Section 8.2. Advanced Fine-Tuning

8.2. Advanced Fine-Tuning

iPhoto 5 introduces a new floating panel for power users who used to go galloping off to Photoshop every time they needed greater control over photo editing. It includes sliders for these parameters:

• Brightness/Contrast . These sliders can tone down bright, overexposed images or lighten up those that look too dark and shadowy. While the Enhance button takes an all-or-nothing approach to fixing a photo, the Brightness and Contrast controls let you make tiny adjustments to the settings.

• Saturation, Temperature, Tint . These sliders affect the overall color of a picture: its vividness, warmth, and color cast.

• Sharpness . There's no rescuing a completely out-of-focus shot. But this slider can take a photo a few percentage points closer to sharp, orin situations where a traditional photographer might smear a little Vaseline on the lensblur the picture softly to hide your subject's wrinkles and flaws.

• Straighten . Here's a really fun new control. In one quick twitch of the mouse, you can rotate a crooked shot slightly so that it appears square with the horizon.

• Exposure . Like magic, this slider lets you fix most over- and underexposed shots, allowing you to crank up the flash or bring details out of shadow.

• Levels . Using these sophisticated controls, you can compress or expand the lights and darks across a photo's spectruma function that will make a lot more sense when you try it.

For anything beyond these touch-up tasks , you need to manipulate your photos in a more powerful editing programwhich you can easily do within iPhoto, as explained later in this chapter.