Chapter 17: Work with Digital Photos

How to…

• Import digital photos from your camera

• Organize your photos with iPhoto

• Make slideshows

• Burn photos to CDs or DVDs

When digital photos started becoming popular, camera owners needed programs to organize, edit, and retouch their pictures. Now that digital photography is overtaking traditional photos, these programs are becoming more sophisticated. The gold standard for working with digital images is Adobe Photoshop, which is one of the most powerful commercial applications for working with photos. But Photoshop is beyond the budget of most users, and it only offers functions for editing and retouching photos; most people also want a program to organize their photos, and this is where iPhoto comes in. iPhoto is one of the most comprehensive programs for working with digital photos, and the best thing is that it’s included with Mac OS X.

iPhoto, Apple’s digital picture application, is a complete yet easy-to-use program for organizing and editing digital photos. It imports photos from your digital camera, organizes them in a photo library, and lets you not only create personalized photo albums, but find those photos quickly. You can use it to enhance your photos by cropping, rotating, and retouching them, change their brightness and contrast, and reduce red-eye from flashes. With iPhoto, you can send pictures to friends, set up web-page photo albums (if you have a .Mac account), create and run slideshows, or export those slideshows as QuickTime movie files. The program also lets you burn CDs and DVDs containing your photos.

In this chapter, I’ll tell you how to use iPhoto to do all the things I just mentioned, plus more. You’ll find that digital photography with Mac OS X is a cinch and that iPhoto can handle just about all your needs when it comes to organizing, editing, and sharing your photos.