iLife '04: The Missing Manual

Painting Out Freckles, Scratches, and Hairs

iPhoto’s Retouch brush lets you paint away scratches, spots, hairs, or any other small flaws in your photos with a few quick strokes. (See Figure 8-4.)

The operative word here is small. The Retouch brush can’t wipe out a big blob of spaghetti sauce on your son’s white shirt or completely erase somebody’s mustache.

UP TO SPEEDWhen Cropping Problems Crop Up

Remember that cropping always shrinks your photos. Take away too many pixels, and your photo may end up too small (that is, with too low a resolution to print or display properly).

Here’s an example: You start with a 1600 x 1200 pixel photo. Ordinarily, that’s large enough to be printed as a high-quality, standard 8 x 10 portrait.

Then you go in and crop the shot. Now the composition is perfect, but your photo only measures 800 x 640 pixels. You’ve tossed out nearly a million and a half pixels.

The photo no longer has a high enough resolution (pixels per inch) to produce a high-quality 8 x 10. The printer is forced to blow up the photo to fill the specified paper size, producing visible, jaggy-edged pixels in the printout. The 800 x 640 pixel version of your photo would make a great 4 x 5 print (if that were even a standard size print)—but pushing the print’s size up further noticeably degrades the quality.

Therein lies a great advantage of using a high-resolution digital camera (5 or 6 megapixels, for example). Because each shot starts out with such a high resolution, you can afford to shave ...