iPhoto can work with digital images from a variety of sources.

Scanner

With a scanner, you can create digital images from photographs and other hard-copy originals.

Scanners also connect via USB, although some high-end models connect via FireWire. Film scanners are a bit pricier, but can scan negatives and slides and deliver great image quality (page 226). Save your scanned images in JPEG format, and then add them to iPhoto by dragging their icons into the iPhoto window (page 135).

For tips on getting high-quality scans, visit www.scantips.com.

In a digital camera, the image is focused by the lens (A) onto a sensor (B), where tiny, light-sensitive diodes called photosites convert photons into electrons. Those electrical values are converted into digital data and stored by a memory card or other medium (C), from which they can be transferred to a computer or printer.

Internet

Many photofinishers also provide extra-cost Internet delivery options. After processing and scanning your film, they send you an email containing a Web address where you can view and download images. After downloading images, you can drag their icons into iPhoto’s window.

A Short Glossary of Imaging Terms

artifacts. Visible flaws in an image, often as a result of excessive compression or when you try to create a large print from a low-resolution image.

CompactFlash. A removable-memory storage medium commonly used by digital cameras. A CompactFlash card measures 43 by 36 by 3.3 mm. The thicker Type 2 cards are 5.5 mm wide.

compression. The process of making image files use less storage space, usually by removing information that our eyes don’t detect anyway. The most common form of image compression is JPEG.

EXIF. Pronounced ex-if, a standard file format used by virtually all of today’s digital cameras. EXIF files use JPEG compression but also contain details about each image: the date and time it was taken, its resolution, the type of camera used, the exposure settings, and more. iPhoto retrieves and stores EXIF information when you import images. EXIF stands for Exchangeable Image File.

JPEG. Pronounced jay-peg, the most common format for storing digital camera images. Like MP3, JPEG is a lossy compression format: it shrinks files by discarding information that we can’t perceive anyway. And as with MP3, there are varying degrees of JPEG compression; many imaging programs enable you to specify how heavily JPEG images are compressed. Note that a heavily compressed JPEG image can contain artifacts. JPEG stands for Joint Photographic Experts Group.

megapixel. One million pixels.

pixel. Short for picture element, the smallest building block of an image. The number of pixels that a camera or scanner captures determines the resolution of the image.

raw. An image containing the data captured by the camera’s light sensor, with no additional in-camera image processing applied (see page 172).

resolution 1. The size of an image, expressed in pixels. For example, an image whose resolution is 640 by 480 contains 480 vertical rows of pixels, each containing 640 pixels from left to right. 2. A measure of the capabilities of a digital camera or scanner.

SmartMedia. A commonly used design for removable-memory storage cards.

Start by clicking the Last Import item in the Library area. This is the fastest way to access the most recent set of shots.

Selective viewing. Adjust the size of the photo thumbnails to your liking: jump down to the lower-right corner and use the size slider.

To magnify a photo so that it fills the iPhoto window, double-click its thumbnail, or select the photo and press the spacebar. Tip: Maximize your viewing area: choose Window > Zoom or click the green zoom button in the upper-left corner.

To return to thumbnails, click the mouse or press the Esc key.

Full-screen variation. To fill the entire screen with a photo, click . To return to the thumbnails, double-click the mouse or press Esc. (For more about full-screen view, see page 168.)

Instant slide show. To screen your photos with more style, display a slide show. Hold down the Option key on your keyboard and click . To stop the slide show, click the mouse or press Esc.

(Pressing the Option key bypasses a step: choosing a soundtrack song. When you want to take time for that extra step, don’t press Option. See page 179 for soundtrack details, and pages 178–183 to learn all about slide shows.)

Here’s the photo-importing technique I use most often.

Laptop Media Readers. You can buy a media reader that plugs into the PC Card slot of a PowerBook. If you’re traveling with a PowerBook, a PC Card-based reader is a compact alternative to a FireWire or USB reader.

Media readers are also available for the ExpressCard/34 slot provided by the MacBook Pro laptops, too. Unfortunately, the ExpressCard/34 slot is too small to accommodate a Compact Flash card, requiring you to use an awkward adaptor. If you use Compact Flash cards and own a MacBook Pro, you’re probably better off with an external FireWire or USB 2.0 reader. Look at it this way: at least your external modem will have company in your briefcase.

To import an entire folder full of images, drag the folder to the Photos item or into the photo area.

iPhoto gives the new event the same name as the folder from which its images came. You can rename the event using the techniques described on page 138.

To import only some images, select their icons and then drag them to the Photos item or into the iPhoto window.

A friend has emailed some photos to you, and you want to add them to your iPhoto library. If you’re using Mail, the email program included with Mac OS X, simply drag the photos from the email message into the iPhoto window. If the email message contains several photos, Shift-click on each one to select them all before dragging.

If you use Microsoft Entourage, your job is a bit more difficult. First, save the photos on your Mac’s desktop. Next, drag them into the iPhoto window as shown at left. Finally, delete the photos from your desktop.

To save a photo that’s on a Web page, just drag the photo from your Web browser into the iPhoto window. In Apple’s Safari browser, you can also Control-click on a photo and choose Add Image to iPhoto Library from the shortcut menu.

iPhoto can also import images saved on a Kodak PhotoCD or Picture CD. (PhotoCD is an older format that you aren’t likely to see too often. Picture CD is a newer format that most photo finishers use.)

Picture CD. Choose Import to Library from iPhoto’s File menu, locate the Picture CD, and then locate and double-click the folder named Pictures. Finally, click the Import button. Or, use the Finder to open the Pictures folder on the CD and then drag images into iPhoto’s window.

PhotoCD. Simply insert the PhotoCD in your Mac’s optical drive. iPhoto launches and displays its Import panel. Type a name and description for the photos, then import some or all of the photos, as described on the previous pages.

You wisely took my page 129 advice and told iPhoto to not delete photos from your camera after an import (see page 129). But you forgot to erase the card before shooting another two-dozen shots.

No problem. When you connect your camera and switch to iPhoto’s Import panel, check the box labeled Hide Photos Already Imported. Photos you’ve already imported will disappear from the Import panel, making it easy to import some or all of the new shots.

Even if you forget to check the aforementioned box, iPhoto has you covered. If you try to import a photo that already exists in your library, iPhoto asks if you really want to import the duplicate.

As I mentioned on page 128, iPhoto stores imported shots as events. When you import photos from a camera, iPhoto automatically splits them into events (unless you uncheck the Autosplit Events After Importing box in the Import pane).

Normally, iPhoto considers one day’s worth of photos to represent an event. For example, if you import some shots taken over a weekend, you’ll have two events: Saturday’s photos and Sunday’s.

Using the Preferences command, you can change the interval of time iPhoto uses when splitting photos into events. Choose iPhoto > Preferences, then click Events. You have three additional choices.

One event per day. iPhoto creates a new event for each 24-hour period. Take a week’s vacation, import all your shots, and you’ll have seven events.

This is an ideal option for vacations and similar getaways.

Two-hour gaps. iPhoto creates a new event every two hours. Say you do a day’s worth of shooting: a sunrise hike at 6:00 a.m., a brunch with friends at 10:00 a.m., and a party at night. Import the shots, and iPhoto will create three events.

When you shoot a lot of shots throughout a day, this option can help corral them into manageable (and related) chunks. Surviving the busy day is your problem.

Eight-hour gaps. iPhoto creates a new event every eight hours. In the busy-day example above, you’d end up with two events: the first containing the hike and brunch photos, and the second containing the party pix.

Before you import a set of photos, think about what kind of time intervals the photos represent, then consider tweaking the interval preference to match.

Or don’t bother. You’re never locked into the way iPhoto divvies up your life. You can move photos between events in whatever way you like, and you can have iPhoto autosplit events for you after you’ve imported photos. Pages 138–139 have all the details.

When you import photos from the Finder—by dragging their icons into iPhoto, as described on the previous page—iPhoto does not split the photos into events. That makes sense when you think about it: if you’re importing a dozen scanned images of photos that are decades old, how would iPhoto know how to divvy them up?

But in some circumstances, you might want iPhoto to automatically split photos imported from the Finder. For example, maybe you’re about to import a CD’s worth of digital photos that a friend burned for you.

For times like these, return to the Events portion of the Preferences dialog box, and check the box labeled Imported Items From Finder.

Since the dawn of time—well, since the dawn of version 1.0—iPhoto has always stored images in the iPhoto Library. Generally, that’s exactly what you want: when you copy photos from a camera or memory card, you want them stashed safely in your iPhoto Library.

But under some circumstances, iPhoto’s “do things my way” approach to organization can work against you. When you add photos that are already stored on your hard drive—for example, images that you’ve scanned and saved—iPhoto makes additional copies in the iPhoto Library.

After adding photos to your Library that are already on your hard drive, you need to delete the originals. That isn’t exactly a sweat-breaking chore, but it does take time. And you might prefer to stick with your existing filing system.

You have the option to not copy image files to the iPhoto Library. If you have a large library of meticulously filed scanned images on your hard drive, you might want to take advantage of this option. You won’t have duplicate photos to delete, and you won’t have to change the filing system you’ve developed for your scanned images.

To activate this option, choose iPhoto > Preferences, click the Advanced button, and then uncheck the box labeled Copy Items to the iPhoto Library.

From now on, when you add items from your hard drive to your iPhoto library, iPhoto simply creates aliases for each item. (In Mac OS parlance, an alias is a small file that simply points to an existing file.) If you edit an image, iPhoto stores the edited version in your iPhoto Library.

And by the way, unchecking this option does not change how iPhoto stores photos that you’re importing from a camera or media reader. Photos that you import from a location other than a hard drive are always stored in your iPhoto Library.

Here are the basic techniques you’ll use when working with events.

Skimming thumbnails. Pass your mouse pointer over the event without clicking. Tip: You can also skim by combining the mouse and keyboard: point to an event, then press the left- or right-arrow keys. I like to use this technique when an event has a lot of photos in it, or when I’ve used the size slider to make the event thumbnails small.

When you’re viewing an event’s photos, you can jump to the previous or next event by clicking the arrows in the upper-right corner of the iPhoto window.

Setting the key photo. Each event is represented by one photo, called the key photo or the poster photo. You can change the key photo to one that best represents the event. Skim across the event, and when you see the photo that you want to be the new key photo, press the spacebar. You can also Control-click on the photo and choose Make Key Photo from the shortcut menu. (This latter technique also works in Photos view.)

Detail view. Sometimes, you need to view the photos of more than one event at once. Maybe you’re organizing some recent imports and you want to work on multiple events at the same time—to move some photos from one event to another, for example.

To open more than one event, select each event (click it once), then double-click one of the selected events or press Return. iPhoto opens each selected event.

To return to Events view, click All Events or press Esc.

Separate event window. You can also open an event in its own window: select the event, then choose Events > Open Event in Separate Window. A new window opens containing the event’s photos.

The separate window is a great way to focus in on the shots in one event while retaining quick access to the rest of your library. The window provides its own size slider for adjusting the size of photo thumbnails. You can even zoom the separate window to fill your screen or a second display, if your Mac has one: choose Window > Zoom.

