iLife ’11: Rotate and Straighten Images in iPhoto

By Tony Bove from iLife '11 For Dummies

Use iPhoto to rotate a horizontal image and make it vertically oriented. For example, if you hold your camera sideways to take a picture of a tall object like a tree, your photo may be horizontally oriented (the tree is on its side). iPhoto fixes that. You may also want to rotate an image when viewing it in iLife for other reasons— for example, to rotate photos shot by a camera held upside down or pointed down.

You can quickly and easily rotate images by using one of these methods:

*While browsing thumbnails in the Viewer pane: Select the thumbnail, click the pop-up menu button on the lower right side, and choose Rotate from the pop-up menu.
After selecting an image: Choose Edit and then click the Rotate button in the Quick Fixes pane.

Either way, iPhoto rotates the entire image in 90-degree increments (right angles) counterclockwise. Every time you click Rotate, the photo rotates 90 degrees counterclockwise. To rotate clockwise, hold down the Option key while clicking Rotate. (You can switch to rotate clockwise when you click Rotate, and counterclockwise by holding down Option first, by choosing iPhoto→Preferences, clicking the General tab, and then clicking the clockwise arrow for the Rotate option.)

Choose Edit→Undo if you don’t like how the rotation turns out.

If the image is crooked, you can straighten it while editing. Follow these steps:

Click the Straighten button in the Quick Fixes pane.
Drag the angle slider to straighten the image or set it at an angle.

A grid appears in order to make it easier to set the image straight. Dragging the angle slider to the right sets the image at a positive angle; to the left, at a negative angle (as much as 10 degrees either way).
To finish, click Done.

By combining rotation and straightening, iPhoto offers great flexibility for setting the image at an angle, either for special effect or to correct the perspective.