Apple Completes iLife for iOS With Introduction of iPhoto. The app has a lot more photo tweaking capability than you might expect from first blush, including fully non-destructive editing that can be selectively undone. It also improves a bit on the standard Photos app's organization, and greatly enhances sharing options. More importantly, for $4.99 you get a photo editing tool that can, in many ways, out-Photoshop Adobe's own Photoshop Touch.
As we mentioned, iPhoto is a universal app, so you can use it on iPads as well as iPhones. Apple says it's compatible with iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, and iPad 2 or higher, and requires iOS 5.1. We verified with Apple that as far as functionality is concerned, the iPad and iPhone versions are identical.
iPhoto includes breakthrough Multi-Touch™ features so you can use simple gestures to sort through hundreds of photos and find your best shots, enhance and retouch your images using fingertip brushes and share stunning photo journals with iCloud®. iMovie now gives you the ability to create amazing Hollywood-style trailers as you record HD video on your iPad and iPhone. GarageBand introduces Jam Session, an innovative and fun feature that allows a group of friends to wirelessly connect their iOS devices to play instruments and record live music together. Each app takes full advantage of the stunning Retina™ display on the new iPad for incredibly sharp and realistic images and video. The new iPad also features a 5 megapixel iSight® camera so you can record, edit and watch 1080p HD video all on the device.
"With the introduction of iPhoto, we've brought the entire suite of iLife apps to iOS and users are going to love it," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. "Whether brushing an effect onto a photo, shooting a movie trailer or jamming with friends to record a song, iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand let you make amazing creations on iPad and iPhone."
iPhoto, Apple's popular photography app, has been completely reimagined for iOS to take full advantage of the Retina display and intuitive Multi-Touch gestures on iPad and iPhone. Simple gestures can be used to select and compare photos side by side and flag your best shots. iPhoto gives you full control over color, exposure and contrast, and you simply touch the parts of the image you want to change. You can enhance pictures by adding beautiful Apple-designed effects with just a tap, or apply adjustments exactly where you want them with fingertip brushes. In addition to posting photos to Facebook, Flickr and Twitter, you can beam photos between your iPhone and iPad; stream photos and slideshows to your Apple TV® with AirPlay®; and use iCloud to publish photo journals to the web and share your stories with friends and family in a whole new way.
Image Editing With iPhoto
Once you have an image selected, you can use iPhoto's editing tools. On the iPad, the editing options are shown on the left all at once, including cropping, exposure, color, brushes, and effects. On the iPhone, clicking a small toolbox icon on the left slides out a tab of these same options to select from. Choosing one loads the particular editing options along the bottom. on the iPhone, the tool's icon shows at the left, while on the iPad the icon is highlighted in blue.
Crop
The crop tool lets you pinch to zoom an image, with an on-demand rule-of-thirds grid for composition. It also offers a dial to straighten or rotate an image arbitrarily, showing a grid to align objects vertically or horizontally. iPhoto will automatically zoom the image to fill the frame. Clicking the gear icon allows you to choose from a variety of aspect ratios, such as 16:9, 10:8, and 3:2, in vertical and horizontal versions (except 16:9 and 1:1 for obvious reasons).
Apple included an interesting use for an iOS device's gyroscope here. Tapping on the rotate dial turns it blue. You can now rotate your iPhone or iPad to straighten an image. It's clever, but it didn't work that well in our experience. Simply sliding your finger along the rotate dial seemed more accurate and effective.
Exposure
The exposure tool lets you adjust contrast, brightness, and tweak the white and black points. On the iPhone, each one of these controls is a separate slider. On the iPad, however, they are cleverly combined into one control. Shifting the white and black points can expand or contract the dynamic range, and moving the brightness control changes where the dynamic range lies. Moving the black or white point beyond the extreme, marked with a thin line, turns the edges of the toolbar red to indicate clipping of the shadows or highlights.
