Enhance Your Login Picture With Visual Effects [OS X Tips]

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funkylogin

 

If you have a snapshot of yourself as a login picture, read on to learn how you can make it substantially more funky…

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Here’s another tip from Mac Kung Fu, which contains over 300 tips, tricks, hints and hacks for OS X. It’s available from Amazon as well as other bookstores, and also as an eBook for all eReaders.

On Macs that have a built-in camera, there’s an option to take a quick snapshot of yourself while you’re setting up your Mac. This photo then appears in the login window next to your username, and on the iCloud website. But the pic can be easily enhanced, as follows:

  1. Open Address Book (Finder->Applications->Address Book) and select your own entry in the list of contacts. If there’s more than one entry, look for the one that—when selected—has the word “me” beneath the thumbnail preview of the login pic.
  2. Double-click the thumbnail preview picture and, in the pop-out window, click the circular button to the right of the camera button at the bottom.
  3. This will open up an effects palette similar to the one seen in Photo Booth, and clicking on any of the previews will instantly apply the effect to your picture.
  4. By holding down Option and clicking and dragging the image after you’ve applied the effect, you can also rotate it (also hold Shift to “snap” the image to points on the compass-like circle that appears). Simply clicking and dragging without Option will let you reposition the image within the frame.
  5. Once you’ve finished, click the Set button at the top right of the window. Note that you can repeat these steps at a later date and will be shown the original iSight/FaceTime HD snapshot once more without the effects you added, ready for a different set of effects to be applied.

You can also click the camera icon in the pop-out effects window to take an entirely new photo for your login pic.

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