Photo Booth Tutorial: How to Take a Simple Picture

Written by: Shane Burley • Edited by: Rhonda Callow
Published Aug 25, 2010 • Related Guides: Apple

Here is a step by step Photo Booth tutorial that will outline how to take a simple picture with Photo Booth from your Mac computer.

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Photo Booth is Apple's built-in photo application that you can use to take pictures from your Mac computer's camera. This is an easy to use program that allows for simple images of you and your friends taken right when sitting in front of you monitor while watching the image form. Here is a step by step tutorial on how to take a simple picture with the Photo Booth program utilizing the built in camera from your Mac computer.

Taking the Picture

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When you first open Photo Booth you will be given a monitor window that is displaying the image that is appearing right in front of the camera. Below the main image will be a list of different images that you have already taken with Photo Booth in this way, though there will be none here if you have never used Photo Booth before. In between the image that Photo Booth is picking up with your Mac camera and the list of past photos will be a button with the image of a camera in it. If you click this there will be a three number countdown before your entire screen flashes white and then the new image that was just taken will slide into the line with all the other pictures that have been taken in the past.

Photo Booth Effects

One of the main things that Photo Booth is known for is the Photo Booth effects that it includes. To the right of the picture button will be an

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Effects button. Once you hit that you will be taken to a nine pane image of what the camera is seeing, each with a different video effect. There will be four pages of this: the first being color and image focused effects, the second being perspective effects such as stretching, the third being background effects like being amongst the clouds, and the third being background effects where you insert the background image you want. Just click into the effect pane that you want and then the camera will come up with that effect, and you can then go through the same picture capture process that was outlined before. When the picture is saved it will be saved with the Photo Booth effect that was chosen and appeared during the image preview.

Saving the Picture

When you take the picture you want in Photo Booth it automatically goes into the list presented in the Photo Booth application, but it also gets saved directly to your computer so you can use it in the same way as you would with any photo that was synced over to your Mac. Go to your "house," which is the direct location for the user signed in, and select Pictures from the built in options. From there just select the Photo Booth folder and you will find the pictures that you took in Photo Booth. From here you can transfer them to any location that you please.