The three-way combined control is extremely intuitive whether you're a novice or an experienced image editor accustomed to a Levels dialog. Our only complaint is that the contrast control has some weird behavior at the extremes, but it's a result of the algorithms iPhoto uses for brightness and contrast. If you use the desktop version, you'll be used to this.
Clicking the gear icon gives you a couple options for the exposure control. For one, you can reset it to the original settings. Each editing tool allows you to reset it independently of the others. This is part of iPhoto's approach to non-destructive editing. If you're happy with some exposure edits, but want to undo your cropping or effects, you can do that without tossing everything and starting from scratch.
You can also copy and paste the edits from one image to another. You can either do individual settings like exposure only, or all settings in one feel swoop. This can speed up editing if you have a group of images taking under similar conditions. Once you have settings tweaked for one, copy and paste them to another, or to a whole group. You may now see why flagging can quickly become a convenient tool.
Color
Moving on to color, iPhoto for iOS offers some pretty simple tools. You can increase or decrease saturation, as well as selectively increase or decrease saturation in three ranges: blue skies, green foliage, or skin tones. Clicking the white balance icon also allows selecting a different white balance. There are familiar settings for indoor lighting, sunshine, clouds, etc. If those don't work for the lighting in your image, however, Apple also added two useful manual white balance controls—one for selecting a neutral gray, and one for balancing based on skin tones.
Using the regular manual white balance tool, you simply use a small circle to center on an area of the image that should be neutral gray. It works pretty well, and is similar to the neutral gray dropper tool in Photoshop. It doesn't work perfectly in every case, but if there's something that should be a reasonable shade of gray in a scene, it is far better than nothing.
The skin-based white balance tool will balance based on skin tones. Apple explained that this works regardless of the race of the people in a photo—skin tones actually reside in a fairly narrow range of hues, making the balancing quite effective. This is especially useful if you don't have a suitable neutral object in your photos and auto white balance settings aren't working.
In addition to the copy, paste, and reset color controls, you can also switch on an optional "preserve skin tones" option. This keeps skin tones looking natural while you otherwise crank up the saturation in an image. If an image has face-recognition data, this option will be on by default.
Brushes
The brushes tool is perhaps the most complex and powerful. These tools let you selectively apply certain edits to specific areas of an image by simply "painting" with your finger. Repair is used to fix small spots, lines, or blemishes. Red eye helps edit out the red eye effect in images taken in dim lighting with a flash. The remaining brushes saturate or desaturate, lighten or darken, or sharpen or soften. Simply pick one of the brushes, and start "painting on" an effect.
There's a lot of ways to control where the effect is applied. The options allow controlling how strong an effect is. Zooming in and out of an image allows painting in finer details. "Detect edges" will confine your painting to a specific area by looking at color and contrast differences. You can also erase your brush strokes. Alternately, you can use the options to apply an effect to a whole area, and then selectively erase the effect from where you don't want it.
Effects
Clicking the effects icon pops out a virtual swatch book to select various effects and filters. The warm & cool, duotone, black & white, and "aura" effects have visual sliders that let you adjust the effects. Simply slide your finger along, and iPhone changes the image. This makes it easy to dial in exactly what you want. The vintage and artistic filters you simply select by taping on them. Several effects include a vignette, which you can edit by pinching and zooming to change the size, and swiping to change the center. Some of the artistic filters have a graduated effect, which you can also adjust by swiping.
Users of apps like Instagram will appreciate these filters. Unlike Instagram, however, there's quite a bit more adjustability. The real-time feedback makes it easy, even fun, to try out different effects. Like other tools, you can copy and paste effects settings or reset them.
Because brushes and effects require far more processing power than the other editing tools, Apple employed an optimization technique that temporarily hides these edits when making additional color, exposure, or cropping adjustments. You'll see these "peel away" when selecting another tool, and a red "LED" lights up over them to let you know they aren't currently being shown.
