Women in Technology

Article:		A RAW Look at iPhoto 5
Subject:		Blurring?
Date:		2005-01-19 21:02:56
From:		freelancer
My big question is, though, does iPhoto 5 still blur pictures into oblivion when you view them? The smoothing/anti-aliasing renders the current iPhoto version completely unusable. (Preview does the same thing, making it, too, completely unusable as a viewer for photographs.) If they've finally fixed that, I, too, may jump for joy about iPhoto 5.

Showing messages 1 through 3 of 3.

• RE: Blurring?
  2005-01-20 01:03:20  Derrick Story | [View]
  
  
  Interesting how the Apple engineers tackled this "problem." In iPhoto 4, when you double-click an image to edit it, iPhoto would perform this progressive type load of the image. You would get a "blurry" full size picture that at some point would snap into clarity.
  
  iPhoto 5 handles this differently. When you double-click on a thumbnail, you get instead a mid-sized photo, about 320 x 240 that is sharp while iPhoto loads the rest of the image information. Then the image snaps to a full size picture (meaning that it fills your editing space) that is nice and sharp.
  
  I think this approach is better. You're always looking at a sharp image, regardless of the size.
• RE: Blurring?
  2005-01-21 22:39:10  robertjordan [View]
  
  
  I don't think freelancer was referring to the blurring of the image as it loads, but to the *very* soft antialiasing of the final displayed image. iPhoto 4 would often make some of my images appear annoyingly out of focus, even at full-screen size. True, some antialiasing has to occur to resize a 6MP image to screen size, but iPhoto 4 (and even Preview, as freelancer mentions, so perhaps it's a system-wide Quartz setting?) is so aggressive as to blur things out of focus. Do you know if this is done any better in '05?
• RE: Blurring?
  2005-01-20 06:08:48  freelancer [View]
  
  
  So they finally removed the anti-aliasing? That would be most welcome! I guess I'll know tomorrow, though; I ended up ordering iLife anyway, even though I have reservations about iPhoto and don't even currently use it because of this problem.
  
  Now if only they would make it not need to copy the pictures into its own file structure. That's the other misfeature that is a big problem with it.