Create desktop background images in iPhoto
Jan 25, '05 09:43:00AM
Contributed by: Anonymous
I came across this idea the other day. If you want to spice up those pictures from your iPhoto library for use as Desktop images, try this:
- Grab a bunch of photos in iPhoto and create an album.
- Create a book from this album, and layout your pages any way you want.
- Instead of ordering a book (or in addition to), select Print from the File menu, and choose to save your book as a PDF.
- Open the PDF in Photoshop (or Preview for that matter), and save individual pages of your book as JPEGs.
You can now use these JPEGs as desktop images. It's not the most exciting hint for iPhoto 4, because most of the page layouts are pretty bland. But with iPhoto 5's new book layouts, you could end up with some pretty cool looking images, though I haven't yet tested it in iPhoto 5.
[robg adds: I tested this with iPhoto 5's new book options, and you can indeed make some creative desktop backgrounds. You'll probably want to do some Photoshop work on the exported JPEG, though -- the largest page size turns out to be 792x612 pixesl in size. I tested upscaling one to 1600x1236 (and then cropping the extra 36 pixels), and then used the Unsharp Mask to tighten it up a bit. The end result was more than acceptable for a desktop image...]
Comments (1)
Mac OS X Hints
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20050121103908756