iPhoto 6: The Missing Manual, 5th 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 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 does include a handful of useful tools. 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 three categories: one-click fixes, one-click effects, and advanced fine-tuning. Here’s a quick summary; details appear later in the chapter.

One-Click Fixes

iPhoto presents these tools front and center, right at the bottom of the editing window. They’re nearly idiot-proof:

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