The following pages describe more uses for the separate event window.

Another Way to Look: Photos View

The Events view is so efficient and versatile that you’ll probably spend most of your time there. But there’s another option: Photos view. To use it, click the Photos item in the Library area.

The Photos view can be handy for moving photos between events and for combining and splitting events, though as the following pages describe, you can do all of these tasks in Events view, too.

A lot of photos fall into that middle ground between bad and beautiful: not awful enough to trash, not good enough to look at all the time. iPhoto lets you hide those mediocre shots to tidy up an event, but bring them back whenever you like.

Hiding photos is also a good strategy when you’ve taken several nearly identical shots—some portraits, each with a different smile. Pick the best, hide the rest.

To hide a photo, select it and click the Hide button (or press -L). The photo vanishes, and adjacent photos snuggle in to fill the void.

Bringing them back. When you’re viewing an event, iPhoto lets you know if any of its photos are hidden.

To hide the photos again, click the message again. To unhide a photo, select it and click Unhide or press -L.

You can split one event into two. Say you have an event containing a hundred shots from an afternoon bike ride and an evening dinner. You may prefer to split the event into two separate, more manageable ones.

To split an event, open it to display its thumbnails. Then, select the photos you want to split off (the dinner shots, for example), and click the Split button. Finally, name the new event.

Merging events. You can also combine two or more events into one. Maybe you fired off some shots at a party, imported them so everyone could see, then took some more. You want all the party shots to be in one event. Easy: drag one event to the other.

You can also merge more than two events: Shift-click or -click on each event, then drag them to another event. Or select all the events, then click the Merge button.

Sometimes, your life as an event planner requires you to move individual photos between events. Maybe you want to fine-tune the way iPhoto autosplit an event. Or maybe a travel companion emailed you some shots that she took, and you want to add a few of them to your vacation event.

There are moving plans aplenty.

Dragging. Open the events in detail view: select them and double-click one of them (page 137). Now drag thumbnails from one event to another. To give yourself more dragging room, zoom the iPhoto window (Window > Zoom) and make the thumbnails smaller (drag the size slider).

The separate event window, described on page 137, can be handy when dragging photos between events, especially if the events aren’t near each other in your library.

Cut and paste. Select the photos you want to move, and choose Edit > Cut. Select the event where you want them, then choose Edit > Paste. When dragging seems like too much work—too many photos, too many events—this is an efficient alternative.

Flagging. This can be the most powerful way to move photos, and it’s described at right.

You can create a new, empty event and then add photos to it. Be sure no events are selected, then choose Events > Create Event.

(You can also use Create Event to merge events or split photos off into their own event: Select the events or individual photos, then choose Create Event.)

Flagging is like attaching a sticky note to a photo. Trying to decide which shots to add to a book? Flag the best candidates, and you can return to them in a flash.

To flag a photo, select it and click the Flag button or press -period. A flag badge appears on the photo’s thumbnail.

You can flag multiple photos at once–select them first, then click Flag–and you can flag as many shots as you like. To quickly see the shots you’ve flagged, click the flagged item in the Recent area of the Library list.

You’ve flagged some shots. Then what?

Move them to an existing event. After flagging the shots, return to Events view. Select the event where you want to move the photos, then choose Events > Add Flagged Photos to Selected Event. If you need to move some shots that are scattered throughout your library, this is the best way to do it.

Move them to a new event. To move flagged photos into a new event of their own, choose Events > Create Event From Flagged Photos. Keep in mind, though, that iPhoto will move those photos from their original events.

Work with them. Select the Flagged item in the Library area. The flagged shots lurk there, ready to be edited, shared—whatever you like.

Lower the flags. Done working with some flagged photos? Here’s the easiest way to unflag them all: click the little number next to the Flagged item in the Library area.

Normally, when you double-click an event thumbnail, you see the event’s photos. With this trick, you can double-click to magnify whichever photo is visible under the mouse pointer. Skim across an event, see a photo you want to magnify, and double click.

Choose Preferences > iPhoto, click Events, then choose the Magnifies Photo option.

You can also tweak iPhoto so that a double click opens a photo in edit view (page 152)—the way earlier iPhoto versions worked. Choose iPhoto > Preferences, click General, and choose the Edits Photo option.

When you want to give photos titles and descriptions, turn to the Information pane. To display the Information pane, click the button.

On a roll. Want to quickly title (or describe) one photo after another? Press -] after typing a title or description, and iPhoto selects the next photo and highlights its title or description field so you can immediately begin typing. To move to the previous photo, press -[. And to keep your hands on the keyboard, press Tab and Shift-Tab to jump from one field to the next in the Information pane.

Check your spelling. Want to check the spelling of your titles and descriptions? Select the text you want to proofread, then choose Edit > Spelling > Check Spelling. Or select the text you want to proofread and press -;.

Many at once. To change information for many photos at once, select them and choose Photos > Batch Change (see the opposite page). If you’re like me and are often too lazy to assign titles and descriptions to individual photos, this can be a good compromise: assign a phrase to a set of related photos, and you can search for that phrase later.

The Information pane is a great place to view and change all kinds of details: a photo’s title, its description, the date and time it was taken, and more.

But there’s another way to edit photo information, and it’s often more convenient than opening the Information pane. Simply click the title beneath a photo’s thumbnail, and start typing:

(If you don’t see titles beneath your photo thumbnails, choose View > Titles.)

The keyboard-shortcut tips described at lower left work here, too: type a title, and press -] to jump directly to the title field of the next photo. Or move the next and previous photo by pressing Tab and Shift-Tab.

As the following pages describe, you can also assign keywords and ratings by working directly beneath photo thumbnails. You can’t, however, type a description or change a photo’s date or time. For those tasks, turn to the Information pane.

Time is important. The date stored along with a photo determines how iPhoto sorts the photo. Accurate dates also simplify searching and organizing your library.

All digital cameras store date and time information along with the image (see the sidebar on page 145). But what if your camera’s clock is off? Maybe you forgot to adjust its time zone when you flew to Hawaii.

Or maybe you’ve scanned some old family photos and you want their dates to reflect when they were taken, not scanned. That Aunt Mary photo is from 1960, not 2008.

Time travel is easy in iPhoto. You can edit the date of an event, a selection of images, or just one photo. The steps differ depending on what you want to change.

An event. Select the event, choose Photos > Adjust Date & Time.

More than one photo. Select the photos, and choose Photos > Batch Change.

Just one photo. Select the photo, open the Information panel, and type new dates and times.

Tip

Of all these techniques, only one has a keyboard shortcut: Batch Change (-Shift-B). If you’re a keyboard jockey, you might find it’s actually the fastest way to change the date of just one photo—a batch of one.

Displaying keywords. To have iPhoto display keywords beneath photo thumbnails, choose View > Keywords.

Creating a keyword directly. When viewing keywords beneath thumbnails, you can create a new keyword by simply typing it beneath a photo thumbnail. Point beneath the thumbnail until the text add keywords appears.

You have a few ways to assign keywords.

The keywords window. Choose Window > Show Keywords. Select the photo(s), then click one or more keywords.

The keyboard. If you assigned a keyboard shortcut to the keyword, reap your reward now. Select the photo(s), and tap the shortcut key.

If you have to assign various keywords to a set of photos, combine shortcut keys with the arrow keys. Select a photo, tap a key, tap an arrow key to move to a new photo, tap a key. There’s never been a faster way to assign keywords in iPhoto.

Directly beneath the thumbnail. See the tip on the opposite page, at lower left.

No matter what kind of search you perform, keep this in mind: iPhoto searches whatever item you’ve selected in the Library list. If you want to search your entire library, be sure to click Events or Photos. To search the last year’s worth of photos, click Last 12 Months. To search a specific album, click the album. You get it.

Searching by rating. From the Search box pop-up menu, choose Rating. Click the dots to specify a minimum number of stars a photo must have.

Searching by keyword. From the Search box pop-up menu, choose Keyword, then click one or more keywords. (For tips on keyword searching, see the opposite page.)

Searching by date. From the Search box popup menu, choose Date, then specify a date or range of dates (see the opposite page).

Even if you never give a photo a title, description, or keywords, you can always search by date, since your camera records the date and time when you take a photo.

And remember, you can use iPhoto to adjust the dates of your photos to make date searches as accurate as possible (page 141).

The Big Picture

Narrow Your View

Advanced Keyword Searches

When you click multiple keywords, iPhoto puts an and between each one: “find all photos with the keywords Sophie and Beach.”

Sometimes, and isn’t what you want.

Excluding a keyword. To exclude a keyword, press Option while clicking it. Say you want to find all Sophie photos that weren’t taken at the beach. Click the Beach keyword, then Option-click the Beach keyword. Notice the Search box: it reads not Beach and Sophie.

Either/or. To search for photos with one keyword or another, press Shift while clicking keywords. For example, to find all photos of the baby or the dog, Shift-click the Baby and Dog keywords.

Combinations thereof. By combining the Shift-click and Option-click variations, you can conduct some fairly complex searches, though it can be confusing to figure out which key sequences to use. For very specific searches, smart albums are easier.

You don’t have to create an album in order to share photos: you can create slide shows, books, calendars, and Web pages by simply selecting photos in your library, and then using the appropriate button or command.

This has always been true in iPhoto, but it’s more applicable than ever in iPhoto ’08. By hiding less-than-perfect photos (page 138), you can “edit” an event to contain only those photos you want to use in a project.

Still, when you’re about to create a photo project of some kind, it’s better to create an album first. Albums give you the ability to change the sequence of photos. You can resequence photos while creating slide shows, books, and the like, but creating these items is easier when you start with the photos that are in roughly the final order that you plan to use.

You can create an album and add images to it in one step. Select one or more images and choose File > New Album. In the dialog box that appears, check the box labeled Use Selected Items in New Album. Or select some photos, then choose File > New Album from Selection (Shift--N).

You can also drag the images into a blank spot of the Library area. When you use this technique, iPhoto gives the new album a generic name, such as untitled album. To rename the album, double-click its name and type a new name.

If you have photos on a storage device—your hard drive, a Picture CD, or a digital camera’s memory card—you can import them into iPhoto and create an album in one fell swoop.

Simply drag the photos from the Finder into a blank area of the Library list. iPhoto imports the photos, storing them in their own event. iPhoto also creates an album and adds the photos to it.

Albums and flagging. iPhoto’s flagging feature (page 138) teams up nicely with albums. Want to create an album of shots that are scattered throughout your library? Flag the shots, then select the Flagged item in your Library list. Next, choose Edit > Select All, then choose File > New Album from Selection.

You’ve created an album containing the best photos of a friend’s wedding. The photos are from various events; indeed, some were emailed to you from other attendees.

You’d prefer that the photos were in an event of their own. Easy. Select the album, choose Edit > Select All, then choose Events > Create Event. iPhoto creates a new event, and moves the photos in the album into the event. Note, however, that the photos are removed from the events where they originated.

You can have iPhoto display the number of photos in each album next to each album’s name. In the Preferences dialog box, click General, then check the Show Item Counts box.

