Welcome to Mac MediaCast episode 7.

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This episode we feature a quick tutorial and review on the new, more powerful photo editing tools in iPhoto 08.

Full transcript below the fold–

Hello everyone and welcome to Mac MediaCast 7 – with a quick tutorial on adjusting photos in iPhoto 08.

I’ve been having so much fun with the new upgrades in iPhoto that I’ve even purchased a .Mac account so I can show off my crappy iPhone photos with the world. Here’s a quick overview of iPhoto’s editing tools.

In iPhoto, click the edit button to get to work. I like to fire up the effects and adjust pallette right away. Nothing really new on the adjust pallette – just your B/W, color, and vignetting effects.

The cool stuff is on the adjust palette. You see the familiar Exposure and Contrast sliders – Exposure brightens or darkens all levels in the picture, and by adjusting contrast you lengthen or shorten the distance between the blacks and the whites in the image.

New to iPhoto are the Highlights and Shadows adjustments – they do exactly as you’d imagine – adjust the darkest or the lightest parts of the photo without bothering everything else. And it does it very well.

We have our familiar saturation slider, which raises and lowers the amount of color in the image, from grayscale on the extreme left, to, well, a mess on the extreme right.

Temperature “warms or cools” your image, and tint adjusts via green or magenta. A new cool feature is the Color Balance eyedropper that allows you to select a white or gray in the image and it will automatically attempt (attempt is the key word) to adjust the color balance in the neutrals. Kind of like an auto white balance in your digital cameras and editors.

Next we’ve got our standard sharpness slider, but below that is a great new “Reduce Noise” tool. This will reduce the grain that is introduced with some cameras – probably placed in there by Apple to help improve our questionable iPhone pictures. But it works well and can even be used as a neat effect when used to the extreme.

The straighten tool is a great way to adjust the rotation of your photo, especially when dealing with a funny-looking horizon.

And the crop tool has a great new “rule of thirds” feature that will help improve your composition. Remembering back to our tutorial on shooting better video – we know that it is pleasing to the eye to place important items in the photo on the intersections of this tic tac toe pattern.

All in all — very pleased with this new version of iPhoto. While not a replacement for advanced tools such as Photoshop or Aperture, it is a great photo collection utility with some added basic editing features.

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Thanks for watching this quick tutorial – for more great videos, articles, news & tutorials pertaining to Macs and multimedia, be sure to drop by MacMediacast.com

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