iPhoto: The Missing Manual

Chapter 5. Editing Your Shots

Rare is the digital photo that doesn’t need a bit of correction. The shot might be too dark or too light, or the colors may have a blue or yellow cast. The focus may also be a little blurry, skin tones might look a little too red, 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 use software to fine-tune your pictures 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.

While iPhoto is no Adobe Photoshop, it’s still a powerful photo editor with an incredible array of easy-to-use tools. In this chapter, you’ll learn how to use each one of those tools to perfect your photos, as well as how to send them over to other programs for more radical surgery.

Note

To perform stunts like removing whole objects from a photo or swapping backgrounds (even heads), you need a way to tell the editing program what portion of the image you want to change, usually by creating a selection, which you can’t do in iPhoto for Mac—the majority of the editing you do here affects the whole photo. However, the iPhoto for iOS app is another story; it includes a set of tools that let you paint changes onto your pictures. See Chapter 14 for the lowdown.

Editing in iPhoto

The good news is that iPhoto is equipped to handle the most common photo-fixing tasks, like rotating, cropping, ...