How can I match MAC screensaver image enhancement?

March 6, 2010 8:35 AM

My mac G5power PC shows random photos that are on its hard drive as a screen saver. They look really great. Better than I can do in photoshop Does anyone know what tweaks the MAC screensaver program applies to images?
posted by al.sharp to Computers & Internet (5 answers total)

I doubt that the program is doing anything to the images. I suspect the difference is in the resolution, color, contrast, content of the default/provided images and the ones that you are creating. It is in Apple's best interest to supply the highest end, most spectacular images possible, it makes the machine look better!
posted by HuronBob at 12:09 PM on March 6, 2010

I think al.sharp means the screensaver is pulling personal photos - so a picture of someone's dog, say, looks just average normally but fantastic as part of the magic screensaver slideshow. If not, yeah, stock Apple photos have entire teams of masseurs.
posted by teremala at 1:27 PM on March 6, 2010

As a sheer guess, boosting brightness/contrast and saturation usually adds zing to an image. Maybe the screensaver has a built-in histogram-type measurement that it uses to "normalize" the visual data the way certain mp3 players measure the volume of multiple songs and evens out the overall volume level.
posted by Greg_Ace at 1:36 PM on March 6, 2010

Response by poster: yes these are my images and i've tried boosting contrast and saturation and have not been able to achieve the same results. i was hoping some mac guru could give me the "formula"

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posted by al.sharp at 1:58 PM on March 6, 2010

I recently scanned a bunch of photos, and found that Aperture's RGB Auto Levels did wonders on them. It basically alters the colors so that the image contains the full range of each of the three color channels. The effect is like an auto brightness, auto contrast, auto tint function. I'm not sure it would necessarily be useful in your situation, but I figure it's in Apple's toolkit so that might be what they're doing.

You can get Aperture as a time-limited demo right now, or you might also try Picasa, which has what looks like the same algorithm under the label "I'm feeling lucky".
posted by bjrubble at 1:12 PM on March 7, 2010