Photo Booth Videos

Photo Booth is a great general purpose app on the Mac, which is easily confused with QuickTime as they do have overlapping functions, but Photo Booth has two advantages: it takes photos (as the name implies) but it also allows you to record video as well, although the resolution is lower than you will get if you use Quicktime, which sounds bad, but this is precisely why I advise using PhotoBooth for 'talking head' videos, nice and simple, and with video that is a suitable size for sharing online without having to resize it.* Then if you want to be fussy, you can drag and drop a video to the desktop, open it in Quicktime to trim it before saving and sharing it.

Photo Booth Photos

When you capture an image using the iSight camera with Photo Booth, try to ensure you have good lighting, with the light shining on the paper, so it's facing the light and you're as close to the camera as you can get, if it's a long document, it's probably best to take two pictures, top half and bottom half, instead of trying to capture the whole image in one go....

Once you've captured the image in Photo Booth, before you share it remember to open it in Preview, and edit the image to enhance it, here's how....

*you can record at about 50 MB per minute, which is pretty good; so you can record for at least 10 minutes and only end up with a video that is less than 500 MB.