job role, 150+ live events each month,
and much more.

Read now

Unlock full access

More than 5,000 organizations count on O’Reilly

AirBnbBlueOriginElectronic ArtsHomeDepotNasdaqRakutenTata Consultancy Services

QuotationMarkO’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.
Julian F.
Head of Cybersecurity
QuotationMarkI wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.
Addison B.
Field Engineer
QuotationMarkI’ve been on the O’Reilly platform for more than eight years. I use a couple of learning platforms, but I'm on O'Reilly more than anybody else. When you're there, you start learning. I'm never disappointed.
Amir M.
Data Platform Tech Lead
QuotationMarkI'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.
Mark W.
Embedded Software Engineer

You might also like

Using iTunes 10

Using iTunes 10

Nancy Conner
Premiere Pro CC Digital Classroom

Premiere Pro CC Digital Classroom

Jerron Smith, AGI Creative Team

Publisher Resources

ISBN: 0596006942Catalog PageErrata