Enhancing Photos

Traditional photo processors learned long ago that fiddling with brightness and contrast and messing with the colors could turn a plebeian picture into a luminescent photo. iPhoto aims to help you do the same for your photos with its one-click Enhance tool.

To enhance a photo:

1.	In edit mode, click the Enhance button. iPhoto adjusts several aspects of your photo, including color levels, color saturation, and brightness and contrast.
2.	Press and release to toggle between the "before" (Figure 4.23) and "after" (Figure 4.24) views of your photo. Figure 4.23. The original photo. It's too dark.
3.	If you like what Enhance has done to your photo, continue working. If not, choose Undo Enhance Photo () from the Edit menu.

Figure 4.24. The photo after clicking Enhance. It's better, but now too light and somewhat blown out.

Tips

• Don't assume Enhance will always improve your photo. It's worth trying, but only you can decide if its results are better or worse than the original.

• If the photo is way too dark or way too bright, Enhance isn't likely to work as well as using the Adjust tools manually (Figure 4.25).

  Figure 4.25. The photo after I fixed it manually using the Adjust controls, lightening the exposure, lowering the white point, and increasing the temperature.

  

• Enhance seems to key off the main color in the image when tweaking color saturation, which can lead to unwanted effects.

• The order in which you perform edits can make a difference. For instance, if you plan to crop a photo, try Enhance before you crop, and if you don't like the results, undo the enhance, crop, and try Enhance again to see if you get different results.