Use the Quick Fix tools in iPhoto – iLife Tutorial

The majority of problems with the photos most people take are not that serious or difficult to fix, and you don’t need anything as heavyweight as Photoshop to do it. Even if you’re working with images more professionally, a lot of the editing you do is the kind of stuff that iPhoto can do. The idea with iPhoto is to make it as simple as possible while offering the best results, and not blinding you with science. And so it is that you get the ability to crop, rotate and straighten images to fix their orientation. To deal with the dreaded red-eye there’s a special tool, and blemishes can be removed with the Retouch tool. Finally there’s a simple one-click ‘Enhance’ tool which adds definition, brightness and contrast to liven up images that might be lacking something.

Step 1: Choose an image
Double click on an image, then click on the Edit button at the bottom-right corner to open the Edit tools. From the menu at the top, choose Quick Fixes.

Step 2: Rotate the image
Click on the Rotate button and you can flip the image through 90 or 180 degrees. iPhoto is good at guessing the orientation of your pictures, however.

Step 3: Enhance your image
Click the Enhance button and iPhoto will add some sharpness, contrast and definition. If you don’t like the results, you can always hit the Undo button.

Step 4: Fix red-eye
Red-eye is a problem when a camera’s flash reflects in people’s eyes. Click on Fix Red Eye, then use the Size slider to match that of the affected area.

Step 5: Zoom in
If needed, use the zoom slider to zoom in to fix red- eye. The auto-fix option will detect and fix problems after recognising that a photo contains a face.

Step 6: Straighten a picture
The Straighten tool can help you to fix wonky images without changing the overall shape of the picture, which it does by zooming in slightly.

Step 7: Crop a picture
Cropping can help you focus on the main area of interest. Drag to set the area, or choose a preset size value from the drop-down menu under the tool.

Step 8: Retouch a picture
The subject may have a spot or blemish. Or, there’s dirt on the lens or a fly lands on your arm – all of these are things you can remove easily from a shot.

Step 9: Make the edit
Set the size of the tool to match the blemish. Click on it and iPhoto takes a sample of the area around it – usually skin tone – and paints it over the blemish.

Click on the image below to zoom in on the annotations.