One of the “wow” factors that made for a great demo during the two times that Apple demoed Leopard in front of crowds at Moscone Center was the brand new Photo Booth effects, and my, they looked pretty awesome. Now that they’re in our hands though, a bit more of the wariness behind them starts to come out.

Although the new Photo Booth effects are shared by both Photo Booth and iChat in Leopard, I’ll be reviewing them here, since they make up pretty much 85% of what’s new in Photo Booth. As such, my iChat review (later this month) will not include as much detail about these effects and instead opt to review the other new features. And so, get the cameras ready and your best smile on, because the Leopard Feature Presentation for Photo Booth starts in 3 (beep) 2 (beep) 1 (beep)…

BIG FLASH!

Oh, um, just trying to be cute, sorry.

I’ll start by running through the new features that come in Photo Booth under Leopard. Probably the most obvious new feature in that in Photo Booth, you can do more than just take a single picture of yourself. Photo Booth now includes an option to take a four-photo blast, or a movie. When you take a four-photo blast, then after the “3 2 1″ countdown, Photo Booth takes four pictures in a row. Note that these aren’t four immediate pictures in a row–there’s a slight pause in between each picture before the screen flashes white again. When you go to review that picture, Photo Booth displays them in a four-picture frame–click one one of them to watch it move into full screen with a nice reflective effect. Click the picture again to see it zoom back out. However, these really are four separate pictures, and if you to look at these in the Finder, they would appear as four different pictures. So now, you don’t just get one picture of me with my nose twirled around in different directions, but you get four!

Photo Booth also includes an option to take a movie of you, either under the Normal option or via one of those weird effects, again, after giving you the “3 2 1″ intro. Once the movie begins, you can look at the counter going by, and click the Stop button when you’re done. My only qualm is that I wish it was possible to switch effects while the movie was in progress, but alas, you’re stuck with whatever effect you picked. The other oddity is that once the video is captured, you’re still given the same four export options that photos are given (Email, iPhoto, Account Picture, Buddy Picture). Although iPhoto can store video clips, it seems kind of a weird option. Furthermore, Account Picture and Buddy Picture don’t store the video, they just select a still out of your video to use! Seems like more appropriate export options could be presented for video.

Another nice new addition is that for some of the original effects, Apple has allowed you to configure some of their effects to your liking. For example, the Light Tunnel, Squeeze, Twirl, and some of the other effects allow you to change how big the circle of effect in the middle is.

But these weren’t the staple features of Photo Booth. Indeed, the staple feature of Photo Booth has been the new feature called Backdrops, the feature where you select a photo or video background, step away from the camera, let Photo Booth capture the background, and then it transforms the background with the selected image or video. Then, supposedly, if you walk into the shot, it will appear as though you are where the background shows you to be. Photo Booth includes some built-in backdrops (Clouds, Color Dots, Earthrise, Eiffel Tower, Fish, Rollercoaster, Sunset, Yosemite), or you can supply your own photos or videos.

In practice, however, I have had absolutely nothing but trouble with the backdrops feature. Apple’s website suggests that you should use backdrops in a room with fairly simple backgrounds, but I haven’t been able to get this to work unless I’m up against a pretty much solid-color background. Even then, I can see bits of the background bleed through simply because I might cast a shadow on it. Essentially, the backdrops feature only works if every single pixel of the background remains exactly identical to how it was before. This means that, although you may not need a green screen to pull these backdrops off, you’re going to need to have a perfectly staged background with anti-shadow lighting and a background that’s fairly un-complex, which pretty much rules out about 90% of the situations out there. Oh, and if you have a laptop like me? Well, that laptop better stay completely stable, or you’re in trouble.

All in all, most of the new features to Photo Booth may be useful, but there’s nothing here that’s groundbreaking. And the new backdrops, although they may have made a good demo by Apple, really do not work very well in a practical sense to be useful whatsoever, and will probably require a number of updates until it can become practical.

Feature Satisfaction Rating:

Be sure to check out the other articles in the Leopard Feature Presentation, occurring throughout the month of November here on Webmacster87.info.

Tags: application, backdrops, effects, features, Leopard Feature Presentation, Mac OS X Leopard, Photo Booth, review, snapshots, Video