Another handy tool to use while editing is the "original" view. Tap the small icon that looks like a page overlay, and iPhoto shows you want your image looked like before you started editing. Tap it again and you see your edits. You can also tap and hold on this button for a temporary toggle.
One last caveat about edited photos: by default, iPhoto keeps the edited image in your camera roll. Like iPhoto on Mac OS X, all your edits are non-destructive, so you can revert to the original at any time using the option menu. But if you want to keep the original and edited versions, you need to use the sharing options to save an edited copy to your camera roll. Again, being used to other image editors for iOS, this behavior was confusing at first. But rest assured your original image is always there if you need it.
Photo and article credit to http://arstechnica.com
As we mentioned, iPhoto is a universal app, so you can use it on iPads as well as iPhones. Apple says it's compatible with iPhone 4, iPhone 4S, and iPad 2 or higher, and requires iOS 5.1. We verified with Apple that as far as functionality is concerned, the iPad and iPhone versions are identical.
iPhoto includes breakthrough Multi-Touch™ features so you can use simple gestures to sort through hundreds of photos and find your best shots, enhance and retouch your images using fingertip brushes and share stunning photo journals with iCloud®. iMovie now gives you the ability to create amazing Hollywood-style trailers as you record HD video on your iPad and iPhone. GarageBand introduces Jam Session, an innovative and fun feature that allows a group of friends to wirelessly connect their iOS devices to play instruments and record live music together. Each app takes full advantage of the stunning Retina™ display on the new iPad for incredibly sharp and realistic images and video. The new iPad also features a 5 megapixel iSight® camera so you can record, edit and watch 1080p HD video all on the device.
"With the introduction of iPhoto, we've brought the entire suite of iLife apps to iOS and users are going to love it," said Philip Schiller, Apple's senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. "Whether brushing an effect onto a photo, shooting a movie trailer or jamming with friends to record a song, iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand let you make amazing creations on iPad and iPhone."
Image Editing With iPhoto
Once you have an image selected, you can use iPhoto's editing tools. On the iPad, the editing options are shown on the left all at once, including cropping, exposure, color, brushes, and effects. On the iPhone, clicking a small toolbox icon on the left slides out a tab of these same options to select from. Choosing one loads the particular editing options along the bottom. on the iPhone, the tool's icon shows at the left, while on the iPad the icon is highlighted in blue.
Crop
The crop tool lets you pinch to zoom an image, with an on-demand rule-of-thirds grid for composition. It also offers a dial to straighten or rotate an image arbitrarily, showing a grid to align objects vertically or horizontally. iPhoto will automatically zoom the image to fill the frame. Clicking the gear icon allows you to choose from a variety of aspect ratios, such as 16:9, 10:8, and 3:2, in vertical and horizontal versions (except 16:9 and 1:1 for obvious reasons).
Apple included an interesting use for an iOS device's gyroscope here. Tapping on the rotate dial turns it blue. You can now rotate your iPhone or iPad to straighten an image. It's clever, but it didn't work that well in our experience. Simply sliding your finger along the rotate dial seemed more accurate and effective.
Exposure
The exposure tool lets you adjust contrast, brightness, and tweak the white and black points. On the iPhone, each one of these controls is a separate slider. On the iPad, however, they are cleverly combined into one control. Shifting the white and black points can expand or contract the dynamic range, and moving the brightness control changes where the dynamic range lies. Moving the black or white point beyond the extreme, marked with a thin line, turns the edges of the toolbar red to indicate clipping of the shadows or highlights.
The three-way combined control is extremely intuitive whether you're a novice or an experienced image editor accustomed to a Levels dialog. Our only complaint is that the contrast control has some weird behavior at the extremes, but it's a result of the algorithms iPhoto uses for brightness and contrast. If you use the desktop version, you'll be used to this.
