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O’Reilly Press have just released this new edition of iPhoto 08. Its one of the well respected ‘Missing Manuals’ series, by David Pogue, and Derrick Story. The Missing Manuals are filling a valuable gap in that Apple do not include written instruction book with their computers. iPhoto is such a useful, and essential program that a book like this is necessary if we are to make use of its many hidden features.

For Mac users, iPhoto has no peer - its the complete integrated system and this book starts by giving the reader guidance in selecting, and using a digital camera. Then the main portion of the book deals with editing - from importing, resizing, correcting, fixing flaws, cropping, dealing with red eye, scratches, and imperfections. You will also learn about color balancing, how to use the histogram, what raw means, contrast, and sharpening.

For those of us who may have had a stab at Photoshop Elements, and found it too technical, Apple have taken the best and most useful of the features and included them for free in iPhoto. You get a great suite of editing tools, and this book tells you how to use them.

A book like this is best read with a digital camera, and a computer by your side - then you can experiment with some of the techniques, take your own photos and see how they can be improved, and then when you have mastered some of the lessons, the book shows you how to have them published - in a book, on the web, or maybe in a slideshow.

In essence, here are the tools to make you a better photographer, and after taking the photo, how to make the image even better. Lastly, when you have your photos perfected, here too are the ideas for computer storage - how to sort, arrange, flag, use tag words; after all, in no time you will likely have many hundreds, if not thousands of photos on your computer, and finding them will become a very useful skill that this book will tell you how to do.

So, if your digital photographic skills need honing, if you want to get the very most out of your ‘snaps’ pick up a copy of iPhoto 08 - 400 odd pages for only $35. Great value.