The iPhoto 4 Book

Rating:
Summary: iPhoto 4 Laughing Out Loud
Review: Calling The iPhoto 4 Book "just" an instruction manual doesn't do it justice, it was a laugh out loud don't want to put in down read. I laughed out loud so many times I started getting looks from my family. If school text books were this engaging and fun to read we would have more "geeks" on our hands. The book was written from an almost comic conversational stand. It felt like you were sitting around with some of your friends on Saturday night talking about making a funny slide show instead of the old fashioned click "oops that slide was put in backwards slide show." You almost felt like the authors were sitting there with you just shooting the breeze while they imparted their knowledge on how to make friends and family beg to see your photos.

The book is broken down into eight different parts with twenty five chapters complete with notes, tips and sidebars. The sidebars had little stories or observations that will have you chuckling. The walk through was so simple and easy to follow that you almost didn't want the book to end.

Chapter One: Taking Interesting Photos - This chapter covers the garbage in garbage out concept. While computers and software have come a long way in helping you tweak your photos it doesn't help if the original photo has nothing to offer. There should be good composition, object or person etc should fill most of the frame, good lighting and a direction that the eye follows, if it doesn't have all or most of those elements use a different photo. Lag time and how to compensate for it is covered. "Lag time the delay between when you press the shutter button to when the picture is actually taken, is usually more prevalent in the lower end digital cameras". Plus other nifty tips and tricks.

Chapter Two: Getting Started With iPhoto - Covers registering iPhoto if you haven't used it before. The "Organize" mode is where you will be spending most of your time. When you pass your mouse over the icons at the bottom of the screen a little box appears and gives you a bit more info on the icon. In "Edit" mode you can go from the default basic editing program that comes with iPhoto to whatever graphic program you have on your computer. I set mine to default to Photoshop CS. You can also adjust the display pane so your photos are displayed in the number of rows and columns you like working in. You can also change the background color of the display pane from white to black or any of the grays in between.

Chapter Three: Importing Pictures - The "Import" mode lets you bring your photos into iPhoto either directly from your camera, compact flash, CD/DVD or photos already on your hard drive. You can hook your camera up directly to your MAC with either a USB or Firewire cable and bring your photos into iPhoto that way or you could use a card reader. Some cameras have a few more hoops to jump through for you to get your photos into iPhoto, a card reader simplifies things. Using a CD/DVD or hard drive just drag and drop your photos into iPhoto.

Chapter Four: Organizing Your Photos - We sometimes get very excited once we start something new that we forget this important step that will save us much frustration in the long run. Organizing when you first start pulling photos into iPhoto it might not seem like a big deal but once you start taking more and more photos you will wish you had done so in the beginning. This chapter covers how the program will organize things to a point even if you don't in the beginning. It creates a film roll for groups of pictures from an import session. It has a quick view of sorts where you can see all of the photos you imported in the last month or the last roll you imported. You can also rearrange the order of photos, so if you are building a slideshow and you want uncle Bob goofing off to start the slide show move that photo to the beginning. Some of us remember when we had only so much space to name a file, like 8 characters. We now can put more info into naming our files, like "Northern Lights Christmas Day 2004" so at least the name of the roll can be easily identified.

Chapter Five: Leveraging the Power of Albums - Albums are the next progression from the film rolls of chapter 4. You can create and customize albums, by adding, removing and rearranging photos in the albums, you can also merge albums. Or create a smart album. With smart albums you can use keywords or ratings to put specific photos within your album. This becomes very valuable when you want to create slideshows or have a book printed.

Chapter Six: Assigning Titles, Comments & Keywords to Images - Your camera has a default name that it gives your images, most of the time it begins with DSCN followed by several numbers. That's fine to a point but the images that you are keeping you might want to give a relevant name or something other than the numerical code. Comments and keywords are a great tool to use to find that image or images later. You can use "vacation" as a all around comment or keyword, but if you want to get more specific you can put in where you took the vacation like "Brazil Vacation". So you can use those words or comments for iPhoto to only show you the pics you want, it's a great way to weed through the tons of photos and create a smart album.

Chapter Seven: Understanding the Edit Tools - Once you click on the edit tab you see a bunch more tools available to use. You can crop, rotate, retouch, enhance, fix red-eye, adjust brightness/contrast, convert to B&W or to Sepia tone. You can use the default edit tool within iPhoto or you can double click and it will take you to the other application you specified during your setup phase.

