Lilahpops

Enjoy the power of iPhoto without buying expensive imaging software

The more I use iPhoto the more I love it. There are so many useful tools in this image editing program and I have realised I rarely use other photo editing software for these enhancements. It has been a personal mission, recently, to get the most out of iPhoto and online image editing tools to see just what can be accomplished without having to resort to the more expensive imaging software (I still use PhotoShop to learn the more intricate post-production techniques) and iPhoto has a lot to offer.

Of course, in a perfect world all the photos we snapped wouldn’t need any retouching at all…

In this article, I’ll focus on some of the tools you can use in iPhoto to improve your photos in just a few simple steps.

First, get a Mac!

Mac users are lucky: iPhoto is powerful without being difficult to learn. As with most of these things it simply requires a bit of exploration and experimentation. I won’t talk here about the ease of importing your photos to your computer, sorting them into albums, creating smart albums or making slideshows. I want to focus on editing your images with iPhoto, especially retouching, cropping and straightening.

Second, get an image

Take this image, for example. While it might not be the most creative of images, it happens to be a photo of one of my most favourite houses that I walk past quite regularly. There’s an intriguing mix of spookiness and tranquility.

So while the subject of the photo is interesting, the image itself could do with some improvement. Look at those telephone wires! And the corner of that car. And…isn’t the house a bit crooked?

Third, use the iPhoto tools

Retouch

Double-click the image and hit the Edit button. Select the Retouch tool. You’ll see a new option appear on the image that says Click or drag over blemish to remove and a Size slider.

The size of the retouch tool depends on the area you wish to retouch. As I am removing telephone wires here I chose a relatively small size. Once you are happy with the selected size you can click and drag it over the area to be retouched. This worked really well with the telephone wires. In the image below you can see that the click and drag effect seems to white out the blue background.

But as soon as you release the mouse button the background appears as desired. Below you can see the start of the disappearance of the telephone lines.

Straighten

What else? The house is crooked, isn’t it? Once again in Edit mode click on the Straighten tool. Grid lines appear over the photo making it nice and easy to straighten the subject. I lined up the front eaves of the house with one of the grid lines.

Crop

Lastly a crop to get rid of the car and to remove any unnecessary distractions from the house and we’re done!

Fourth, admire your new image

Here’s the final image.

So as you can see with a few simple steps you can really make a difference to your photos.

iPhoto has much more to offer and we’ll explore other tools in future articles.

Find your creative streak and turn your photos into comic strips!

I recently read a very detailed, comprehensive tutorial about enhancing your photos with a retro comic book effect. The tutorial is an excellent example of one of the many and varied post-production techniques you can apply to your own photos. I was inspired to try out this comic book effect on some of my own photos.

Again, one of my cats has the starring role.

The original images

As a proud cat owner, you would be right in assuming that I have amassed gazillions of photos of my cats. I took these shots a while ago, and although they were sadly overexposed, I thought they were quite expressive and decided to hold onto them until I found a use for them. And then I found this tutorial.

Adding the comic book effect

The tutorial over at the Photoshop Roadmap is easy to follow. There is also cartoon-type fonts for you to download. It’s fun and you’ll be pleased with the results. I’d love to know how you go in the comments.

I only took one deviation from the steps which was to use iPhoto to make the initial adjustments to the levels, saturation and color. Click the images below for the higher resolution versions.

So there you have it – my first comic strip!