Picture books by Apple Computers (part II)

The application I'm using is iPhoto, part of the iLife suite which contains the full range of applications that's needed for the digital lifestyle: iPhoto (organizing & editing digital photographs), iMovie (editing digital movies), iDVD (making your own DVDs), iTunes (digital music jukebox & organizing your mp3's) and Garageband (music composing & editing). Every new Macintosh comes with iLife installed. For Mac users who doesn't have iLife, it can be bought at your local Apple dealer or order it at the Apple Store.

With iPhoto you can organize and edit digital still pictures. But with iPhoto you can also layout and create your own picture books, all at the comfort of your own home. I'll try to give you an idea how this works.

After importing the pictures to iPhoto, you are ready to start selecting which pictures are worth keeping and which can be deleted. It's amazing how few pictures are good enough and worth keeping. I shot almost 400 pictures of the recent trip and I ended up keeping about 40 pictures. That's barely 10%!

Most pictures 'just out of the box' are okay, but sometimes you want to emphasize a certain aspect of the picture. If you took a nice scenic view of a mountain side, you want to show the panoramic aspect of the picture. By cropping the picture to a more 'broad' proportion, the picture gains strength. Same goes for pictures where you want to show the glorious blue sky, you want to show more area above the 'horizon line' than below the line. If the gracious river is what you want to show, make sure that the water shows 2/3rd below the horizon line. This cropping (getting rid of unnecessary areas of a picture) trick works up to a certain amount. It helps to start with taking pictures the 'right way'.

After editing the pictures you want to use in your book, it's now time to select the size of the book. iPhoto has many so called 'themes' from which you can choose from. Each theme has it's own layout as well as design. After choosing the theme, you choose the size of the book. Most themes has three sizes from which you can choose. This is the first book I ordered using iPhoto, so I wanted to see what they are capable of. A hard covered book has a nice 'book' feel to it, so I ordered the hard cover version. The hard covered books are only available in the large format (about the size of an A4 page or 8.5 x 11 inches). Check out here to see which sizes are available as well as the prices.

Making a book is now merely dragging and dropping the pictures on the virtual book. On the upper part of the window, you can see which pictures are still available. The layout of each page can be changed, so if you want three pictures on a page or maybe only one page filling picture of your pet? Just press the layout button and select your desired layout of that page and drag-and-drop away!

It's always a nice 'problem' to think about which story-line to use. Making such a book gives the 'author & publisher' the opportunity to come up with a book that is entirely a personal view on a happening or trip. Just adding every picture you like will rarely make an interesting book to browse through. Surely you know such boring photo books (just ask your aunt or neighbor!). Try to limit to a certain aspect of the trip or happening. What do you want to show? That mythic atmosphere of the Greek temples? The quietness of the back country? Or the happiness of the wedding? I chose to make a picture book with just a few impressions (without descriptions) of the trip rather than a full review. Adding descriptions are possible, some themes are better suited than others though.

Okay, we are done and let's press the 'Buy book' button! iPhoto starts to crunch numbers and after a few minutes it is ready to upload the book to Apple's printing center. The size of the file which will be uploaded depends on the amount of pictures you used. My file was around 80 Mb, so a fast internet connection is recommended.