Featured Feature: Image Editing

It is inevitable. You have the ideal picture for your Inkubook, but the subject is a bit off center, there is a little too much background, or maybe you’d like to cut Cousin Rudy out altogether. After all, nothing is ever really perfect. Luckily, Inkubook has a handful of tools that allow you to make basic modifications to your images right in your book. We aren’t trying to duplicate Photoshop™ here; we’re just trying to help you make drop-dead gorgeous books.

You can access the photo-editing tools simply by clicking on any image from within the editor. A set of tools will appear at the top of the screen. At any time, you can switch images with a single click.

The first set of tools on the left of the bar allow you to reposition the image within the photo box. You can move the image up, down, left, or right within the box. The fifth button with all four arrows allows you to re-center the image within the box. That comes in handy when you’ve nudged your photo too much in one direction and you think, “Dang, that’s not going to work. I’d better start over.” 

The next set of controls consists of two buttons that allow you to rotate the image within the photo box. The left button rotates 90° clockwise and the right button rotates 90° degrees counter-clockwise. Why ever would you want to rotate a photo? Well, sometimes photos come off your camera with the image lying on its side. If you make the artistic decision to leave Great-Aunt Lucille lying on her right side, we respect that. She might find it mildly offensive, though, so if you want to ensure that you continue to get that $5.00 check for your birthday, you can rotate the picture so she’s upright again.

Next are a pair of buttons with magnifying glasses on them. These allow you to resize the image. The left button will make the image smaller until the entire image appears within the photo box. For example, if you put a landscape photo in a box that’s oriented for a portrait picture, you can shrink your landscape until it spans the width of the box. (This will leave some blank space at the top and bottom of your photo box.) The right button allows you to zoom in on the image, making the visible portion larger. This can help eliminate some unwanted background and make the focal point of the photo more prominent. Take note: When enlarging a photo, it is possible to make the image so large that it will be of poor quality when printed. We warn you when you’re in danger of this happening by displaying an error icon on the image. If you see the error on one of your photos, you can scale the image back down using the left (-) resize button.

Finally, there is a trash can on the far right of the image editing toolbar. It probably won’t surprise you to find out that clicking this button will remove the current image from its photo box. By deleting the photo, you’ve returned the photo box to its original state and the background will be visible behind it in the preview screen and the printed book. (The outline of an empty photo box or text box doesn’t print in the book, so leaving one empty is like pretending it was never there at all.) At any time, you can drag another image into this box.

The image editing tools allow you to make those last-minute tweaks to make an image more perfect within your Inkubook. While we can’t get Cousin Rudy out of your life altogether, we can at least help you squeeze him out of the picture.

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