Christopher Breen Senior Editor, Macworld
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area.
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Heavens, such a lot we’ve learned about iPhoto. You know your way around the interface, you’re up to speed on importing your images, you grok Photo Stream, and you can edit your images so they have more pow! and less patooey! In this lesson we turn to organizing and packaging your images.
The art of albums
As you know, iPhoto automatically organizes your images into events. But the application provides plenty of other avenues for image organization. The main thoroughfare in this regard is albums.
Making books, cards, and calendars from your images
Images are meant to be shared. And while the digerati point us toward electronic means, there’s something pretty wonderful about the printed picture. Apple understands this idea, and demonstrates that awareness by providing the tools necessary to create printed books, cards, and calendars.
The general idea is this: First, you create an album that contains the images you’d like to appear in one of these projects. Next, you select images, click the Create button, and choose the kind of project you want to make. Let’s see how this arrangement works with each type of project.
Card
You can create photo cards with iPhoto, too. Choose Card from the Create menu, and you see an interface similar to the one that appears when you’re creating a book. In this case you can choose from three styles of cards: Letterpress, Folded, and Flat. Letterpress cards are … well, let’s have Apple explain the idea in its most glowing terms.
Each letterpress card is made from premium paper and produced using a centuries-old printing method that presses a design into the card for a unique look and texture. Then the card is digitally processed with your photos and text.
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Christopher Breen Senior Editor, Macworld
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area.
More by Christopher Breen
We’ve covered the anatomy of the iPhoto interface, the ways and means of importing and viewing images, and the mechanics of iCloud’s Photo Stream feature. This is all important information, but I know that many of you have suffered through these lessons with this single thought: “Let’s cut to the chase, already. Show me how to edit my pictures!”
I hear and obey.
Before I dig in, allow me to preface the following with this: I am a photo dabbler. As such, I’ll explain what I can from the perspective of such a dabbler. There are far more powerful applications you can use to edit your images and more interesting (and, in some cases, convoluted) ways to adjust them. Consider the following the first steps in image editing. I’ll leave it to the pros to offer more-advanced techniques and tools.
The Effects tab
The Effects tab holds controls for making quick adjustments to exposure, contrast, temperature, and saturation. In addition, you can apply a variety of effects to “vintage-ize” your images. The tab’s included elements are:
Lighten and Darken: With each click of these buttons, the image’s exposure setting increases or decreases, respectively, by 0.10 on a scale of +/– 3.0. The setting adjusts only the image’s exposure, not its highlights or shadows.
The Adjust tab
Apple places the Adjust tab at the end of your edit options because many iPhoto users prefer the easier adjustment options found in the Quick Fixes and Effects tabs that precede it. Were they to see the Adjust pane first thing after revealing the Edit area, they might be scared off and immediately click away with a “Holy smokes! That’s too complicated for me!”
I assure you that it’s not. Let’s take a peek, section by section.
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Christopher Breen Senior Editor, Macworld
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area.
More by Christopher Breen
In our long look at iPhoto, we’ve covered the interface basics, along with importing and viewing images. During those two lessons I took pains to do little more than mention Photo Stream as an option for viewing images. I avoided getting into the details, but now it’s time to dive in.
Your photos: Here, there, and everywhere
Photo Stream is a component of Apple’s iCloud service. We can safely classify it as part of iCloud’s syncing services. The general idea is pretty simple. Once you’ve signed up for an iCloud account and configured it properly, you can sync any images on a device associated with your Apple ID with other devices that use that same ID. So, for example, if you’ve taken a picture with your iPhone, that picture can also appear on your iPad, your Apple TV, and (within iPhoto) your Mac. And it will do so without your having to select the image, tap a Share button, and choose to share it. It just happens in the background.
Sharing photo streams
As much fun as it is to share photos with yourself, there’s something to be said for sharing your photos with others (and, in turn, viewing their shared photos). This is all possible with Photo Stream. It works like this.
iPhoto: In iPhoto select an album, event, face, place, or group of selected photos and choose Share > Photo Stream. In the window that appears at the bottom-right of the iPhoto window, click New Photo Stream. A New Shared Photo Stream sheet appears. In the sheet’s To field, enter the email addresses (separated by commas) of others you want to share the photo stream with. Enter a name for the stream in the Name field if you like. If a person you want to share the stream with doesn’t have an Apple device (and that includes a Mac), enable the Public Website option so that they can view your pictures via a Web browser.
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Christopher Breen Senior Editor, Macworld
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area.
More by Christopher Breen
Last week we took a long look at iPhoto’s interface. Now that we’ve got our bearings, it’s time to use the application for something worthwhile. And what could be more worthwhile than adding images to iPhoto’s library and then viewing them? We’ll start with the traditional method of importing images—connecting your iOS device, camera, or storage media to your computer and copying images between the two.
Stringing you along
Apple tries to make pulling images off your digital camera or iOS device as easy as possible. In the best of all worlds, when you string a USB cable between your Mac and your iPhone, iPod touch, iPad, or switched-on camera, iPhoto launches and offers to import images from the device. (I’ll provide the gritty details shortly.) I say “best of all worlds” because, while this almost unfailingly occurs when you use an iOS device, it doesn’t work with all cameras.
Viewing your images
Once the images are in iPhoto, you can perform all the magic you’d expect—viewing, editing, and sharing them. For the moment, let’s concentrate on viewing.
To view an image so that it takes up most of the iPhoto window—or the Mac’s screen if you’ve chosen View > Enter Full Screen (Command-Control-F)—just double-click it. Once it has expanded in this way, you can move between images by using the Mac’s left and right arrow keys, clicking the arrow keys at the top of the window, or (if you’re using a trackpad or Magic Mouse) swiping two fingers to the left or right.
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Christopher Breen Senior Editor, Macworld
Chris has covered technology and media since the latter days of the Reagan Administration. In addition to his journalistic endeavors, he's a professional musician in the San Francisco Bay Area.
More by Christopher Breen
After some 42 lessons, we’ve tackled most of the parts of OS X that are relevant to new Mac users. But, as they say in the late-night-commercial racket, “But wait, there’s more!” And by more, I mean the iLife applications bundled with each new Mac: iPhoto, iMovie, and GarageBand.
These applications, respectively, help you catalog, edit, and share digital images; capture and edit digital videos; and create and edit musical scores, podcasts, and video soundtracks. Although you may not think of yourself as a photographer, filmmaker, or musician, there’s absolutely no shame in being an enthusiastic dabbler. Your Mac and these applications can make that possible. As almost everyone has some variety of digital camera—whether it’s a DSLR (digital single-lens reflex), a point-and-shoot, or a mobile phone—we’ll start our iLife explorations with iPhoto.
The iPhoto interface
The toolbar
Unlike with most other Apple applications, iPhoto’s toolbar sits at the bottom of the window. It bears a feature for searching your library, controls for increasing or decreasing the size of thumbnails and images in the main viewing window, the Slideshow button that I’ve mentioned, and—in most views—Info, Edit, Create, Add To, and Share items. Let’s run through them.
Search: Click the Search button, and a field appears where you can search for images by title, description, date, keyword, or rating.
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