Section 6.1. Editing in iPhoto

6.1. Editing in iPhoto

You can't paint in additional elements, mask out unwanted backgrounds, or apply 50 different special effects filters in iPhoto, as you can with editing programs like Photoshop and GraphicConverter. Nonetheless, iPhoto is designed to handle basic photo fix-up tasks in three categories: one-click fixes, one-click effects, and advanced fine-tuning. Here's a quick summary; details appear later in the chapter.

6.1.1. One-Click Fixes

iPhoto presents these tools front and center, right at the bottom of the editing window. They're nearly idiot-proof:

• Enhance . With one click, this tool endeavors to make photos look more vibrant by tweaking the brightness and contrast settings and adjusting the saturation to compensate for washed-out or oversaturated colors.

• Cropping . The cropping tool lets you cut away the outer portions of a photo to improve its composition or to make it the right size for a printout or Web page.

• Retouch . This little brush lets you paint out minor imperfections like blemishes, freckles, and scratches.

• Red-Eye . This little filter gets rid of a very common photo glitchthose shining red dots that sometimes appear in a person's eyes as the result of flash photography. Who wants to look like a werewolf if it's not necessary?

6.1.2. One-Click Effects

It's not entirely clear how often you'll use these eight special effects, new in iPhoto 6, but they'll be here when you need them. Among them, you'll find an inexplicable abundance of effects designed to make your photos look old and bleached out (Black & White, Sepia, Fade Color , Antique), and three options for fading out the photo at its corners or edges (Matte, Vignette, Edge Blur).

6.1.3. Advanced Controls

This floating panel is aimed at 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 program.

6.1.4. Using the Editing Tools

All iPhoto editing is performed in a special editing mode, where editing tool icons appear along the bottom (Figure 6-1). You enter Edit mode either by double-clicking a photo's thumbnail (the quick way) or by highlighting the thumbnail and then clicking the Edit icon at the bottom of the screen (the long way).

Figure 6-1. iPhoto's editing tools appear in the toolbar when you open a photo for editing. A >> symbol at the right end of the toolbar (as shown here) means that the window is too narrow to display all the tools. Just drag the window wider to show all tools, or click the double-arrow to access the tools via a pop-up menu.

As you may recall, however, iPhoto offers you several different layouts of this Edit world. First, there's the one where the photo appears right in the iPhoto window. Second, there's the one where the photo opens up in a separate window of its own. Third, there's the new full-screen mode, where the photo fills your entire screen, and elements like the menu bar, Source list, and thumbnails display are temporarily hidden.

A reminder: You specify which arrangement you prefer in the iPhoto Preferences dialog box. Then again, you can decide on an individual basis, too. To do so, Control-click (or right-click) a thumbnail or a photo in its own window; from the shortcut menu, choose "Edit," "Edit in separate window," or "Edit using full screen," depending on your preference.

Review pages 108-110 for details on these different editing modes. But considering how much better the full-screen mode is than any other method, it's worth taking a few moments to learn about its ins and outs.