Using the Adjust Panel

The Adjust panel enables you to modify photos in all sorts of useful ways. Although using the Adjust panel can be a fair amount of effort, it's usually worth the results.

To use the Adjust panel:

1.	Click the Adjust button, or -click the image and choose Adjust from the contextual menu. iPhoto opens the translucent Adjust panel (Figure 4.33). Figure 4.33. Use the sliders in the Adjust panel to modify the brightness and contrast, color levels, sharpness, exposure, and more.
2.	Drag the various sliders until the photo looks the way you want (see the following pages in this chapter for details).

Tips

• There is no "right" way to adjust a given photo other than what looks good to you!

• Click the icons at either end of a slider to nudge the slider in one-point increments.

• Pressing to toggle between the "before" and "after" views shows you the view before you started working with the Adjust panel, not in between the use of each individual slider, so it doesn't help discern the effect of a given slider.

• It's difficult to center a slider, so if you decide you don't like the effect of one, use Undo immediately rather than trying to reset it to the middle manually.

• Click Reset Sliders to reset all the sliders to the middle.

• Click the X button in the upper left of the Adjust panel to close it, but note that there's no need to do so unless you want to avoid the screen clutter.

Color Reproduction

I can't be certain of how the colors in the example photos in the rest of this chapter will reproduce onto paper, so if my comments about what a photo looks like and how I adjusted it seem off, rest assured that I'm describing what I see on my screen! For more details, see "Understanding Color Management" in Appendix A, "Deep Background."