My Mom's Guide to Using iPhoto 2 A step-by-step guide to the everyday features of iPhoto.

Crop

Even if you are a professional photographer, most any picture you take can be improved by cropping.

Cropping is like taking a pair of scissors to your snapshot, and trimming the uninteresting parts off of one or more of the four edges.

With iPhoto you can electronically crop your pics to focus on the best parts and make them more attractive and interesting.

When taking your digital pictures it's best to try to fill the viewfinder with the subject of your photo. Long shots usually don't come out well in consumer digital pictures. But sometimes it's not possible to get close enough to your subject. Or maybe you had to snap the pic quickly. But with iPhoto you can crop these long-shots to turn them into close-ups.

It's easy to Crop your pictures with iPhoto.

I strongly recommend that you DO NOT do this kind of editing on the only copy of a photo. Before cropping, Duplicate the photo, and then Crop the copy.

1. In the Organize view, choose the photo you want to crop by clicking on it. A blue frame will appear around your choice.
2. Click the Edit tab near the bottom of the screen.
3. Use your mouse to draw a rectangle around the part of the photo that you want keep.

   After first drawing the rectangle, you can fine-tune it by using the mouse to adjust any of the corners of the cropped area, or your can move the entire rectangle by dragging the center of the retangle

4. When you are satisfied with the selected area, click the Crop button to resize your picture.
5. If you are unhappy with the new picture you can select Undo from the Edit menu at the top of your screen.

Constrain

Near the Crop button is a pop-up menu labeled Constrain. This menu lets you select a preset proportion for the shape of your cropping. This is useful if you are cropping your photo in order to display it as your desktop background, or maybe you plan to print it as a snapshot.

Use Constrain by selecting a proportion from the pop-up menu BEFORE drawing the rectangle on your photo. Once you've selected a proportion, iPhoto will only let you draw a certain shaped cropping rectangle.

Try it out.

Copyright 2003 by Jack Hodgson userguides@da4.com

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