You have a photo that appears in multiple albums, but you want to edit its appearance in just one album, leaving the original version unchanged in other albums. Time for the Duplicate command: select the photo and choose Duplicate from the Photos menu (-D). Now edit the duplicate.

Duplicating an album. There may be times when you’ll want several versions of an album. For example, you might have one version with photos sequenced for a slide show and another version with photos organized for a book. Or you might simply want to experiment with several different photo arrangements until you find the one you like best.

iPhoto makes this kind of experimentation easy. Simply duplicate an album by selecting the album and choosing Duplicate from the Photos menu. iPhoto makes a duplicate of the album, which you can rename and experiment with.

You can make as many duplicates of an album as you like. You can even duplicate a smart album—perhaps as a prelude to experimenting with different search criteria. Don’t worry about devouring disk space. Albums don’t include your actual photos; they simply contain “pointers” to the photos in your library.

Another good reason to create albums surfaces elsewhere in iLife: iMovie, iDVD, GarageBand, and iWeb all display iPhoto albums in their photo media browsers.

Have a batch of photos you want to use in another iLife program? Rather than searching through your library using those programs’ media browsers, first stash the photos in an album. Then, choose that album in the other iLife program.

iPhoto album support is also built into other programs, including Mac OS X’s screen saver and Apple’s iWork programs. And you can choose to sync only certain albums to a photo-capable iPod (page 210) or Apple TV (page 214).

Organize Your Library with Folders

As you create albums, slide shows, and books, your Library list may become cluttered. iPhoto helps a bit by providing separate areas for albums, slide shows, projects, and other items. But you can do your part, too. Take advantage of the ability to create folders in the Albums area of the Library list.

Folders in iPhoto have the same benefit that they have on your hard drive: they let you store related items. And as with the documents on your hard drive, the definition of “related items” is up to you.

Filing strategies. You can use folders in any way you like. You might want to set up a project-based filing system: create a folder for a project, then stash albums, books, and slide shows in that folder.

Or you might prefer an object-oriented filing system: stash all your albums in one folder, all your slide shows in another, and all your books in yet another.

You might want to mix and match these approaches or come up with something completely different. What’s important is that you create a filing scheme that helps you quickly locate items.

Creating a folder. To create a folder, choose New Folder from the File menu. Or, Control-click on a blank area of the Library list and choose New Folder from the shortcut menu. iPhoto names a new folder untitled folder, and selects its name. To rename the folder, just start typing.

Working with folders. To move an item into a folder, simply drag it to the folder until you see a black border around the folder. To close or open a folder, click the little triangle to the left of its name.

Like folders in the Mac’s Finder, iPhoto folders are “spring loaded”—if you drag something to a closed folder and pause briefly, the folder opens.

Folders within folders. You can create folders inside of folders. You might use this scheme to store all the albums, books, and slide shows that relate to a specific event or theme.

To open a folder and all the nested folders within it, press Option while clicking on the folder’s triangle.

By adding additional criteria, you can be very specific about what you want to find.

To work on a photo, open it in iPhoto’s edit view.

Change your mind? To exit edit view without saving any changes, press the Esc key.

Global or local? When you edit a photo, you change the photo everywhere you’ve used it—in slide shows, books, and calendars, for example. There’s another way to fine-tune an image. When printing a photo or using it in a book, greeting card, or calendar, you can modify the photo’s appearance in just that place—without changing its appearance elsewhere.

I’ll remind you of these local editing opportunities as we go.

Constraining the crop. You can make the crop area any size you like. But sometimes, you may want to control the proportions of the crop area—to ensure that your photo’s proportions match a certain print size, for example.

Click the Constrain box, then choose an option.

For example, if you plan to order an eightby ten-inch print of the photo, choose 8 × 10.

To switch between a horizontal and vertical crop area, choose Constrain as Landscape or Constrain as Portrait. To override the constrain setting, press Shift while resizing the crop area.

Resetting the crop. To start over, press Option—the Cancel button changes to Reset. Click Reset, and iPhoto restores the original crop rectangle.

Cropping and resolution. When you crop a photo, you throw away pixels, lowering the photo’s resolution. If you print a heavily cropped photo, you may notice ugly digital artifacts. Always shoot at the highest resolution your camera provides; this gives you more flexibility to crop later (see page 232).

The local option. If you’re printing a photo on your own printer, or using the photo in a slide show or print project, you might prefer to use iPhoto’s zoom tools to crop—that way, you won’t change the photo everywhere you’ve used it. See pages 181 (for slide shows), 198 (for printing), and 211 (for print projects).

To apply one-click enhance, open a photo in edit view, and then click the Enhance button at the bottom of the iPhoto window.

If at first you don’t succeed, click, click again. Each time you click Enhance, iPhoto processes the image again. But too much enhancement can make an image appear grainy and artificial. If that happens, choose Undo Enhance Photo from the Edit menu as many times as needed to backtrack.

If the Enhance tool isn’t doing the job—maybe its results are too harsh—undo your enhancements and turn to the tools in the Adjust panel (see page 160).

Zoom for precision. To retouch with more precision, use the size slider to zoom in on the area of the image that you’re working on. You can also zoom by pressing the 0 (zero), 1, or 2 keys.

Undo and revert. You can undo each mouse click or drag by choosing Edit > Undo Retouch from the Edit menu.

To undo all of your retouching, choose Photos > Revert to Previous. Note that you’ll also lose any other edits, such as cropping, that you performed since switching into edit view. Because of this, you might want to retouch first—that way, you won’t lose work if you decide to revert. Or take a different approach: Do your cropping and other adjustments, then click Done to exit edit view. Reopen the photo, and retouch.

Brush keyboard shortcuts. To make the retouch brush smaller, press the leftbracket ([) key. To make the brush larger, press the right-bracket key.

Combining effects. Some effects pair up particularly well. For a dream-like look, try combining Edge Blur with the B&W effect. For an old-fashioned look, pair the Sepia or Antique effects with the Vignette effect. To create an oval border around a photo, combine the Matte and Vignette effects.

Don’t be afraid to try offbeat combinations, either. It might seem contradictory to follow the Boost Color effect with the Fade Color effect, but you can get some interesting results when you do.

If you effect yourself into a corner, just click the Original button in the center of the Effects panel to return to safety.

When once isn’t enough. You can apply most effects up to nine times: simply click the desired effect’s button over and over again. (The two exceptions are the B&W and Sepia effects; clicking their buttons repeatedly will only wear out your mouse.)

iPhoto lets you know how many times you’ve applied an effect. To backtrack one time, click the left-pointing arrow.

Refining an effect. You can refine the appearance of an effect by using the controls in the Adjust panel (discussed on the following pages). In particular, you can improve the contrast and tonal range of a black-and-white conversion by adjusting the Saturation, Tint, and Temperature sliders. For details, see page 165.

No single photo is ideally suited to every effect, but that didn’t stop me from working my dog into this example.

To remove the effects you’ve applied, click the Original thumbnail in the center of the Effects panel.

The local angle. You’ll find an Adjust panel elsewhere in iPhoto: there’s one in the custom print view (page 198) and in the calendar, greeting card, and book views (page 211). These Adjust panels aren’t identical to the one in edit view, but they’re very similar—and they’re great places to adjust a photo without changing it everywhere you may have used it.

A histogram is a bar graph that shows how much black, white, and mid-tone data a photograph has. Pure black is on the left, pure white is on the right, and the mid-tones are in between. iPhoto displays a color histogram that breaks this information down into an image’s three primary-color channels: red, green, and blue.

Beneath the histogram is a set of sliders that let you change what iPhoto considers to be pure black, pure white, or mid-tone values.

A Sampling of Histograms

This properly exposed shot has a good distribution of dark, bright, and mid-tone areas. Notice that the histogram shows a lot of bright blue data: the ocean and sky.

This overexposed shot has very little data in the blacks; everything is bunched up toward the right side—the white side—of the histogram.

Nice close-up, but the whites could be a bit whiter; notice the absence of data at the right end of the histogram.

The Adjust panel’s Exposure slider makes a photo brighter or darker.

I enhanced this underexposed photo by dragging the Exposure slider to the right. Notice that its histogram is broader than the original (see opposite page).

Cameras don’t perceive high-contrast scenes as well as our eyes do. As a result, high-contrast photos are often missing something. Shadows are dark and devoid of detail, or bright areas are washed out to nearly pure white. Take a photo of a friend under a beach umbrella, and you’ll probably see a silhouette, not a smile.

The Shadow and Highlight sliders in the Adjust panel can help. To bring out details hidden in dark areas of a photo, use the Shadow slider. It might just bring a smile to your silhouetted friend’s face. And to recover details in the brilliantly lit beach sand, drag the Highlights slider.

But a little goes a long way. It’s easy to end up with an artificial-looking photo that has strange halos where bright and dark areas meet. To recover shadow details, try brightening the photo with the mid-tone or white-point Levels slider, then drag the Shadow slider a bit. You might even try brightening the photo until highlights appear too bright, then darken them a bit by using the Highlights slider.

And that’s a good guideline for all your Adjust panel endeavors: the best results often come from combinations of several adjustments, not just one.

To make a photo’s colors more vivid, drag the Saturation slider to the right. To make colors more muted, drag the slider to the left.

Pale and pastel. To give a pastel-like quality to a photo’s colors, decrease the saturation.

Going gray. If you drag the Saturation slider all the way to the left, you create a grayscale version of the photo. Generally, the B&W button does a better job, but experiment and see which version you like best.

Watch your gamut. If you significantly increase a photo’s saturation, you probably won’t be able to print a version that matches what you see on screen. Printers have a much narrower color range, or gamut, than does the Mac’s screen.

To adjust a photo’s color balance, use the Temperature slider, the Tint slider, or both.

Temperature. The Temperature slider adjusts a photo’s color temperature. To make a photo appear cooler (more bluish tones), drag the slider to the left. To make a photo appear warmer (more yellow/orange tones), drag the slider to the right.

Tint. The Tint slider adjusts red/green color balance. If you drag the slider to the left, iPhoto adds red, making a photo appear less green. If you drag the slider to the right, you add green and lessen the amount of red. The Tint slider can help remove the greenish color cast that you may find in photos taken under fluorescent lighting.

Temperature Tips. Photos taken under incandescent light with your camera’s flash turned off tend to have a yellowish cast to them. I like this warm look, but if you don’t, try dragging the Temperature slider to the left to cool things off. If the corrected image looks dark, bump up the Exposure or mid-tone Levels slider.

You can often simulate different lighting conditions by shifting a photo’s color temperature slightly. Warm up a photo to simulate late afternoon sun, or cool it down to simulate shade or twilight.

Old color photos often take on a reddish-yellow appearance as their color dyes fade. To fix this, drag the Temperature slider to the left a bit.

Gray Balancing. If you have an off-color photo containing an object that you know should be gray or white, click the eyedropper tool (), then click on part of the photo that should be gray or white. iPhoto adjusts the Temperature and Tint sliders as best it can to make the object a neutral gray.

iPhoto’s B&W effect does a good job of converting a color photo to black and white, but you can often improve on its efforts: after clicking B&W, adjust the Saturation, Temperature, and Tint sliders.

