iPhoto

My book The Skinny on Holiday Photo Gifts is now available on Apple's iBooks Store, as well as in PDF and EPUB format! Click here for sample pages, a detailed description, or to buy the book.

Make memorable and personalized gifts using your own photos! This step-by-step $5.99 book helps you create myriad gifts such as Pillows, Tote bags, Purses, Magnets & stickers, Canvas prints, Skins for laptops and portable devices, Postage stamps, Mugs, Keychains, Playing cards, Tree ornaments, Dry-erase calendars, Notepads, and Wine and beer bottle labels. You’ll also learn how to create spectacular cards and personalized calendars in Apple’s Photos for Mac and iPhoto. Then, you’ll learn step-by-step instructions for creating unique, do-it-yourself projects such as photo napkin rings, photo gift tags and wooden photo cubes. Along the way, you’ll also learn many valuable tips for improving the overall look of your projects, including: adjusting the color of your photos so they harmonize together, how to save your files for successful printing, the best ways to add text to photos, how to remove color from parts of your photo, and unusually impressive card designs.

While it’s true that Apple is phasing out iPhoto in favor of its new Photos app, iPhoto is still an incredibly powerful program and includes many features you likely know nothing about. If you don’t plan on moving to Yosemite 10.10.3, or if you elect to keep using iPhoto when you do—yep, it’ll still work!—here are four useful things that iPhoto can do that even the new Photos app currently cannot...click here to read the full story on Macworld.com

For an incredibly meaningful gift, look no further than a wall calendar hand-crafted in iPhoto. Apple’s calendars are nice and big (13 by 10.4 inches), beautiful, and affordable—$20 for a gift that lasts 12 months! Each one is wire-bound, with lots of room for pictures above the date grid. You can customize each month with text and titles, import holidays and events from iCal, and plop photos into individual date squares. It’s printed on gloriously thick matte stock, and even the packaging is a treat—it arrives inside a classy white envelope.

When you think about all the variables involved in producing a well exposed photo, it’s a wonder any photo turns out halfway decent. If you’ve got a great subject but terrible color, the following shot-saving solutions can come to the rescue in a variety of apps...click here to read the full story on Macworld.com

When iPad, iPhone, Apple TV and Mac users want to show off their best photos, there are several beautiful options, and happily, most don't cost a dime. Whether you’re setting up a formal viewing for your local photo club, hosting cocktail hour, a birthday party, or maybe you’ve merely managed to trap a neighbor in your house for a few minutes, the following options will set your pictures free… click here to read my latest Creaticity column on Macworld.

She's done! She's printed! I'm happy to say that the iPhoto 6 Missing Manual is ripe for purchase. As always, it's truly a joy to work on the Missing Manual series, and for this book I was honored to serve as production/tech editor and screen shot goddess.

iPhoto 6 is a wonderfully powerful tool and I love using it for photo importing and organizing, and for editing when I just don't have the time to play in Photoshop (or Elements) for more serious editing. My one complaint about this new version is that Apple is trying to force me into using iWeb for posting web photo galleries. That's right, they took away the "Publish to Home Page" option completely.