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

Removing Red-Eye

Sometimes when you take pictures with your camera's flash, people's eyes will glow red like they've been possessed by the devil.

This is caused by the bright flash actually making the inside of a person's eyes glow.

Some camera's will automatically compensate for this by having the flash blink a few times before the picture is taken. This makes your subject's eyes adjust, and reduces or eliminates the red.

But sometimes it's just unavoidable, so iPhoto let's you color-correct your photos to remove the scary red eyes.

I strongly recommend that you DO NOT do this kind of editing on the only copy of a photo. Before eliminating the red eye on your photo, Duplicate it, and then work on the copy.

1. Choose the photo that has red-eye by clicking on it.
2. Click the Edit tab beneath the photo.
3. Use your mouse to draw a rectangle around the face that has red eyes.
4. Click the Red-Eye button beneath the photo.
5. After a few seconds the red eyes should disappear.

Smaller is better.

The smaller the rectangle you can draw the better your red-eye corrrection will work.

Drawing the rectangle around too large an area may cause other parts of your photo to change colors in ways you don't like. If this happens, select Undo from the Edit menu at the top of the screen, and try again.

Redraw the rectangle more carefully this time and click Red-Eye again. If necessary, you can even do one eye at a time.

What's the difference?

Whenever you do editing in iPhoto, not just red-eye correction, you can quickly compare the changes you just made with the original, by pressing the Control key -- that's the key in the lower left of your keyboard.

Press Control, see the original, let go, see your changes... press Control, see the changes, let go, see your changes... fun!

Copyright 2003 by Jack Hodgson userguides@da4.com

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