When you drag the color sliders after converting a photo to black and white, iPhoto blends the photo’s red, green, and blue color channels in different ways. To make a black-and-white photo appear richer, bump up the saturation after clicking the B&W button. While you’re experimenting, drag the Temperature and Tint sliders to see how they alter the photo’s tonal values. (For you film fogies, this is the digital equivalent of exposing black-and-white film through color filters.)

To sharpen a photo, drag the Adjust panel’s Sharpness slider to the right.

To edit a photo in full-screen view, select the photo and then click the Full Screen button ().

If you’re already in the standard edit view, you can switch to full-screen view by clicking the same button.

It’s always smart to take more than one version of an important shot—to experiment with different exposure settings or to simply increase your chances of capturing that perfect smile.

After you’ve imported those multiple variations into iPhoto, compare the photos to find the best one. (And if you don’t want to see the rest, consider hiding them; see page 138.)

To compare photos

Comparing in edit view. If you’re already working in full-screen edit view (opposite page), click the Compare button (). iPhoto loads the next photo and displays both side-by-side.

From browsing to comparing. You can also set up a comparison before entering edit view. Select the photos first, then click the Full Screen button (). For a review of ways to select photos, see page 147.

Tips for Full-Screen View

Show your stuff. Normally, iPhoto hides the thumbnails and toolbar unless you mouse to the top or bottom of the screen. But you can choose to display either or both all the time. To always see the toolbar, choose View > Show Toolbar; for thumbnails, choose View > Thumbnails > Always Show.

Move your thumbs. Thumbnails can appear along the left or right edge of the screen instead of along the top. Choose View > Thumbnails > Position on Left (or Position on Right). Since your screen is wider than it is tall, moving thumbnails to the side uses space more efficiently, especially when you are working with vertically oriented photos.

Grow more thumbs. You can see more than one row of thumbnails—handy when you want to edit a lot of photos. Choose View > Thumbnails, then choose how many rows or columns you want.

The shortcut menu. In full-screen view, you can still access some editing functions with the shortcut menu: just Control-click within the photo, and choose a command.

Normally, iPhoto displays the image you’re editing within the iPhoto window itself. But you can also open and edit a photo in a separate window that has its own editing toolbar.

You can have multiple edit windows open simultaneously, which makes it easy to compare images. For example, if you’ve duplicated a photo a few times and are trying out different sharpening or exposure-correction approaches, you can open each version in its own window and compare them—and work on them at once.

To open an image in a separate window, Control-click on it and choose Edit in Separate Window from the shortcut menu.

Prefer editing in full-screen view? Or in the separate editing window? Use the Preferences command to control where iPhoto opens your photos for editing.

Choose iPhoto > Preferences, click General, then choose an option from the Edit Photo pop-up menu. To always edit in full-screen view, choose Using Full Screen. For the separate edit window, choose In Separate Window.

Here are a few tips for taking advantage of the edit window.

Showing thumbnails. Normally, the edit window doesn’t display a photo browser containing thumbnails of adjacent images. If you’d like to see them, choose View > Thumbnails > Show.

Switching between windows. When you have multiple edit windows open simultaneously, use the Window menu to switch between them and the main iPhoto window. Or use the keyboard: press -~ (that’s the tilde, located above the Tab key) to cycle through open windows. That key sequence works in many Mac programs.

Zooming differently. Unlike iPhoto’s standard edit view, the edit window has a Size pop-up menu that lets you choose a specific zoom percentage for your photo. As I mentioned on the previous page, if you’re sharpening, you’ll get the most accurate preview of your work by viewing at 100 or 200 percent.

Resizing the window. Remember that you can quickly resize the edit window to fill your screen by clicking the green button in the upper-left corner of the window or choosing Window > Zoom.

Sometimes, you might have a series of photos that can benefit from the same adjustments—maybe they’re all similarly dark, for example, or all have the same color cast.

With the Copy and Paste buttons in the Adjust panel, you can apply one photo’s adjustments to other photos. After tweaking a photo to perfection, click the Copy button in the Adjust panel. Next, open a different photo in edit view, display the Adjust panel, and click Paste.

You can activate various editing tools by pressing a single key on your keyboard (see the table below).

While you’re pawing your keyboard, remember that you can open a photo for editing by selecting the photo and pressing the Return key—you don’t have to click the Edit button. To save changes and return to thumbnail browsing, press Return. To save changes and edit an adjacent photo, press an arrow key. To discard changes and exit edit view, press Esc. And to switch to full-screen edit view, press Option--F.

Want to go straight from browsing photos to editing one? Press Option while double-clicking a photo’s thumbnail, and it opens in edit view. (And remember, if you always want iPhoto to work this way, use the Preferences command to set it up.)

Most of the time, you probably enter edit view while browsing your library or an album. But you can also enter edit view while working on a book, calendar, or greeting card: just Control-click on the photo and choose Edit Photo from the shortcut menu.

The thumbnail browser—that row of images at the top of the edit view—is a handy tool for quickly accessing another photo in the same event or album.

But it has another use, too: you can drag a thumbnail from the photo browser directly into an album, book, or slide show. If you’re on an editing binge and suddenly realize that a certain photo would go nicely in a specific album, slide show, or book, there’s no need to exit edit view. Just drag the photo from the photo browser to the album, slide show, or book.

To shoot in raw mode, venture into your camera’s menus—specifically, to the menu that controls image format. In some cameras, you’ll find this option in the Mode menu. With others, such as the Canon EOS-10D shown here, this option is in the Quality menu.

Make sure. It’s a sad fact of life: each camera company has created its own raw format. Even if iPhoto supports your camera, it may not recognize its raw-format images. Before shooting raw, verify that iPhoto supports your camera’s raw format. You may find that you need to update to a newer Mac OS X version—Apple often adds support for new cameras when it releases a Mac OS update. For a current list of supported cameras, go to www.macilife.com/iphoto.

Make room. Raw files are often several times larger than their JPEG equivalents. For example, an eight-megapixel JPEG might use 4MB while its raw version uses 16MB. Because you’ll get fewer raw images on a memory card, you might want to buy a few extra cards.

Make time. With some cameras, raw images can take longer to save after you snap the shutter. If you’re shooting a fast-changing scene, verify that your camera’s raw mode is fast enough to keep up with your subject.

Those large raw files also take longer to transfer to the Mac. If your camera and Mac don’t provide USB 2.0 interfaces, get a FireWire media reader and use it to transfer your shots (see page 133).

Learn more about raw-format photography. www.macilife.com/iphoto

In some ways, working with raw photos in iPhoto is no different than working with JPEG photos. You can import raw photos into your library, edit them using all of the edit-view features I’ve described previously, and share them using all of iPhoto’s sharing features.

Importing raw photos. Aside from making sure you have plenty of free disk space, you don’t have to do anything special to import raw photos into iPhoto. If iPhoto supports your camera’s raw format, it imports the raw photos and stores them in your photo library.

JPEG companions. When you import raw photos, iPhoto creates JPEG versions of them. You don’t see thumbnails for these JPEG companions in your photo library, but they’re there.

iPhoto creates these JPEG versions for use by programs that don’t understand the raw format. For example, when you access your iPhoto library from a different program, such as iDVD, that program uses these JPEG versions.

However, when you open a raw photo in edit view, iPhoto does indeed use the original raw-format image. For details on how iPhoto handles raw images during and after the editing process, see the following pages.

Raw plus JPEG. Some cameras save a JPEG version of a photo at the same time that you shoot a raw version. This is a handy convenience that gives you the best of both worlds: a compact JPEG and a digital negative—a phrase often used to describe raw-format images.

When you import photos from such a camera, iPhoto imports both the JPEG and the raw versions of each shot. It also displays both versions, and if you’re planning to do some editing, you’ll want to make sure you open the raw version—you want iPhoto to base your changes on the highest-quality version available.

To see which photo is the JPEG version and which is the raw version, open the Information pane and select one of the photos. iPhoto displays its format in the Kind area of the Information pane.

Raw and Leopard. Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard) provides improved image quality for raw-format images. For more details, see the following pages.

If you edit a raw photo that you’ve already edited, iPhoto returns to the original raw version of the photo, and applies all the changes you’ve made—today’s as well as yesterday’s. This is a big step forward—as I mentioned on page 124, iPhoto ’08’s non-destructive editing gives you far more flexibility than earlier iPhoto versions provided. You can edit an image as many times as you like without worrying about introducing quality loss each time.

The exception to the rule. Ah, but there’s an exception. If you edited a raw photo using an earlier iPhoto version, iPhoto ’08 applies your latest edits to the edited JPEG that the older version of iPhoto created. Open that edited raw photo in edit view, and you won’t see the RAW badge at the bottom of the iPhoto window—and any new edits you make are applied to the JPEG version.

So what do you do if you’ve been using iPhoto for a while and you want the full power of non-destructive editing? Select the edited version of the raw photo and choose Photos > Revert to Original. iPhoto discards the JPEG version (and any edits you made). Now you can bring iPhoto ’08’s non-destructive editing power to bear.

Get links to the best Photoshop resources. www.macilife.com/iphoto

There’s another way to get to your original raw data after making edits: export the original raw file from iPhoto.

First, select the JPEG version of the photo that iPhoto created after you edited the raw file. Next, choose Export from the File menu. Finally, in the Export Photos dialog box, choose Original from the Kind pop-up menu. Save the file somewhere convenient, such as on your desktop.

When might you use this approach? Here’s one scenario. You’ve edited a raw photo in iPhoto, but then you decide to try editing the original raw file in Adobe Photoshop Elements. You want to keep the version you edited in iPhoto, so instead of reverting the photo or duplicating the edited version, you export a raw version for use in Photoshop.

As I describe on the following pages, iPhoto pairs up beautifully with the Adobe Photoshop family. This marriage is particularly happy where raw images are concerned: in my experience, Adobe’s Camera Raw software does a better job than iPhoto when it comes to decoding and processing raw files. Camera Raw, even the version included with Photoshop Elements, provides more control than iPhoto’s edit view—and control is what raw is all about.

I use iPhoto to import and store raw photos, but when I’m after maximum quality, I bring those photos into Photoshop. I fine-tune the photos in Photoshop, export them as JPEGs, then import those JPEGs back into iPhoto for sharing. It’s more work, but the results are better.

To ensure that iPhoto supplies Photoshop with the original raw file and not the JPEG stand-in, choose Preferences from the iPhoto menu, click Advanced, and then check the box labeled Use RAW Files with External Editor. If you don’t, iPhoto will hand Photoshop a JPEG when you double-click the raw file—exactly what you don’t want.

Given that you’re obsessed enough with image quality to be shooting in raw mode to begin with, you might lament the fact that iPhoto saves your edited images in the lossy JPEG format. You have a higher-quality alternative: tell iPhoto to use the TIFF format when saving edits to raw images.