Chapter Eight: Better Photography through Editing - You learn about aspect ratio cropping. I really like this chapter so when my clients want me to crop more of the photo to make them look slimmer but they want more of the back ground I will have them read this chapter. You should however have a general idea how you are going to use the photo. You will need to decide if you want a 5x7 or a 4x6 or if you are just using it for the web. You learn how to use the red-eye correction tool. The enhance tool works by taking the lightest part of your photo and the darkest part of your photo, it however is going under the assumption that the light part is white and the dark part is black for it to get a balance of colors between. Sometimes the enhance tools works well and at other times when the colors are not so readily discernible it can make your photo a bit cartoonish. If you want to try and tweak the image yourself you can use the brightness/contrast tool. You can also "retouch" that piece of broccoli stuck between uncle Bob's teeth to make you image better. Changing the photo to either B&W or Sepia tone. This technique works better with some photos than with others. Experiment to see what works best and remember if you don't like any of the changes you can always revert back to the original.

Chapter Nine: - Editing Outside of iPhoto - You set this up in an earlier chapter. iPhoto allows you to make some basic edits to your photo if you have some text you want to add or other more dramatic changes you will need to go to the outside editor. You need to open the outside editor within iPhoto for any changes to apply to the current image. iPhoto makes a copy of your original file so if after your changes you decide to go back to the original you can. You do however have to make sure that the images is saved in the same format .jpeg or iPhoto won't recognize that you have made any changes to this file. If you add layers just save a .PSD file then flatten the layers and save it as a .jpeg file and you're covered if you want to go back and make more changes.

Chapter Ten: Making A Slideshow - This is not your old high school slide projector slide show. This one is way cooler. You can add transitions, set how long the slide will be displayed and chose to have the slides displayed randomly and scale the photos to fit the screen. Need to check this before going ahead because you might cause a few decapitations. You have the choice of creating a slideshow using an album or by selecting specific photos. To add some pizzaz to your slideshow you can add music. The only thing about this slideshow is the transition and timing applies to all slides you can't have different transitions within the same slideshow and you have to use the whole song.

Chapter Eleven: Basic Print Tools - This chapter covers the different types of printers, printer resolution, plus the different types of paper. It explains how to configure your printer to work with iPhoto. I loved the last part of this chapter about the photo off the low res camera, I laughed so hard. I have had clients bring me their out of focus, underexposed print and want me to make uncle Chester look like he's sitting there with them in the correctly exposed photo I just shot.

Chapter Twelve: Using iPhoto to Print Your Pictures - So after setting up your printer you are now ready to print out your photos. You have many options when it comes to printing you can print either one photo, a couple of photos on one page or a contact sheet of all of the photos within an album or that you have selected. You can choose the size of the images you would like to print, like 2 5x7's on one sheet, or 4 3x5's on one sheet, greeting cards etc...you can do this by using the presets that come with iPhoto. However if you print a contact sheet it does not print out the file name which can be a bit of a bummer if you have a lot of photos that look similar.

Chapter Thirteen: Printing Your Photos Professionally - With so many places offering you an opportunity to have your prints made from digital camera it's a shame not to take advantage of them. You have your local services like WalMart and Costco offering to make prints, greeting cards and calendars with ease. You also have your web services that allow you to upload your images and order more cool stuff like T-shirts, mugs and mouse pads plus other neat stuff. Of course with iPhoto you just have to hit the order prints button and you are on your way. It's pretty self explanatory once you log in.

Chapter Fourteen" Sharing Your Photos Electronically - This chapter covers sending email photos, building a QuickTime slideshow, creating a desktop image, making a screen saver and backing up your photos. I remember the first time I scanned an image and tried to send it (this was years and years ago) it took forever and of course it got kicked back to me and I crashed my aunts computer. I have since then learned the correct way to send photos via email. In iPhoto it's very simple to email photos. You can choose what size, small, medium or large and it automatically resizes the photo for you and off it goes. You can also make a slide show and export the images into to a QuickTime movie and email it to your family of baby's first steps. It shows how to setup a screen saver using your photos instead of the default blue. Plus the biggest reminder of all to backup your photos. I had the unfortunate experience of having to have my external drive saved. As we all know CD's are great but you can only fit so much info on one. I have over 250 GB's of photos from my clients. Burning CD after CD was driving me insane so I bought a large external drive dumped all of my work on it and thought I was safe. The partition failed the company couldn't figure out why because it never went anywhere it just sat on my desk it wasn't moved or anything. After the $1300. price tag to recover the photos (they were fortunate to recover everything) I do a double back up now. I went and bought a DVD burner to put my images on so at 4 GB's I will at least not have to store as many as I would a CD but I backup like a mad person now. (This is from the PC side of my life.)

