Macs All-in-One for Dummies®, 2nd Edition

Chapter III.2. Importing, Viewing, and Organizing Photos

In This Chapter

• Understanding digital photography

• Transferring pictures to your Mac

• Capturing pictures

• Finding image-editing programs

More people are taking pictures than ever before with digital cameras and mobile phones. Both gadgets let you capture a picture, see it right away, and then decide whether you want to keep it. Even better, after you capture a picture, you can edit it to make it look better than the subject or scene did in real life. You can even alter a digital image with an image-editing program. You can use iPhoto, which is part of the iLife suite, for image editing, but many other programs are available, and I discuss them briefly here.

Understanding Digital Photography

Instead of using film, digital photography captures images on memory storage devices. Not only does this make storing digital photographs easy on your Mac, you can also make identical copies of your pictures at any time without losing the quality of your images. When using a digital camera or mobile phone equipped with a camera, it's helpful to understand how digital cameras and mobile phones store images so you can transfer them to your Mac.

Megapixels

Digital photographs capture images as a collection of tiny dots called pixels. A single picture consists of hundreds, thousands, or (more commonly) millions of pixels. The greater the number of pixels used to create a picture, the sharper the overall image. To help you understand the capabilities of ...