To do so, choose Preferences from the iPhoto menu, click Advanced, and check the box labeled Save Edited RAW Files as 16-bit TIFFs. The resulting file will be much larger than a JPEG, but it will have that 16-bit headroom described on page 173, and it won’t have any lossy compression.

Is it worth the extra storage space? Possibly, particularly for images whose brightness or levels you’ve altered dramatically. JPEG versions of these images might show that undesirable banding I mentioned on page 162. Consider doing some tests—let your eyes be your guide.

The Adjust panel’s Exposure slider works differently when you’re editing a raw photo. When you’re editing a raw image, the Exposure slider works hard to avoid clipping blacks or whites: as data approaches the black or white limits of the histogram, it tends to bunch up before it finally spills over the brink into the abyss of clipping.

With JPEG photos, the Exposure slider shifts tonality in a different way, one that is more analogous to decreasing or increasing the camera’s shutter speed.

One side effect of this approach is that it’s much easier to introduce clipping by dragging the slider too far in either direction. A little bit goes a long way. For this reason, it’s best to use the Levels sliders, particularly the mid-tone slider, to brighten or darken JPEG images.

A photo in your iPhoto library needs some help. How do you open it in Photoshop? You have a few options.

Drag and drop. If you’ve already started Photoshop, its icon appears in your dock. To open a photo, simply click on the photo in your iPhoto library and drag it to the Photoshop icon in the dock. When the icon highlights, release the mouse button, and Photoshop opens the photo directly from your iPhoto library. This drag-and-drop technique is handy if you use Photoshop only occasionally.

Direct connection. If you end up using Photoshop for all your image editing, you can set up iPhoto to directly hand off photos to Photoshop.

Choose Preferences from the iPhoto menu and click the General button. From the Edit Photo pop-up menu, choose In Application. In the dialog box that appears, navigate to your Applications folder, then locate and double-click the icon for your version of Photoshop.

From now on, when you double-click a photo in your library, iPhoto will hand that photo off to Photoshop.

Middle ground. Maybe you use Photoshop frequently, but you also use iPhoto’s edit view for cropping and other simple tasks. Head for the middle ground: specify Photoshop as your external image editor as described above, then return to the Preferences dialog box and choose one of the other Edit Photo options, such as In Main Window or Using Full Screen.

This restores iPhoto’s factory setting: double-clicking a photo opens it in Edit view. But iPhoto doesn’t forget that you’re also a Photoshop user. To open a photo in Photoshop, Control-click on the photo and choose Edit in External Editor from the pop-up shortcut menu.

In a hurry? Select the album or photos you want to screen, press the Option key, click the button near the bottom of the iPhoto window, and sit back and watch.

Want more control? Follow these instructions to customize your slide show’s music, transitions, and more.

Step 2

Step 3

Click to begin.

Screen Test: Reviewing Photos

If you move the mouse while a slide show plays back, a set of controls appears that lets you rotate, rate, and delete the currently displayed photo. This is a handy way to perform common housekeeping chores on a freshly imported set of photos: click Last Import, start the slide show, and get to work.

Note

The workings of the Trash button depend on what you’re viewing. If you’re viewing a slide show of an album, clicking the Trash button removes a photo from the album. If you’re viewing photos directly from the Photo Library (for example, you clicked the Last Import item), clicking the Trash button moves the photo to the iPhoto Trash.

When you’re creating a saved slide show, you have some additional settings options. Use the Transition pop-up menu to specify a default transition for the slide show—that is, a transition that iPhoto will use unless you specify a different transition for a specific photo or photos.

You can also have iPhoto fit the slide show’s duration to match the length of its music soundtrack: click the Fit Slideshow to Music option.

And finally, you can have iPhoto create a widescreen (16:9 format) version of your slide show—ideal if you have an Apple Cinema display or want to create a widescreen-format DVD in iDVD. To create a widescreen slide show, choose 16:9 Widescreen from the Slideshow Format pop-up menu.

You’ve crafted a gorgeous slide show and decide you want to add more photos to it. It’s easy: just drag the photos to the slide show’s item in your Slideshows list. You can even drag photos from the edit view’s photo browser into a slide show.

Planning to use the Ken Burns effect in a slide show? There’s something you should know about Ken: he prefers the dissolve transition and the fade through black transition.

If you use any other type of transition in a slide show, a Ken Burns move will end right before the transition starts, and won’t begin for the next photo until the transition has finished displaying. Having those smooth moves abruptly stop and start before and after each transition can appear jarring with some transitions.

Bottom line: if you’re using Ken Burns, lean toward the dissolve or fade through black transitions.

Want more than one song to play back during a slide show? In iTunes, create a playlist containing the songs you want to use. Then, return to iPhoto and choose the playlist’s name when assigning music to the slide show or album.

Basic slide shows—the kind you see when you click the Play button in the iPhoto window—provide a couple of customizing opportunities.

A song for each album. You can assign a different song to each of your albums. When you view a particular album as a basic slide show, iPhoto plays the song you’ve assigned to it.

To assign a song to a specific album, select the album in your Albums list. Next, drag a song from the iTunes window into the iPhoto window. iPhoto asks if you’d like to “make the selection your default slideshow music.” Click OK. To assign a different song to a different album, repeat this drill.

Custom settings, too. Every album can have its own basic slide show settings—and not just for music. All of the other options that you can adjust in the Slideshow dialog box—transition style, photo scaling, and so on—can also apply on an album-by-album basis. Just select the album whose settings you want to adjust, click the Play button near the bottom of the iPhoto window, make your adjustments, and click Save Settings.

Keep in mind that these tips refer to basic slide shows—the kind I described on pages 178–179. Saved (cinematic) slide shows can obviously have their own settings, too, but you adjust them using the slide show editor.

If you frequently create saved slide shows, you might want to add a Slideshow button to iPhoto’s window—it’s a bit more convenient than using the New Album command. Choose View > Show in Toolbar > Slideshow.

While you’re customizing the toolbar, consider adding or removing other buttons to reflect the way you use iPhoto.

You can add some interesting special effects to your slide shows by duplicating photos, modifying the duplicates, then sequencing them in the slide show. For example, you can have a photo start out in black and white and then dissolve or wipe into a color version.

To duplicate a photo, select it, then choose Duplicate from the Photos menu (-D).

You can have iPhoto display additional information and other items during a slide show. For a basic slide show, use the Slideshow dialog box. For a saved slide show, use the Settings dialog box.

Display Titles. Each photo’s title appears in the upper-left corner of the screen.

Display My Ratings. Each photo’s rating appears in the center at the bottom of the screen.

Display Slideshow Controls. The rotation, rating, and deletion tools described on page 181 appear immediately—no need to move the mouse first.

Want to email a slide show to someone or post it on a Web site? Configure the slide show settings as desired, then use the Export command to create a QuickTime movie as described on page 220. Feeling ambitious? Take things a step further: Import the movie into GarageBand and add narration and chapter markers to create a “slide show podcast” (page 376).

To earn some extra style points, sprinkle some titles into a slide show. For example, create a set of titles—one for each destination—for your vacation slide show.

You already have a great program for making titles. It comes with pre-designed styles that are ready for your own photos and text. The program is called iPhoto.

By combining iPhoto’s greeting card features with the Mac’s ability to create a PDF file of just about anything, you can create great-looking titles and add them to your slide shows.

iPhoto and Mac OS X go to work, and a few moments later, your library contains a PDF of your postcard. To see it, click the Last Import item in the Recent list.

Your PDF title is ready for its screen debut. If you’ve already created a slide show, drag the title to the slide show in your Slideshows list. If you haven’t created the slide show yet, add the title to the album where you’ve stashed the slide show’s images.

Variations. To animate your title slides, use the Ken Burns effect. Here’s a fun trick: Follow your title with the same photo that you used in the title. Apply the Ken Burns effect to the title so that it zooms in slowly, ending at a point where the photo almost fills the viewing area. Use a cross-dissolve effect between the title and the following photo. When you play your slide show, the title will zoom in, then its background and text will fade away, leaving just the photo.

Here’s another way to put Ken to work. Use one of the postcard styles that holds two or more photos, then create a Ken Burns move that slowly pans across the photos.

You can also save a book or calendar page as a PDF and add it to a slide show. Making a slide show of a three-week road trip? Start it with a calendar page whose dates contain photos from the trip. Then, use the Ken Burns effect to pan across the calendar page.

If you use Mac OS X 10.5 (Leopard), you have yet another way to share a slide show: iChat Theater. This sublimely cool addition to Apple’s instant-messaging software lets you broadcast a slide show (among other things) to people with whom you’re chatting. They’ll see Ken Burns moves and transitions, and will even hear your background music.

And your friends don’t have to be using Leopard, either—earlier iChat AV versions can also view iChat Theater broadcasts, as can compatible instant-messaging software for Windows.

Already connected? The instructions above assume that you haven’t yet begun a video chat with someone. If you’re already in a video chat, skip Step 3.

Sound options. Your chat buddy will hear whatever music you’ve assigned to basic slide shows (page 179). If your Mac has a microphone, your chat buddy will also hear you talk. If you’d rather not broadcast a music soundtrack—maybe you’d prefer to narrate—uncheck the Play Music During Slideshow box in iPhoto’s Slideshow dialog box. (You’ll need to do this before starting the slide show broadcast.)

Conversely, if you don’t want your buddy to hear you type or talk during a slide show, click the Mute button () in the Video Chat window.

Sharing other items. The iPhoto/iChat connection goes beyond slide shows. Want to broadcast the photos from an event without creating an album? Start a video chat, then drag the event thumbnail into the Video Chat window.

You can also broadcast just a few photos: select them, then drag them into the Video Chat window.

iPhoto displays the Mail Photo dialog box.

Here’s a look at the Web gallery albums your online fans will see, along with a tour of their features.

The index page. Click the My Gallery button on a gallery album, and you see a visual table of contents for all the albums you’ve published. Each album has its own thumbnail, and you can skim across the thumbnails to see its photos.

Changing the index page name. Is the name “My Gallery” too generic, too dorky, or both? Change it. Choose iPhoto > Preferences, click Web Gallery, then type a name.

iPhone and iPod touch. You can view Web galleries using the Safari browser on an iPhone or iPod touch—they appear in a special format for the small screen.

Who gets to see your albums? You decide when publishing the album, or afterwards. Choose one of these options from the Album Viewable By pop-up menu.

Everyone. Any stranger who finds your gallery pages can see the album.

Only me. Only you—to see the album, you must type your .Mac account name and password.

Aunt Fern. Okay, it doesn’t say that. But you can specify a name and password that visitors must type to see the album. To create a name and password for the album, choose Edit Names and Passwords. In the next dialog box, click the plus sign, and type a name and password. Give that name and password to everyone who needs to see the album.

When you set up a gallery album to allow uploads via email, .Mac gives you a “secret” email address for that album. To see the address, select the album in your Web Gallery list—the address appears in the upper-right corner of the iPhoto window. Give this email address to your friends, and they can add photos via email.

To upload a photo via email, send the photo as an attachment to the album’s secret email address. The email’s Subject field becomes the photo title. You can send multiple photos in one email, if you like.

