Datasheet

Chapter 1: Presenting the iPhoto’09 Interface

✓ Faces: No, it’s not about making faces — it’s about recognizing them.

It almost sounds like science fiction, but it’s a wonderful new part of

iPhoto. The software recognizes that one or more faces are in a photo,

outlines them, and asks you to name them. It then finds more photos

that it thinks match the person, and you can confirm or deny the match.

Now you can quickly find all the photos of Grandpa Pete, regardless of

when you took them or where they might be in the Library. Neat, huh?

✓ Places: If your camera puts GPS information into your photos, you can

use the new iPhoto Places feature to keep track of it. And with a little

help from you, iPhoto provides maps that contain pins marking the loca-

tion of each photo. There’s even a Location browser that lets you search

for photos by location. You can also enter location information manually

even if your camera doesn’t. I show you how in Chapter 3. Good stuff.

Editing in iPhoto

Of the many great things to like about iPhoto, to me, its greatest plus is non-

destructive editing. Simply put, the original photo in the iPhoto Library is

never changed. Behind the scenes, iPhoto keeps track of all your edits for

a photo and applies them whenever you want to view, edit, or publish the

photo. Amazing, isn’t it?

When you edit, iPhoto compiles an edit list of all the changes you make to a

photo. Later, when you re-open the photo, the original has all the items in the

edit list applied to it again, to get you back where you left off. You can now

make further edits — or, lo and behold! — revert to the original photo if you

decide you’re going down the wrong path.

And the tools available for editing are impressive, too.

✓ Rotate: Need to turn a photo in 90° increments? This tool is made just

for that.

✓ Crop: Want to enhance the look of a photo? Sometimes, it just requires

removing things that are distracting, and that’s what using the Crop tool

does.

✓ Straighten: Held the camera a little crooked when you took the picture,

did you? No matter — it’s easy to straighten things out by using the

Straighten tool and moving a slider.

✓ Enhance: This is the tool to use to quickly adjust brightness and

contrast.

✓ Red-Eye: You’ll have no more photos of people with ghoulish looks

when you use the Red-Eye tool in iPhoto.

✓ Retouch: You’ll love this very effective blemish-remover tool.