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

Retouching and Color-Correcting your photos

iPhoto provides you with tools to improve the color, and fix blemishes, in your photos. These tools are no replacement for a talented artist using state of the art graphics software, but it is a pleasant surprise to see that they can make a noticable difference to some of your photos.

Enhance is the easiest to use. You simply locate the pic you want to try to improve, click the Edit tab, then click the Enhance button. It's located at the bottom of the screen, slightlly to the left of center.

It may take a few seconds, but iPhoto will analyze the color, brightness and contrast of your photo and automatically change the settings. If you're not happy with the changes, just select Undo from the Edit menu. No harm done. But often iPhoto will make a nice improvement to the colors and sharpness of you pic.

Retouch requires a little more effort on your part, but when it works it can seem like magic.

Retouch is intended for photos that have very small blemishes, like scratches in old photos that you've digitized, or the occasional freckle that must go.

Click on the photo you want to retouch and click the Edit tab. Next click the Retouch icon at the bottom of the iPhoto window. Now use the mouse to "rub" the cursor around on top of the blemish. After awhile it will magically seem to disappear.

What iPhoto does is replace the blemish with the color and texture that surrounds the area you are rubbing.

You can check your progress by holding down the Control key, which will cause the picture to change back to before you did the retouch. Let go of Control and your retouching returns.

If, after trying to retouch the photo, you are not satisfied with the result, you can always return to the original image by selecting Revert to Original from the File menu.

Use caution though, because Revert to Original will undo ALL edits that you have ever made to this picture, including cropping, rotating, enhancing and retouching.

Copyright 2003 by Jack Hodgson userguides@da4.com

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