The iPhone angle. You can use the secret email address to upload photos from an iPhone, but there’s an easier way that eliminates pecking out the address.

On your iPhone, display the photo you want to upload. Tap the button, then tap Send to Web Gallery. In the next screen, tap the name of the album where you want the photo to be stored.

Normally, iPhoto doesn’t let you edit a photo from an album that you’ve subscribed to. If you open the photo in edit view, all the tools are disabled.

The workaround is easy: Add the photo to an album in your iPhoto library. Then, select the photo in that album and open it in edit view.

You can export photos and albums as Web pages to post on Web sites or burn to CDs (opposite page). iPhoto creates small thumbnail versions of your images, as well as the HTML pages that display them. (HTML stands for HyperText Markup Language—it’s the set of codes used to design Web pages.)

To export a Web page, select some photos or an album, choose Export from the File menu, then click the Web Page tab. Specify the page appearance and dimensions of the thumbnails and the images, then click Export. In the Export dialog box, click the New Folder button to create a new folder. (The export process will create several folders, so it’s a good idea to stash everything in one folder.)

Check out my Flickr photos. www.flickr.com/photos/jimheid/

If you aren’t a .Mac subscriber and you don’t want to fuss with Web servers, you have other Web album options. Most online photofinishers provide free Web album features, but given that the primary focus of these sites is to sell prints and photo gifts, your albums tend to be surrounded by ads and e-commerce clutter.

A better choice is a site designed specifically for online photo sharing. I’m a huge fan of Flickr (www.flickr.com), which combines photo-sharing and print-ordering services with an inspiring community of creative photographers who comment on each other’s photos.

Flickr is packed with slick features you won’t find elsewhere, starting with an uploading tool that lets you transfer photos directly from iPhoto’s Export dialog box. (Try out the Flickr export plug-in for iPhoto at www.connectedflow.com.)

You can also assign descriptive tags, such as beach, to your photos, and other Flickr users can search for images based on those tags. The Flickr iPhoto plug-in even supports iPhoto titles, comments, and keywords. Titles and comments are displayed along with your photos, and keywords are converted into Flickr tags.

Best of all is Flickr’s pervasive support for RSS and newsreaders. Subscribe to another user’s photo stream, and small thumbnails appear in your newsreader whenever that user uploads new photos. You can also subscribe to specific tags. Subscribe to the beach tag, and your newsreader will display everyone’s beach photos as they’re uploaded. You can even subscribe to photo feeds using iPhoto itself (see page 230).

Flickr can also automatically publish, on your blog, your recent photos. It’s a happy marriage between photography and the latest geek technologies. A Flickr account is free, although if you upload many photos, you may reach the 100MB-per-month bandwidth limit of a free account. A Pro account costs $24.95 per year and allows for unlimited uploads and much more.

To share your photo library with other Macs on a network, choose Preferences from the iPhoto menu, then click the Sharing button.

To access shared photos, choose Preferences from the iPhoto menu, click the Sharing button, and be sure the Look for Shared Photos box is checked. iPhoto scans your network and, if it finds any shared photo libraries, adds their names to the Shares area of the Library list.

To view a shared library, click its name.

A standard print contains just the photo, with no ornamental borders or mats.

Notes and Tips

Choosing a print size. Most of the time, you’ll want a photo to fill the page. But you can also choose a print size that is smaller than the paper size you’ve chosen. A small image floating within a large expanse is a common framing technique.

Another reason to choose a small print size is to get more than one photo on a sheet of paper—to shoehorn a couple of 4- by 6-inch prints onto a letter-sized sheet, for example (see page 199).

With the print themes in iPhoto, you can produce prints with borders, mats, and more. And by clicking the Customize button in the Print dialog box, you can personalize the themes to match your photos and tastes. For details on customizing print jobs, see the following pages.

Contact Sheet

Prints numerous photos on a page—a handy quick-reference to the photos in an event or album. Be sure to select a bunch of photos (or select an entire album or event) before choosing Print.

Customizing: Change the background of the page as well as how many images appear across each row. Print titles, captions, dates, and exposure information beneath thumbnails.

Simple Border

Adds a wide border around the image.

Customizing: Change the border style and choose from several layouts, some with text captions and multiple photos on a page.

Single Mat

Simulates the stiff cardboard mat that a framing shop uses to accent a photo and set it off from its frame. The mat has a bevel-cut opening through which the photo appears.

Customizing: Choose from 26 mat colors and styles. Add a white border inside the mat. Choose from several layouts, some with text captions and multiple photos on a page.

Double Mat

Simulates a framing technique that involves using two mats to provide a richer look. A top mat has a large opening that reveals a bottom mat, whose smaller opening reveals the photo.

Customizing: Choose from 26 mat colors and numerous border styles. Choose from several layouts, some with text captions and multiple photos on a page.

To customize a print job, click the Customize button in the Print dialog box. This opens iPhoto’s print settings view.

Here are the two most common adjustments you can make—ones from which any print job can benefit.

Adjust “cropping.”. A photo’s proportions rarely match the proportions of the paper size you’re using. I don’t know of any digital camera whose photos perfectly fit an 8.5- by 11-inch sheet.

With some programs, mismatched proportions yield prints with uneven borders. iPhoto eliminates that problem by enlarging an image until it fits the dimensions of the print size you chose. That gives you nice, even borders (or a fully borderless print), but at a price: parts of the photo’s edges are cut off. In this example, iPhoto cut off part of the dog’s legs and tail (ouch).

By positioning a photo within the print area, you can control how the photo is cropped. Click the photo, then use the controls above it to zoom and reposition the photo. You can see the results on the opposite page: I dragged the dog (gently!) to fix the unwanted leg surgery.

Adjust appearance. To adjust exposure, contrast, and other image settings, select the photo and click the Adjust button. The Adjust panel is similar to its counterpart in edit view (pages 160–167), but changes you make here apply only to this print job.

Sharpen up. The single best adjustment you can make is to sharpen. As I said on page 166, ink-jet printers introduce some softness, and sharpening can help. Don’t be afraid to crank the sharpness way up—even to 100 percent. Make some before-and-after prints and judge for yourself.

More Ways to Customize

Use the Background, Borders, and Layout pop-up menus to explore each theme’s design options. Here are some tips.

Add a caption. To print a text caption at the bottom of a print, use the Layout pop-up menu to choose a layout with text.

Type the text below the photo. To change the font and size of the entire caption, click Settings. To mix and match fonts within the caption, use the Fonts panel. For details and tips, see page 210.

Multi-photo layouts. Most theme layouts provide options that print two or more photos on a page. But what if you selected only one photo before choosing Print?

No problem—just add more photos to the print job. When you open print settings view, an item named Printing appears in your Recent list. To add photos to the print job, drag their thumbnails to the Printing item.

Then, click the Printing item. iPhoto automatically creates additional pages for the new photos, but you can rearrange the photos as you see fit. To remove a photo from a page, select it and press Delete. To see all the photos in the print job, click the button in the thumbnail browser.

Mix and match settings. Normally, when you change a print background or border, iPhoto applies the change to all the pages in the print job. But you can also apply changes on a page-by-page basis: just hold down the Option key while choosing a background or border.

By tweaking a few print settings, you can print multiple copies of a photo on a single sheet of paper. Have a cute kid photo that you want to send around? Print multiple 4- by 6-inch photos on a letter- or legal-sized sheet, then cut them apart.

You can also use this technique to print multiple photos (but not the same one) on a single sheet of paper. Select several photos, then perform steps 1–5. In Step 6, choose the option labeled Multiple Photos Per Page.

On previous pages, I discussed how iPhoto prevents uneven borders by enlarging a photo until it fills the paper size you’ve chosen. And I described how you can use print settings view to zoom and pan a photo to crop it as you see fit.

But what if you don’t want any cropping at all? Easy. In print settings view, Control-click on a photo and, from the shortcut menu, choose Fit Photo to Frame Size.

Your print will almost certainly have some uneven borders, but it will contain every precious pixel of your original image. You can trim the borders by hand after printing.

Remember that you can save a print job as a PDF file and use it elsewhere, such as in an iPhoto or iDVD slide show, a print project, or an iMovie project. After customizing the print job, click the Print button. In the final print dialog box (the one you see when you’re actually ready to commit ink to paper), use the options in the PDF pop-up menu to create a PDF. To create a PDF and add it to your iPhoto library in one fell swoop, choose Save PDF to iPhoto.

PDF to photographic print. You can combine this PDF technique with Apple’s online print-ordering service (page 202). The result: the ability to design a fancy print and then have it printed by Apple.

Design a print, first making sure to choose a paper size that corresponds to the print size you’ll order. (For example, if you plan to order an 8 by 10, choose the 8 × 10 paper size.)

Next, use print settings view to choose mats and borders and adjust the photo as desired. Click the Print button, then choose the Save PDF to iPhoto option.

When iPhoto has finished importing the PDF, select it and click the Order Prints button. Complete your print order as described on page 202.

When your prints aren’t charming, read on.

Verify paper choices. In iPhoto’s Print dialog box, be sure to choose the preset that matches the type of paper you’re using and the quality you’re seeking. It’s easy to overlook this step and end up specifying plain paper when you’re actually using pricey photo paper.

Check ink. Strange colors? Check your printer’s ink supply. Many printers include diagnostic software that reports how much ink remains in each cartridge.

Clean up. The nozzles in an inkjet printer can become clogged, especially if you don’t print every day. If you’re seeing odd colors or a horizontal banding pattern, use your printer’s cleaning mode to clean your ink nozzles. Most printers can print a test page designed to show when the nozzles need cleaning. You may have to repeat the cleaning process a few times.

After all the effort you put into making inkjet prints, it may disappoint you to learn that they may not last long.

Many inkjet prints begin to fade within a year or two—even faster when displayed in direct sunlight. Most printer manufacturers now offer pigment-based inks and archival papers that last for decades, but pigment-based printers are pricier than the more common dye-based printers.

If you have a dye-based printer, consider using a paper rated for longer print life. Epson’s ColorLife paper, for example, has a much higher permanence rating than Epson’s Premium Glossy Photo Paper.

To prolong the life of any print, don’t display it in direct sunlight. Frame it under glass to protect it from humidity and pollutants. (Ozone pollution, common in cities, is poison to an inkjet print.)

Allow prints to dry for at least a few (preferably 24) hours before framing them or stacking them atop each other. For long-term storage, consider using acid-free sleeves designed for archival photo storage.

Finally, avoid bargain-priced paper or ink from the local office superstore. Print preservation guru Henry Wilhelm (www.wilhelm-research.com) recommends using only premium inks and papers manufactured by the same company that made your printer.

Is all this necessary for a print that will be tacked to a refrigerator for a few months and then thrown away? Of course not. But when you want prints to last, these steps can help.

To learn more about digital printing, read Harald Johnson’s Mastering Digital Printing, Second Edition (Muska & Lipman, 2005).

The most efficient way to create a book is to first add photos to an album, and then tell iPhoto to create a book based on that album. Here’s an overview of the process.

Step 3

Choose a book type and a theme, then click Choose. For a summary of the types of books you can order, see the sidebar at right.

