iPhoto '09: The Missing Manual

Chapter 5. 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 photography is that you can fine-tune 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’s getting closer in every version. 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 with iPhoto, as you can with editing programs like Photoshop. Nonetheless, iPhoto is well-equipped to handle most basic (and not-so-basic) photo fix-up tasks: rotating, cropping, straightening, fixing red-eye, color correction, special effects (like black and white or sepia tone), and tweaking brightness, contrast, saturation, color tint, exposure, shadows, highlights, and sharpness.

Now, all of iPhoto’s editing tools live on a toolbar at the bottom of the window. But which window? And how do you ...