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Apple CEO Steve Jobs' announcement of iPhoto at
January's MacWorld Expo caused a stir among Mac users and
digital photographers.
The next great thing, the FREE iPhoto is an OS-X
only download that imports, organizes, edits, publishes and
shares digital photos directly from a digital camera (and other
sources).
iPhoto sounded great enough to make me buy OS-X
and download the freebie immediately.
Not only did I cope with learning OS-X with its
impatiently dancing icons but tending to iPhoto as well. Here
are some of my experiences.
Import: iPhoto preferences can be defaulted to
open and download automatically whenever a digital camera is
connected via a USB cable. This works like a charm and the
images show up in iPhoto's Library section after a languid
download.
The Library is where all downloaded images
reside and their identified by Roll number and Image number:
i.e., Roll 1, Image 6. Fine for fundamental downloading but what
happens when we've downloaded for the 200th time?
Mr. Jobs said never have to mess with
complicated digital names again (to paraphrase) but what's more
complicated than Roll 4782-Image 21? Renaming and adding
keywords is still going to be an iPhoto chore.
Once images are downloaded, they can be
drag/dropped to Albums and rearranged in the Organize section.
The original image remains in the Library but renaming it in an
album also renames it in the Library. Confusion. If an image is
deleted from the Library, it is automatically deleted from all
Albums.
In the Edit section, iPhoto offers the
opportunity to Rotate (in 90 degree increments) an image, scale
(to several pre-set formats plus unconstrained), crop, correct
red-eye, and transform to black and white. Badly needed is a way
to darken, lighten, and adjust contrast but then, we're talking
about Photoshop.
Correcting red-eye works by changing the red
area to an eggplant color but the red must be a bright red.
Further, this tool will change any red color to the eggplant
color as you can see from the poinsettias above. Argh!
Next week, we'll examine making a book with
iPhoto and the many ways to share images in the Share pane. |