Clicking the gear icon gives you a couple options for the exposure control. For one, you can reset it to the original settings. Each editing tool allows you to reset it independently of the others. This is part of iPhoto's approach to non-destructive editing. If you're happy with some exposure edits, but want to undo your cropping or effects, you can do that without tossing everything and starting from scratch.
You can also copy and paste the edits from one image to another. You can either do individual settings like exposure only, or all settings in one feel swoop. This can speed up editing if you have a group of images taking under similar conditions. Once you have settings tweaked for one, copy and paste them to another, or to a whole group. You may now see why flagging can quickly become a convenient tool.
Color
Moving on to color, iPhoto for iOS offers some pretty simple tools. You can increase or decrease saturation, as well as selectively increase or decrease saturation in three ranges: blue skies, green foliage, or skin tones. Clicking the white balance icon also allows selecting a different white balance. There are familiar settings for indoor lighting, sunshine, clouds, etc. If those don't work for the lighting in your image, however, Apple also added two useful manual white balance controls—one for selecting a neutral gray, and one for balancing based on skin tones.
Using the regular manual white balance tool, you simply use a small circle to center on an area of the image that should be neutral gray. It works pretty well, and is similar to the neutral gray dropper tool in Photoshop. It doesn't work perfectly in every case, but if there's something that should be a reasonable shade of gray in a scene, it is far better than nothing.
The skin-based white balance tool will balance based on skin tones. Apple explained that this works regardless of the race of the people in a photo—skin tones actually reside in a fairly narrow range of hues, making the balancing quite effective. This is especially useful if you don't have a suitable neutral object in your photos and auto white balance settings aren't working.
In addition to the copy, paste, and reset color controls, you can also switch on an optional "preserve skin tones" option. This keeps skin tones looking natural while you otherwise crank up the saturation in an image. If an image has face-recognition data, this option will be on by default.
Brushes
The brushes tool is perhaps the most complex and powerful. These tools let you selectively apply certain edits to specific areas of an image by simply "painting" with your finger. Repair is used to fix small spots, lines, or blemishes. Red eye helps edit out the red eye effect in images taken in dim lighting with a flash. The remaining brushes saturate or desaturate, lighten or darken, or sharpen or soften. Simply pick one of the brushes, and start "painting on" an effect.
There's a lot of ways to control where the effect is applied. The options allow controlling how strong an effect is. Zooming in and out of an image allows painting in finer details. "Detect edges" will confine your painting to a specific area by looking at color and contrast differences. You can also erase your brush strokes. Alternately, you can use the options to apply an effect to a whole area, and then selectively erase the effect from where you don't want it.
Effects
Clicking the effects icon pops out a virtual swatch book to select various effects and filters. The warm & cool, duotone, black & white, and "aura" effects have visual sliders that let you adjust the effects. Simply slide your finger along, and iPhone changes the image. This makes it easy to dial in exactly what you want. The vintage and artistic filters you simply select by taping on them. Several effects include a vignette, which you can edit by pinching and zooming to change the size, and swiping to change the center. Some of the artistic filters have a graduated effect, which you can also adjust by swiping.
Users of apps like Instagram will appreciate these filters. Unlike Instagram, however, there's quite a bit more adjustability. The real-time feedback makes it easy, even fun, to try out different effects. Like other tools, you can copy and paste effects settings or reset them.
Because brushes and effects require far more processing power than the other editing tools, Apple employed an optimization technique that temporarily hides these edits when making additional color, exposure, or cropping adjustments. You'll see these "peel away" when selecting another tool, and a red "LED" lights up over them to let you know they aren't currently being shown.
One last caveat about edited photos: by default, iPhoto keeps the edited image in your camera roll. Like iPhoto on Mac OS X, all your edits are non-destructive, so you can revert to the original at any time using the option menu. But if you want to keep the original and edited versions, you need to use the sharing options to save an edited copy to your camera roll. Again, being used to other image editors for iOS, this behavior was confusing at first. But rest assured your original image is always there if you need it.
Photo and article credit to http://arstechnica.com