Brighten, Zoom and Balance Your Way To Better Photos With iPhoto For iPad [iOS Tips]

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Brightness

Photo editing is all about making changes to the visual image, using your own aesthetic preferences to make the picture just that much better than the original. With some simple tricks in iPhoto for iPad, you can make that good photo better, and that great photo sing.

iPhoto has three tools that you can use to do just that. Brighten, Zoom, and White Balance. While the features may be fairly intuitive, it never hurts to point them out, as not all of us are intuitive in the same way.

Brighten up your photos in two ways. First of all, you can adjust the brightness of the entire photo. Launch iPhoto and choose the photo you’d like to make brighter, or darker, if that’s your thing. We don’t judge. Tap the Exposure button in the lower left. That’s the second icon from the left; it looks like a little aperture symbol.

Tap on your photo where you want to adjust the brightness and iPhoto will figure out if you’re touching shadows or highlights. Drag your finger up or down to brighten or darken up the photo, respectively. You can also just use the sliders along the bottom, dragging the sun-shaped button to the left or right. You can also drag the little half and half buttons to change the contrast, or the outer rectangular buttons to adjust the shadows and highlights.

The Face Balance setting can be found by tapping on the palette icon, third from the left in the lower left corner of the screen. Choose your photo and tap the second icon from the far right, which will be different depending on where you left it last. The WB button stands for white balance. Tap on a face or skin tones in your photo, and drag up to saturate, down to de-saturate. Drag right to increase skin-tone warmth, and left to decrease. This is where your own preferences will come in, as each photo is different.

Finally, as you are doing all this post-processing, you’ll want to see how your changes look close up. Use the loupe to do so. Simply press and hold on your chosen image with two fingers and a big circular area will appear. This is the loupe, a digital version of the simple, small magnification device used by watch and jewelry makers to see small details more closely. Drag your two fingers around the photo to see, up close, the changes you’ve wrought.

Got an iOS tip of your own? Need help troubleshooting your iPhone, iPod touch or iPad? Drop me a line or leave a comment below.

Source: Laptop Mag

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