Picture this: your Address Book photos, now with extra crazy

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November 14, 2007

Picture this: your Address Book photos, now with extra crazy

Posted Nov. 14, ’07, 9:31 AM PT by Dan Moren

Category | Tips

Address Book effects One of my favorite features of OS X is the ability to associate a picture with a contact in the Address Book. Several years ago, I went through and found pictures for a bunch of my friends, with the main intent of making sure that the people I chatted with most often in my IM client would have actual identifying images, instead of that creepy little AOL dude.

But those pictures can get kind of staid. Now, thanks to a tip from a Mac OS X Hints reader, you can punch up any of the pictures with a bevy of useful Core Image filters, all without leaving the Address Book application.

Pick the record whose picture you want to alter, and click on the Edit button at the bottom of the window, then double click the image. The standard picture chooser will pop up and below the image you’ll see buttons for taking a new picture (if you’ve got an iSight) and a bizarre little swirly button. Therein lies the secret which we seek. Hit that, and you’ll be presented with a pane of effects that you can apply to the photo. Some of the effects are familiar from Photo Booth (Colored Pencil, Comic Book, Pop Art, Dent, Twirl, Mirror, etc.), but there are several panes of effects that you won’t find in Photo Booth or iChat, like City Lights, Neon, Tracer, Pixelate, etc.

Want to Blur your boss? Kaleidoscope your kids? Flip-Flop your friends? Go nuts! There’s even an ASCII art filter that looks a bit like you’re in the Matrix (though with admittedly, not very much detail). If nothing else, it’s given me a new mission of acquiring pictures for the rest of my contacts.

6 Comments

Joe Waterman said:

So is there anyway to actually use these cool effects inside of photo booth, where it might be a little more useful?

November 14, 2007 9:40 AM

Branden said:

You have to edit the quartz files to make them photo booth compatible. I did City Lights, working on the others.

If you want to see the City Lights I converted for Photo Booth/iChat use, get it here:
http://www.advancedphotowork.com/quartz/citylights.qtz.zip

You can edit this in Quartz Composer (included on your system installation disk) and edit the address book effects, replacing out the City Lights effect section with the one from your address book effect and save it with a new name.

November 14, 2007 10:25 AM

Dan Frakes

said: