iPhoto 5: The Missing Manual, Fourth Edition

One-Click Fixups: The Enhance Button

The Enhance button provides a simple way to improve the appearance of less-than-perfect digital photos. You click one button to make colors brighter, skin tones warmer, and details sharper. (If you’ve used Photoshop, the Enhance button is a lot like the Auto Levels command.)

But if you want to know exactly what the Enhance button does, well, good luck. Apple guards that information as though it’s a top-secret meatloaf recipe. iPhoto’s online help makes only a nebulous statement about it “improving colors,” but provides no explanation as to how they’re improved.

What’s clear is that the Enhance button analyzes the relative brightness of all the pixels in your photo and attempts to “balance” the image by dialing the brightness or contrast up or down and intensifying dull or grayish-looking color. In addition to this overall adjustment of brightness, contrast, and color, the program makes a particular effort to identify and bring out the subject of the photo. Usually, this approach at least makes pictures look somewhat richer and more vivid.

Figure 6-2. The Enhance command works particularly well on photos that are slightly dark and that lack good contrast, like the original photo on the left. Using iPhoto’s Brightness and Contrast sliders alone might have helped a little, but the Enhance button produces a faster and overall better result, as shown at ...