Step 4

Lay out the book.

Step 5

Click and pay up using your Apple ID (page 15).

Book Types and Sizes

You can create several kinds of books with iPhoto. To preview the books, explore the options in the pop-up menu shown in Step 3 on the opposite page. The cost of a book depends on the type of book you order and on its number of pages; see apple.com/iphoto.

Hardcover. The classiest book option, and the priciest. Also called a keepsake book, it measures 11 inches wide by 8.5 inches tall. The book’s title is foil-stamped on a suede-like hardcover, and a customizable dust jacket protects the entire affair.

Softcover. Available in three sizes: 11 by 8.5 inches, 8 by 6 inches, and 2.6 by 3.5 inches. The tiniest size is sold in packs of three.

Wire-bound softcover. Available in 11 by 8.5 inch and 8 by 6 inch sizes, this softcover variation has a wire binding that lets the book lay flat.

Here’s a look at some of the factors that may influence your choice of book sizes and themes.

Figure . 

When you create a book, you can choose to have iPhoto lay out the book automatically by clicking the Autoflow button, or you can take the wheel and drive yourself by dragging photos onto the book’s pages. When you create a new book, iPhoto reminds you of these options.

Regardless of the option you choose, iPhoto always creates a book with 20 pages—the minimum a book can contain.

iPhoto also assigns a layout to each page. And that’s why I prefer to lay out books manually instead of clicking the Autoflow button. I often want to change the designs that iPhoto has chosen, and if I’m going to do that, I might as well start with a blank slate—why have iPhoto position photos that I’m going to be rearranging anyway?

But that’s just me. If you’d rather get immediate results and then fine-tune, click Autoflow. Or mix both approaches. If you want to do something fancy at the beginning of your book—maybe have a full-page photo opposite an introduction text page—lay out those first couple of pages. Then click the Autoflow button to have iPhoto do the rest.

Note that the Autoflow feature adds additional pages to your book if necessary to accommodate the rest of your unplaced photos. Those extra pages will cost you, so if you’re watching your production budget, keep an eye on your total page count.

Each book theme includes numerous layouts, each with a different arrangement of text and photos. Some layouts contain just text, some hold just photos, and some hold both.

Choosing a layout. First, navigate to the page you want to change: click the left- or right-arrow buttons or click the page in the thumbnail browser. (If you don’t see page thumbnails there, click the button.)

Next, use the Layout pop-up menu to choose a design.

Background options. To change a page’s background, use the Background pop-up menu. Background designs vary depending on theme. All themes also let you use a photo as a full-page background; see page 211.

Adding photos. Add photos to the empty frames by dragging them from the thumbnail browser (click the to see photo thumbnails).

Adding to a full page. If you drag a photo from the photo browser to a page that already contains photos in each photo frame, iPhoto changes the page type, adding an additional photo frame to accommodate the photo.

With some themes and page designs, iPhoto may add more than one photo frame. For example, in the Picture Book theme, the available page types jump from four photos per page to six. If you add a photo to a fully populated four-photo page, iPhoto switches to the six-photo page type. You can either add a sixth photo or ignore the empty frame. iPhoto will omit it when you order your book.

Incidentally, if a page already has the maximum number of photos supported by that theme, iPhoto won’t let you add another one.

Moving to a different page. You can move a photo to a different page. Be sure that your page thumbnails are visible (click the button), then drag the photo to its new page. The same points mentioned previously apply: if the destination page is full, iPhoto may change its page type to accommodate the new photo.

Removing a photo. To remove a photo, select the photo and press the Delete key, or drag the photo up to the photo thumbnails browser. iPhoto moves the photo to the thumbnails area.

You can also remove a photo by Control-clicking on it and choosing Remove Photo from the shortcut menu.

To remove the photo’s frame, switch to a page type that provides fewer photos, or simply ignore the empty frame—that’s what iPhoto will do when you order your book.

Swapping photos. To swap two photos on a page or spread, simply drag one photo to the other one.

Editing a photo. Need to edit a photo that you’ve placed on a page? Control-click on the photo and choose Edit Photo from the shortcut menu.

Adding photos from your library. To add additional photos to a book, drag them from your library to the book’s name in the Projects list.

To add a page, click the Add Pages button. If you’re viewing two-page spreads, iPhoto adds a full spread, which is two pages. To add just one page, switch to single-page view (click the View button).

To insert a new spread or page between two existing pages, use the page thumbnails browser to select the page that you want to precede the new page. For example, to add a new page between pages 4 and 5, select page 4, then click Add Pages.

When you add a page or spread, iPhoto gives the page or pages a layout from the book’s current theme, filled with empty photo frames. Customize the layout as desired.

Removing a page. To remove a page, select it in the pages thumbnail browser and press the Delete key. Or, Control-click on a blank area of the doomed page and choose Remove Page from the shortcut menu.

When you delete a page containing photos, iPhoto moves its photos to the photo thumbnail browser so you can use them elsewhere, if you like.

You can format your book’s text in several ways.

Globally: the Settings button. When you want to change the font iPhoto uses for every occurrence of an element in your book (such as its captions), use the Settings button. Tip: Each book theme provides its own text elements, and some provide more than others. The Settings dialog box is a convenient way to see what elements a theme provides.

Locally: the Fonts panel. Typographic consistency is important for a book like the one you’re reading, but for a photo book that contains only a few text elements, a bit of variety can be fun. You can format individual text elements—indeed, individual letters, if you want to—by using the Fonts panel. Select the text you want to format, and choose Edit > Font > Show Fonts (-T)

Here are more textual tips.

Low-rent formatting control. All themes provide at least one Introduction layout. But don’t feel obligated to write an introduction. You can adapt the Introduction page to other uses, such as a title page. You can also move items around on the page by using the spacebar or Tab key to bump a line of text to the right, and by pressing Return to move text down. These tricks don’t provide page-layout precision, but they work.

Consider a word processor. Planning a lot of text in your book? Consider using your favorite word processor to write and format the text. Then, move the text into iPhoto as needed: select the text you need for a given page, and copy it to the Clipboard. Next, switch to iPhoto, click in the destination text box, and paste. iPhoto even retains your formatting.

This approach lets you take advantage of a word processor’s superior editing features, not to mention its Save command—something iPhoto lacks.

Controlling paragraph formatting. iPhoto doesn’t provide controls for adjusting the spacing between lines (leading) or paragraph indents. Solution: Use your word processor. Format your text in a word processor, then copy and paste it into the text box on your book page.

Saving custom text styles. You’ve pasted in some custom formatting and would like to save it to apply to future books or to other pages in the same book. Here’s how.

First, click within the text box that contains the custom text. Then, Control-click and choose Styles from the shortcut menu’s Font submenu. In the dialog box that appears, click the Add to Favorites button. In the next dialog box, type a name for your custom style, click both check boxes, then click the Add button.

To use that custom style, select the text you want to format, and Control-click on it to summon the shortcut menu. Choose Styles from the Font submenu, then click the Favorite Styles button. Locate and choose your style in the pop-up menu, and click Apply.

Fun with glyphs. Some of Mac OS X’s fonts contain beautiful alternative characters, such as ornamental swashes and flourishes. To explore and use these alternative glyphs, choose Typography from the pop-up menu at the bottom of the Fonts panel. Then, explore the options in the Typography panel.

For a good example, choose the Zapfino font, then check out the Stylistic Variants portion of the Typography panel. The Apple Chancery font also has some interesting alternate characters.

Also, many fonts have old-style numerals that lend a classic look, as shown here with the Didot font.

If a font provides old-style numerals, you’ll see a Number Style entry in the Typography panel.

Who needs page numbers? Unless you’re putting a table of contents or index in your book, you have little reason to print a page number on each page. To remove page numbers, use the Settings dialog box or Control-click on a blank area of a page and make sure that the Show Page Numbers command is unchecked in the shortcut menu.

If you zoom in too far for a given photo’s resolution, iPhoto displays the yellow triangle of doom to let you know that you won’t get good quality at that zoom setting.

To adjust a photo’s exposure or add an effect, click the photo, then click the Adjust button. As with inkjet prints, some sharpening can improve quality.

You can, of course, also open the photo in edit view and do your cropping and exposure adjustments there. But doing so changes the photo everywhere you’ve used it.

You can use a photo as the background of a page. Put a photo behind the text that introduces your vacation book. Or use a close-up of a garden as the background for a page of weekend-getaway photos.

Start by clicking the Background pop-up menu and choosing the option with a faint palm tree on it:

Next, choose a layout and add photos and/or text to the page, as appropriate.

Tip

A busy background photo will overwhelm text or other photos, impairing legibility. Solution: increase the transparency of the background photo. Click the photo, and drag the slider to the right until the photo appears faint.

Before you click the Buy Book button to place your order, do one last proofreading pass of any text in your book. And remember, your Mac can help: select the text in a text box, Control-click, and choose Spelling > Check Spelling.

Placeholder text. Also check to see that you haven’t left placeholder text on any pages. (This is the stuff iPhoto inserts for you when you choose a page design that supports text. It usually reads Insert a description of your book.) But don’t sweat it: if your book contains placeholder text and you click Buy Book, iPhoto warns that the placeholder text won’t be printed.

Unused photo frames. Don’t worry if any pages have unused (gray) photo frames. iPhoto simply ignores them.

Preview. To preview your book, Control-click on a blank area of a page and choose Preview Book from the shortcut menu. iPhoto assembles the book and displays its pages in Mac OS X’s Preview program.

iPhoto’s book editor view provides a Play button that lets you display the pages of your book as a slide show. This opens up some interesting creative possibilities: you can take advantage of iPhoto’s book themes and page designs to create “slides” containing multiple images and text. (In the interest of readability, think twice about using a lot of small text.)

You can also send a “book slide show” to iDVD; while in book-edit view, choose Share > Send to iDVD.

iPhoto provides a somewhat hidden (and completely undocumented) command that helps prepare a book for its voyage to Apple’s printing service. The command is called Clean Up Book; to access it, Control-click on the gray area outside of your book’s page boundaries to bring up a shortcut menu.

Here’s what happens when you choose the Clean Up Book command.

Because this command can potentially alter your book’s formatting (for example, by changing a three-photo page type to a two-photo page type), you might think twice before choosing it. It’s better to go through your book yourself for final fine-tuning.

If you do use Clean Up Book and aren’t happy with the results, choose Undo before doing anything else to restore your book’s design.

iPhoto’s Print command is alive and well when you’re in book view: you can print some or all of your book for proofreading or to bind it yourself.

Printing a specific page is a bit cumbersome. Here’s the easiest way to do it: in iPhoto’s Print dialog box, click the Preview button. When Mac OS X’s Preview program starts, display its sidebar (choose View > Sidebar, or, in earlier Mac OS X versions, View > Drawer) to find the number of the page you want to print. Then, while still in the Preview program, choose the Print command and specify that page number.

It’s worth noting that you can order hardcover books with single-sided pages—just uncheck the Double-Sided Pages box as noted on the opposite page. In a single-sided book, the left-hand page of each spread is blank. That’s unlike any coffee-table book I’ve ever seen, but if it’s what you want, iPhoto can accommodate. (Softcover and wire-bound books always have double-sided pages.)

