Apple's Mac mini - Tempting PC Users Everywhere

Editing Images with iPhoto 5

If you double-click on any image in iPhoto, you are essentially dropped into an Edit mode.  Getting back and forth between the edit mode and the browsing mode is much simpler in iPhoto 5 than it was in 4. Just hit the Done button and you're back to browsing without the editing tools.  But the real benefit of iPhoto 5's editing mode is that you now have all of your images at the top of the window for you to scroll through, instead of having to go back to browsing mode and then re-enter editing mode.  You can also scroll left and right using the arrow keys at the bottom right corner of the window. 

Given that it is designed for the type of photo editing that the vast majority of digital camera owners will be doing, the editing controls in iPhoto 5 aren't too surprising.  You have an easily accessible row of buttons at the bottom of your picture window, so there's no going to a separate tool box or pulling down another menu. 

The first one is rotate, which is self-explanatory.  The next tool is a drop-down for dimensions (or ratios) to constrain the image canvas to prepare it better for printing; and next to that drop-down, the crop button that will finish the deed.

Then, there are the usual buttons: enhance, red-eye reduction, a retouch brush, B&W and sepia filters. And then the most important button - the Adjust button. 

Hitting the adjust button brings up a translucent dashboard that has sliders to adjust the following items: brightness, contrast, color saturation, color temperature, tint and sharpness.  There are also sliders to straighten the image as well as adjust the exposure and crop out the high/low color levels of the picture. 

All of the sliders work in real time and for the first time, I found myself actually adjusting things like color saturation and temperature on a regular basis for the images that I imported into iPhoto. It was just so easy, since all of the useful controls were all presented for you right there.

The straighten slider is particularly neat because as soon as you start moving it, a grid appears over the image to help guide your image straightening - one of the most useful features of iPhoto.  For the first time, I actually had straight images without spending a lot of time on them. 

Straightening a photo in iPhoto 5

Editing images in iPhoto is very easy, but unfortunately, not a Photoshop replacement for me. The problem is that saving (exporting) images from iPhoto is a bit of an ordeal compared to doing a simple Save As under Photoshop. 

The application is clearly designed for the needs of your normal digital camera enthusiast. You can easily email the photos, print them, make them into a book (which you can then order printed and made from Apple directly within the application) or even order prints using the integrated Kodak Print Service (also built-in directly to the application).  However, for web publication on a site like AnandTech where photos need to be ftp'd over, iPhoto does lose some of its appeal.  So for my needs, iPhoto is faster in some cases, but I can't get rid of Photoshop all together.  For example, iPhoto won't let me do a custom resize of an image that doesn't scale the length and width by the same proportions, something that is sometimes necessary for our front page graphics.  While iPhoto 5 produced all of the images for this article, one required launching Photoshop.  The one thing that I did like about iPhoto's file export is that you can give it width and height constraints for the images and it will handle all resizing for you. Unfortunately, it doesn't always stay within those bounds if you have images of varying sizes in the selection that you're exporting. 

For management of your pictures of friends, family and your hobbies, iPhoto works wonders, but it does leave me wishing that there was a more professional version of iPhoto that would add features like non-constrained sizes and ftp export.  I'd like to be able to replace Photoshop completely, simply because it's too expensive of an application and too feature-filled for the needs that I have; unfortunately, iPhoto wasn't the complete replacement that I was looking for, although it came extremely close.