| I've had iPhoto for about a year, but wasn't familiar with any of the features save importing my photos from my camera. After a few hours with this book, however, I've mastered the program and received a lot of kudos on the improved quality of my shots. The first section is on how to take better pictures. As I've never taken a photography class, this section was particularly useful for me. It breaks down the different types of pictures (portraits, action shots, close-ups, night shots, etc...) and tells you how to get the best shot. The meat of the book is in the second section though - that part details how to use iPhoto, from importing pictures to touching them up and eliminating red eye. I primarily use my photos for my website. As such, I wanted to crop them, touch them up, and eliminate red eye. All three of those functions are easy to use after reading this book. It takes me a minute or so to turn my original, off-centered, dark, photo into something worthy of going online. The Missing Manual goes through each function in order, explains what it does, and what the potential drawbacks are. It also goes into file management - I had no idea that iPhoto stored a copy of the original of any image I altered, even if it was just to rotate it. I followed a suggestion in the book, downloaded a piece of freeware, and was able to open up a lot of space on my hard drive by eliminating these unnecessary duplicates. The Missing Manual also details how to edit photos in other programs (such as Adobe Photoshop) without causing problems in iPhoto. As I occasionally have to resize pictures based on the DPI, this information was quite useful. The third section describes how to show off your photos. As I usually just upload them to my website, I only perused this section. It looks to contain some useful information though - how to make a slideshow with a soundtrack, turn the slideshow into a QuickTime video, back up your photos on a DVD, upload them as a photo album to a website, print out a photo album, e-mail them, and more. |