Want to flip a photo so that it appears “backwards”? Select the photo in its book frame, then Control-click on it and choose Mirror Image from the shortcut menu.

Here’s an easy design trick: Add the same photo to the left and right pages of a two-page spread. Then, mirror one of the photos so that the two photos appear to reflect one another.

When you have multiple items on a page, you can change the way they overlap. For example, some themes position photos so they overlap. To change the way two photos overlap, Control-click on a photo and choose Move to Front or Send to Back.

You can perform several PDF-related tricks with your books. For more details on these tricks, see www.macilife.com/iphoto.

Combining book designs. You love one of the page designs from the Family Album theme, but you really want to use the Line Border theme for your book. No problem—if you’re using Mac OS X Leopard, where the Preview program boasts some powerful PDF-manipulation talents.

Here’s the big picture. Create the page that you’ll want to add to a different book. Preview your book to create a PDF in the Preview program. Extract the page that you want to put in the different book, and save it as a JPEG, with maximum quality. Then, choose Tools > Adjust Size, and specify a width of at least 3,000 pixels. Save this enlarged JPEG, add it to your iPhoto library, and then add it to the book project, choosing a layout that provides one photo per page. The result: two different themes within one book.

Here’s a spread that presents some old photos using the Family Album theme opposite some new photos and the Line Border theme.

Book page to poster. How would you like take one page of a book and turn it into a 20 by 30 inch poster? Create a high-resolution version of a page using Preview as described above, then use edit view to crop it to the proportions of the specific print size you want (such as 20 by 30 inches). Then order a print of the page.

PDFs everywhere. Use the Print command to create a PDF of your book (choose Save as PDF in the Print dialog box). Email the PDF to a friend. Post it on your Web site. Include it in the DVD-ROM portion of an iDVD project (page 312). Or stash it in your iTunes library, if that’s your idea of fun (page 86).

A bigger year. For iPhoto ’08, calendars measure 10.4 by 13 inches—70 percent larger than iPhoto ’06 calendars.

When creating a calendar, try to choose photos that relate to a given month. Use photos of a family member for the month of his or her birthday. If you have some particularly fine holiday shots, use them for the month of December. This sounds obvious, I know, but you’d be surprised how many times I see iPhoto calendars with photos that bear no relationship to the months in which they appear.

Think vivid. I’ve ordered several calendars, and in my experience, photos with soft, muted colors often print poorly. You’re likely to see faint vertical stripes, sometimes called banding, in the photos. I get the best results when I use photos that have bright, vivid colors. Black-and-white photos work beautifully, too, provided they have strong contrast.

Laying out a calendar involves many of the same techniques behind book creation (pages 204–213). You can add photos by hand, dragging them from the thumbnails area into specific months, or you can click the Autoflow button and have iPhoto sling the photos into your year as it sees fit. As with books, I prefer the manual layout technique for calendars.

How many photos in a month? iPhoto’s calendar themes, like its book themes, provide multiple page designs. Some designs provide for just one photo for a given month, while others allow for a half dozen or more.

I like to minimize the number of photos I use each month. Bigger photos have a more dramatic look, and they’re easier to see and appreciate when the calendar is hanging on a wall at the opposite end of a room. For most of my calendars, I put just one photo on each month.

That’s a rule that begs to be broken, and I do break it now and then. If I have relatively low-resolution photos and iPhoto displays its yellow warning triangle, I’ll switch to a page design that has smaller photo frames. Or if I have a series of photos that tells a story about a particular month, I’ll choose a page design that lets me use all of those photos.

Top, bottom, or both? Normally, iPhoto’s calendar view displays both halves of a given month—that is, the upper portion, where your photos appear, and the lower portion, where the days and weeks are displayed. Between those two halves is the spiral binding that holds the calendar together.

But when you’re fine-tuning a calendar’s design, you may find it useful to display only the upper or lower portions. The answer? Tear out the spiral binding. Click the single-pages View button (), and iPhoto displays only the upper or lower portion of a month.

To switch between viewing the upper or lower portion of a month, display the calendar’s page thumbnails (click the button at the top of the thumbnails area), then click the thumbnail of the page you want to view.

When creating a calendar, your photo options aren’t limited to just the page above each month. You can also add photos to individual dates. To commemorate a birthday, add a photo to the birthday girl’s date. To never forget your anniversary, put a wedding photo on the date. (Another good way to never forget an anniversary is to forget it just once, but this method is not recommended.)

To add a photo to a date, drag it from the thumbnails area of the calendar.

To remove a photo from a date, select the date and press the Delete key.

When creating a new calendar, you can choose to have iPhoto include event information from iCal (discussed on page 222). You can also add iCal data to an existing calendar by clicking the Settings button and checking the appropriate Import iCal Calendars box.

Don’t use iCal to manage your life? As I mentioned on page 223, you can download thousands of calendars from iCalShare (www.icalshare.com). Because I like my calendars to include the phases of the moon, I subscribed to a lunar calendar at iCalShare. When I’m creating a new calendar, I simply check the moon-phases calendar and iPhoto does the rest.

Many of the typographic tips that apply to books (pages 210–211) also apply to calendars.

Global formatting. You can change the fonts that iPhoto uses for various elements of the calendar—its dates and captions, for example—by clicking the Settings button, then clicking Styles. Most of the items in the Settings dialog box are self-explanatory. The two that are less than obvious are Page Text and Comments. The Page Text item controls the font in which dates, days of the week, and the month appear. The Comments item controls the formatting of custom text that you add.

Local formatting. As with books, you can also override iPhoto’s font settings and apply formatting to individual text items, but within limits: you can’t apply local formatting to a specific date. (For example, you can’t have February 14 appear in a bold red font.) You can apply local formatting only to comments and photo captions. To do so, display the item’s text box (click on the date, and the text box zooms into view), then select the text and use the Fonts panel as described on pages 210–211.

Curl those quotes. It’s common to use apostrophes in calendars: Sophie’s Birthday, President’s Day, and so on. But iPhoto commits a cardinal typographic sin by using those heinous “typewriter quotes” instead of true typographer’s quotes:

Heinous: Sophie’s Birthday

Correct: Sophie’s Birthday

Fortunately, it’s easy to make your quotes typographically correct. To get a true typographer’s apostrophe, press Shift-Option-] (that’s the right-bracket key, just above the Return key).

Burning photos involves selecting what you want to burn, then telling iPhoto to light a match.

You can display photos on a disc using the same techniques that you use to display photos stored in your iPhoto library. You can also display basic slide shows, email photos, and order prints.

However, you can’t edit photos stored on a burned disc, nor can you create an iWeb photo album, a Web gallery album, a saved slide show, a book, a calendar, or a greeting card. To perform these tasks, add the photos to your photo library as described at right.

To modify an item that’s stored on a burned disc, you must copy it to your iPhoto library.

To copy an item, select it and drag it to the Events or Photos item in the Library area.

Before creating a new library, you may want to back up your existing library by dragging your iPhoto Library to another hard drive or to a blank CD or DVD. For some backup strategies, see the sidebar on the opposite page.

There may be times when you want to switch to a different iPhoto library—for example, to access the photos in an older library. Here’s how.

Before you buy a scanner, take stock of what types of media you’ll need to digitize. Do you have negatives, prints, slides, or all three? Not all scanners are ideal for every task.

Flatbed scanners. If you’ll be scanning printed photos, a flatbed scanner is your best bet. Place a photo face down on the scanner’s glass, and a sensor glides beneath it and captures the image.

Repeating this process for hundreds of photos can be tedious. If you have a closet full of photos, you may want to look for a scanner that supports an automatic document feeder so you can scan a stack of photos without having to hand-feed the scanner. Some flatbeds include photo feeders that can handle up to 24 prints in sizes up to 4 by 6 inches. Other scanners accept optional document feeders. Just be sure to verify that the document feeder can handle photos—many can’t.

Film scanners. A print is one generation away from the original image, and may have faded with time or been poorly printed to begin with. Worse, many photos are printed on linen-finish paper, whose rough texture blurs image detail when scanned. Bottom line: you’ll get better results by scanning the original film.

Many flatbed scanners include a film adaptor for scanning negatives or slides. With some scanners, the adaptor snaps on to the scanner’s bed. A more convenient option is a scanner with the adaptor built into the lid, such as Epson’s Perfection V750-M Pro. Like many high-end flatbed units, this scanner can scan negatives, mounted slides and, unlike many flatbeds, medium-format film, such as the 120 format popular in old cameras.

A flatbed scanner with a film adaptor is a versatile scanning system, but a film scanner provides much sharper scans of negatives and slides. Unfortunately, this quality will cost you: film scanners cost more than flatbeds.

Many film scanners provide a dust- and scratch-removal option called Digital ICE (short for image correction/enhancement). Developed by Kodak’s Austin Development Center (www.asf.com) and licensed to numerous scanner manufacturers, Digital ICE does an astonishingly good job of cleaning up color film. However, it doesn’t work with black-and-white negatives.

Whether you use a flatbed or film scanner, you’ll encounter enough jargon to intimidate an astronaut: histograms, tone curves, black points, white points. Don’t fret: all scanners include software that provides presets for common scanning scenarios, such as scanning for color inkjet output. Start with these presets. As you learn about scanning, you can customize settings to optimize your exposures.

The right resolution. A critical scanning setting deals with how many dots per inch (dpi) the scanner uses to represent an image. Volumes have been written about scanning resolution, but it boils down to a simple rule of thumb: If you’re using a flatbed scanner and you plan to print your scans on a photo inkjet printer, you can get fine results with a resolution of 180 to 240 dpi. If you plan to order photographic prints from your scans, scan at 300 dpi. Scanning at more than 300 dpi will usually not improve quality—but it will definitely use more disk space.

Film scanners are different. A film scanner scans a much smaller original—for example, a 35mm negative instead of a 4 by 6 inch print. To produce enough data for high-quality prints, a film scanner must scan at a much higher resolution than a flatbed. The film scanner I use, Minolta’s Scan Elite 5400, scans at up to 5400 dpi.

This difference in approach can make for even more head scratching when it comes time to decide what resolution to use. Just do what I do: use the presets in the scanning software. I typically choose my film scanner’s “PhotoCD 2048 by 3072” option, which yields a file roughly equivalent to a six-megapixel image.

Special circumstances. If you plan to apply iPhoto’s or iMovie’s Ken Burns effect to an image, you’ll want a high-resolution scan so you can zoom in without encountering jagged pixels. Experiment to find the best resolution for a specific image and zoom setting.

In a related vein, if you plan to crop out unwanted portions of an image, scan at a higher resolution than you might normally use. Cropping discards pixels, so the more data you have to begin with, the more cropping flexibility you have.

Format strategies. Which file format should you use for saving images? The JPEG format is lossy: it sacrifices quality slightly in order to save disk space. If this is the last time you plan to scan those old photos, you may not want to save them in a lossy format. When scanning my old slides and negatives, I save the images as TIFF files.