PhotoWalkPro

It’s true that most days you can look at my blog and you will see mention of your typical photo editing tools such as Photoshop, Lightroom, Photomatix, and even Aperture, but what about that little program that comes loaded on your Mac? Isn’t it a photo management and editing program? Do I really need to spend $650 just to play with my digital files? The answer is, it all depends. So lets take a look at a program that doesn’t always get a lot of love but probably should, Apple’s iPhoto.

I have to admit that I don’t use iPhoto that often but the other day my son was working on a Scout project that required him to take photos and then present them on his computer. This is when I remembered the perfect tool for my 12 year old and that was the little used iPhoto `08. The one thing you can always count on from Apple is that their software interfaces will always be clean and easy to use and this is no different for iPhoto.

The default workspace is split into two panes, the left is your source list where your imported images, video, slideshows, etc. are organized. The right pane is your viewing area. Here you can look at thumbnails of your collections, images, and slideshows. This is also where you will view your images during editing or build the pages of your books before printing (more on this in a minute).

At the bottom of the viewing area is the Toolbar. This is where you can click on buttons to easily access functions that allow you to edit, organize, review, and share your images. Since these are the main features of iPhoto, let’s take a quick look at each one of them.

When you click on the Edit button, the Adjust dialog box pops up and allows you to make some fairly powerful corrections to your images. For those using Photoshop and Aperture, you would feel right at home at the controls. At top is a histogram along with levels adjustment sliders, there are also adjustments for shadow/highlight, saturation, color temperature, sharpness, and even a neutral point eye-dropper. All of the changes from this group of controls will be global but do a pretty good job of general image correction.

Other controls on the Edit bar allow you to Crop, Straighten, and Rotate your image. While you are in this mode, you can quickly switch over to another image in your collection by clicking its thumbnail at the top of the window or by click in the left/right arrows on the right side of the bar. There are also some special edit tools such as Retouch which is sort of like the Healing Brush in Photoshop, Red-Eye correction, Enhance, which is like an auto-corrections adjustment, and finally Effects.

The effects allow you to add some simple “looks” to your image such as Sepia and B&W as well as a few others. Once you are done making your edits, you may want to do something else with your images so lets look at some of the other tools.

By selecting the image thumbnails that you would like to display to others, you can click on the Slideshow button and create a really nice slideshow that has some great editable options.

From the Options panel, you can select things like; how long you would like each slide to play, what type of transition you want, if you want to use the Ken Burns Effect (you probably will because it just looks cool), what type of screen your slideshow should be optimized for, and even how your music can interact with the slides. Yes, that’s right, you can use music directly from your iTunes collection in your slideshow (Lightroom and Bridge don’t do that!). Personally this is one of two features that I just love about iPhoto. Once you have configured your slideshow, you can play it full screen from your computer or choose to output it to DVD or CD using the Send to iDVD command under the Share menu.

Speaking of sharing, iPhoto comes with a lot of great features for you to share your work with others. You can create great Web Galleries or send your images to iWeb for even more internet integration. *Here is my one and only gripe about the program and that is that unless you have a .Mac account, none of the Web tools will be of any use to you since they are made especially for creation of web content for .Mac accounts. I think this is a shame because there are some incredible looking galleries that I would love to use but I’m not laying out more cash when I already have my own domain. On the plus side, those folks that I know that have .Mac accounts really love them so if you haven’t committed to a web presence yet and are thinking about it, you might want to look into this.

The other features of the sharing tools are Printing and Emailing. The Email function is extremely easy and simple to use, just select your images, click the button, select the size you would like your images to be (it will tell you how large the file size of the total images will be with the size you have selected), and click the Compose button to write the email and send them on their way.

In Printing, you can either print pictures yourself using the easy to follow guide for sizing and output options or you can chose the Order Prints option that will send your images to a Kodak Print service where you can order anything from a wallet size print up to a 20×30, and all for pretty reasonable prices.

All of these features are pretty cool but now let me tell you what I like most in iPhoto – it’s the Books!

That’s right, books made right from your images. Just select all of the images you want included, click the Book button on the toolbar, and a menu opens up that let’s you select the style, size, and type of book that you would like to make. Once you have made your selection, you get to drag your images into the spaces on the blank pages and create some fantastic photo albums.

Ever wonder what to do with all of those family vacation pictures? Why not turn them into a coffee table book complete with your own written narrative. Need to impress a perspective client with your photography? Make a custom printed portfolio book. The possibilities are endless and making the books and playing with the layouts is almost as much fun as actually getting the book in the mail. I have had books printed with this service, both hard and soft cover and I have to tell you that the quality is outstanding and the prices are pretty competitive with all the other services. As I have said, this and the slideshow features are my hands-down favorite tools in iPhoto. Other custom printing options are for Cards (think Holidays) and Calendars, all with numerous choices for style and layout.

The final feature of iPhoto is its ability to keep your images organized. The Library takes all of the images that you have imported and organizes them into Event groupings by the date they were taken. From there you can flag images, group them into Albums, create folders to organize your albums, and so on. It is a fairly logical approach to image and file organization that will assist you in finding those images that you want, long into the future.

So that’s a brief look at iPhoto. It is certainly not going to be used for heavy-duty pixel pushing but its special features and ease of use should at least make you sit up and take notice.

If you are using an older version of iPhoto, you might want to look into upgrading to the 08 version. It’s worth the $70 price tag and you can get it by clicking right here from Amazon. That $70 not only gets you the new iPhoto but also the new versions of iWeb, iMovie, GarageBand and iDVD.

Related posts:

1. Blurb Photo Books Review
2. In Search of…Easy Photo Books that Look Great
3. Apple iPad – Is It A Game Changer?
4. Bridge vs. Lightroom
5. Get a Little Action In With Droplets

This entry was posted on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 12:21 am and is filed under Image Processing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.