My last copy of iPhoto dated way back to version four. (And yes, this is another Mac entry… it’s all I’ve got to talk about… I haven’t been doing anything else.) I haven’t fiddled with any of the other iLife apps, but the new version of iPhoto has really impressed me. There aren’t a lot more editing tools, but the ones I’ve used are better. In particular, the touch-up tool has worked wonders on some of my scans of older pictures.

In the past I’ve opened images in Photoshop (Elements) and painstakingly touched up blemishes, scratches, and dust artifacts with a brush tool (sampling adjacent color and painting in the scratch a pixel or two at a time). There was probably an easier way, but I’m a hard way kind of guy. The touch-up tool in the latest iPhoto works like a brush, but it does a pretty good job of picking up the surrounding color and just filling in the scratch, without smearing or coloring over the stuff that was o.k.

Color me impressed.