Chapter Fifteen: Sharing Your Photos on the Internet - For those of you that have wanted to post your photos for the world and your friends and family to see this chapter walks you through setting up a .MAC account and publishing your photos with HomePage. You can build your website pretty easily with this program. Just click, click and click and a few more clicks and you're done. Pretty neat if you are one of those people that like to share your images while still on vacation you can send an email letting everyone know to go look at the new slides.

Chapter Sixteen: Creating an iPhoto Book Design - Any wanna be author's out there? Here's where you can astound your friends and family with a hard cover bound book of your photos. There are seven basic book themes that are built into iPhoto. Choose the one that bests suits the types of photos you are arranging. Try to do this before getting to far into the book, while you can change themes mid-book all of the custom text you so laboriously entered earlier will be lost. Remember however that it's one album per book. Make sure it's your best stuff that goes into this book the minimum charge for the book is $30.00. This book feature would be a great gift idea for the grand parents. Put together a day, a week or a year in the life of their favorite grandchild(ren) and you are sure to get unlimited baby sitting for a really long time.

Chapter Seventeen: Laying out Pages of the Book - Here's where you get into the meat and potatoes of laying out the pictures for your new bestseller. Get those photos together, make sure that the photos tell a story. Some pictures work best when they are shown together to tell a story some work stronger by themselves. This is where you get to decide how many photos will go on a page what order etc...

Chapter Eighteen: Adding Text to Dress up Your Book - Here's where you get to add the little blurbs that you think your picture needs. You can choose the font style, size and color in most of the templates. Make sure to spell check, spell check, nothing screams amateur like a misspelling for all the world to see. The font limitations I think are great. I know some of you want to add every font you have in your arsenal to your book, I have over 400 fonts and I use them sparingly. I have seen some brochures that contain so many fonts that it becomes a distraction.. OK down right annoying. So double check that your colors and typeface are easy to read.

Chapter Nineteen: Previewing and Printing Your Book - If you are going to plunk down $30.00 to have your book printed and bound preview before you buy. Heck make your own ink jet print of the book so you can see what it will look like. Also when you preview you can see if any text was cut off, and many other little things you might not have noticed on the screen. For those of you that like a challenge you get to learn about making your own book theme in this section. Once you have proofed your book you are now ready to order. Just click the order book and follow the directions and your master piece will be on its way.

Chapter Twenty: Creating an iMovie Slideshow - This is a step above the slideshow that you can create in iPhoto. The transition and slide duration limitations are gone. You can add a voiceover, use part of a song instead of the whole song and you can use multiple songs for more dramatic effects. The possibilities start becoming more exciting. You don't have to open iPhoto to create this slide show just launch iMovie and start drag and dropping and you're on your way. For the voice over you can use your built in microphone or attach your camcorder and use that microphone. You also have access to more effects to spice up your slide show. Just don't over do any once effect and you will be fine.

Chapter Twenty One: Creating and iDVD Slideshow - iDVD is the next level up from iMovie and the next level down from Final Cut. iDVD comes with many templates choose the one that suits your needs. You can customize it a bit by changing the colors and font sizes and some more stuff. You however have to use iPhoto to access your albums for this program. You have to use entire albums so get all of your photos sorted before you pull them through into iDVD. You can rearrange and delete slides in your show. You can add music for the intro and the slide show. Then preview before you burn.

Chapter Twenty Two thru Twenty Five: Are mostly odds and ends about what folders to stay out of, so you don't mess up your iPhoto library. Automating iPhoto with Apple Scripting. Twenty Questions and Using your digital cameras.

As I said in the beginning the book is very user friendly. It points out some of the glitches and things that will make you see red. Gives great examples and it does it with lots of humor. The only thing that I found a bit of putting was that the book was in black and white. Not a big deal. So even my totally afraid of the computer Grandmother could follow this book and make some cool slideshows.

Rating:
Summary: Best iPhoto Book EVER!
Review: The best thing about this book is it's conversational approach and handsome author. It's filled with fantastic content that's so entertaining I almost couldn't put it down, and I'm not saying that just because I wrote it! OK, maybe I am a little bit. But seriously, I had a good time writing it and I think you'll enjoy reading it just as much. Plus, my email addy is in the preface so you can tell me what you didn't like.

My sixty-[mumble] year old mom loved it and she's kinda technophobic. She's calling me and telling me about how she read a chapter, designed her own photo book and sent it off to Apple to have it printed all by herself. Trust me. If she's geeking out on a computer book, well, let's just say that she's no geek, so I musta done something right.