Product Reviews

Never mind the Mac mini, the biggest whoops and hollers among the audience at Apple CEO Steve Jobs' January keynote were reserved for a small feature in the new version of iPhoto: the ability to straighten photos.

On its own, this feature may seem to have engendered an extreme response, but as an example of what Apple has done with the iLife suite as a whole, the reaction was justified. Where last year the company brought all the applications in the package to maturity, this year it has enriched them to the point where the component applications offer far more power and flexibility than we have a right to expect for £49. There's no upgrade path for owners of iLife 04, but £49 is such good value that to complain about it seems churlish.

Although iTunes remains identical to the version available for download, all the other iApps in the suite have received significant upgrades.

The most arresting new development in iPhoto is one so apparently frivolous that we're embarrassed to admit how impressed we are with it. The version of iPhoto included with iLife 04 first introduced the ability to order linen-bound books of your photos from Apple. These were beautiful - if expensive - and Apple has extended the service with iPhoto 5. Books now come in four formats: the original hardback version and three paperback sizes, all of which can also now have content printed on both sides of the paper. The smallest, 8.9 x 6.7cm books (which start at £2.93, but must be ordered in multiples of three) are nothing short of adorable but can only contain pictures, not layouts. The 20 x 15cm (from £7.39) and 28 x 21.5cm (from £14.09) paperbacks can all use the new layouts that Apple has designed. These are stunning, and creating them is easy: pictures can be reordered at will, and page designs can be quickly altered based on templates linked to each theme. This is an excellent way to ensure your photos make it out of your Mac and can be archived in a way that's easy, reasonably cheap and spectacularly attractive.

You still also have the option of ordering

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Kodak prints through iPhoto, and these now start at only 18 pence for a 6 x 4in print. This is around the same price as printing from standalone photo devices such as the Epson PictureMate, and should in theory provide you with longer-lasting prints.

Of course, if you send off duff photos to be printed, you're liable to be disappointed with the results, but iPhoto 5 has introduced editing abilities that should help rescue all but the most cack-handed photographer's efforts.

The new Adjust button in the edit view gives you control over brightness, contrast, saturation, temperature, tint, sharpness, exposure and levels, and with typical Apple panache also displays an RGB histogram of the image, which updates live. No, it won't replace Photoshop CS, but it's easily powerful enough to make you think twice before buying Photoshop Elements. Sliders adjust the value of each, or you can nudge values by clicking on the icons at each end of the sliders.

It's in this dashboard that you also have the neat straighten control: as you drag the slider to rotate the picture clockwise or anticlockwise, a yellow grid is overlaid on the picture to help you line things up.

Slideshows have also been updated. They're now much more sophisticated, and consequently appear as separate entities in the Source list. Books do this, too, but iPhoto now supports nested folders in this list to keep things tidy. Each slide can have its own duration and transition (of which there are some slick new examples), and the slideshow can be set to fit to any audio track you specify. There's also the option of creating 16:9 cinematic slideshows, and any you do create can be easily passed to iMovie or iDVD for further work.

Keyword support has been extended - there's now a handy pop-up keyword browser - and you're prompted to add a title and description for your digital roll when you import. iPhoto 5 adds an iTunes-like search field to help track down photos, and there's also a new calendar palette that allows you to browse by date.

iPhoto also now supports Mpeg-4 and Raw formats. The former is the format commonly adopted by digital cameras to record movie clips, while the latter is a high-end, uncompressed format, which is beginning to filter down to consumer level. Its inclusion is to be welcomed, but do make sure your particular Raw-capable camera is supported (visit www.apple.com/macosx/upgrade/cameras.html).

True, it's not perfect - it's still not as responsive as we'd have liked, and it took a patch from Apple to address a few redraw issues we noted - but iPhoto 5 is still an essential upgrade, if only for the gorgeous books.