Section 87. About iPhoto and Digital Photography
87. About iPhoto and Digital PhotographyThe graphics and imaging portion of the iLife suite of applications is iPhoto. Apple has focused on digital photography as the primary reason for home users to get into image processing, and they have designed iPhoto accordinglyacting as an organizer for all the photographs you've ever taken with your digital camera. And that's not where its capabilities end. iPhoto, the digital photographer's best friend.  Digital photography, as anybody who owns a digital camera knows , provides a great many benefits over traditional film photography. Not only do you get to take as many pictures as will fit on your camera's memory card, and delete bad pictures immediately after you take them instead of having to wait until they come back from the developer, but the camera can store all kinds of interesting information about each picture: the date and time when it was taken, the flash and shutter settings, even the model of camera that was used. After the photos have been downloaded to your computer, you can retouch them using your favorite graphics tools, instead of having to rely on the skills of the person at the photo lab. The only thing that digital photography is missing is a way to get the digital photographs onto nice heavy paper so that you can send them to your relatives. That's where iPhoto comes in, providing the "last mile" between your imported digital photos and traditional enjoyment of your photographic efforts. NOTE It's important to understand that iPhoto is not designed to be a general-purpose image organizer and viewer (like ACDSee on Windows); it's specifically intended as a digital photography tool. If you have a lot of collected image files to browse, it's possible to do so in iPhoto, but you might find another application such as ViewIt (http://www.hexcat.com/viewit/) to be more to your liking. iPhoto revolutionizes the process of organizing your photos. You can scroll through them by thumbnails or by name , browse them by "film rolls" (each batch of photos you import from your camera is a "film roll") or by calendar date, assign descriptive names to them, and organize them into "albums" to group them by content or your own artistic pleasure . You can even share your iPhoto albums over your home network so they can be viewed by anyone else in the house with their own copy of iPhoto. When you double-click any photo in iPhoto, the image opens in Edit mode so that you can use iPhoto's built-in retouching tools. These allow you to crop the photo, reduce red-eye, reduce blemishes (the Retouch tool applies a soft blur effect to what you click), automatically sharpen the contrast and color saturation (the Enhance button), or change the color photo to black-and-white or sepia-tone. A floating Adjust palette lets you control all aspects of color manipulation visually and with a high level of control; you can adjust the brightness and contrast, color saturation, temperature (red/green/blue balance), tint, sharpness/ blurriness , and adjust for the camera's exposure settings to lighten or darken without losing color information. You can even straighten photos with a slider that overlays a grid on the photo and rotates the image until it's aligned with the gridperfect for photos you've obtained by scanning old photo prints instead of importing from a digital camera. All these effects are achieved using a visual red/green/blue histogram and levels display, which you can watch update visually as you play with the adjustment sliders. A Reset Sliders button returns the photo to its original settings, so don't be afraid to experiment! TIP If you don't like iPhoto's built-in retouching tools, you can assign a different editing program, such as Adobe Photoshop, to launch when you want to retouch a photo. Assign this third-party application by selecting the Opens photos in option in the iPhoto Preferences window and using the navigation screen that appears to find the retouching application you want to use. KEY TERMS Thumbnail A small version of a picture, useful when you're browsing for the picture you want. Contact sheet A group of thumbnail images gathered together onto a single sheet so that you can see them all at a glance. When you crop, rotate, or edit photos in iPhoto, you aren't actually making any changes to the picture files themselvesiPhoto is merely changing how it displays them to you. If you export or share the photos, iPhoto applies your crops, rotations , and color processing to them in the process of exporting them. This allows you to revert back to the original state of any photo, exactly as it first left your camera, if you want to back out of your changes. This technique is very similar to how iMovie operatesit keeps the original, unedited digital video clips in their pristine form and merely keeps track of pointers to the edits and rendered transitions you make so that you can always revert to the original media. TIP At any time, you can back out of all the changes you've made to a photo or group of photos, by selecting it and then choosing Photos, Revert to Original . When you're satisfied with how your photos look, iPhoto steps up to the plate by giving you a whole bevy of ways you can export or share them. These range from computerized methods for the tech-savvysuch as sending them by email, creating an online photo album on the Web, publishing them to your .Mac account so that others can use them as a slideshow, and burning them onto a CD or DVDto methods that are much more familiar to traditional photographers: creating contact sheets , ordering prints on photographic paper, or creating a hardbound photo book that Apple prints and mails to you as a beautiful keepsake. The sharing methods that iPhoto provides are all available in the Share menu, and (depending on which ones are checked in the Share, Show in Toolbar submenu) shown as icons in the toolbar at the bottom of the iPhoto window. The available sharing methods are listed here:
There are two more options for things you can do with groups of photos: create a printed Book , and display them in a Slideshow . These options create specialized groupings that appear in the Source column for later access when you want to view or tweak them further.
The full range of iPhoto functionality is covered in iLife In a Snap (published by Sams Publishing) or other dedicated books on iLife or iPhoto. The next few tasks look at some of the highlights of iPhoto to get you started using your digital camera to its fullest potential. |
EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 212