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The Watercolor theme is characterized by pseudo-textured pages in several pastel shades with either straight sunken frames or slanted matted ones. There are one-, two-, three-, four-, and six-photo layouts. Text is displayed in a mixture of the flowery Zapfino and the more staid Hoefler.
The only changes to the Watercolor layout in iPhoto '09 are the addition of just two of the introduction (or text) pages (the two-columned intro page is missing, go figure!) and the ability to create maps. As far as I can tell, everything else has remained the same.
The Watercolor cover can have a full-bleed photo, a single large photo and caption with pastel rainbow background, a framed block of text on the rainbow background, or three photos with caption with the rainbow background. Personally, I think that rainbow background is over-rated...
The Watercolor theme only lets you use white for the background for the outside (but then has a rainbow thing in the layouts). For the interior, you can choose from four two-toned textured pastel and one textured blue, along with the Photo Background (formerly Palm Tree) which lets you use any image you want for the background of the inside pages).
Apart from the full-bleed photo (not shown), Watercolor offers three other layouts for the cover. The first lets you have a single large photo with a horizontal rainbow ribbon:
The second offers a framed block of text (and the horizontal rainbow ribbon):
The third is a three-photo layout with one large photo to the left and two stacked photos to the right. Each maintains its original orientation. You can't avoid that ubiquitous rainbow ribbon:
There are five one-photo layouts. The first is a standard full-bleed photo. Layouts 2 and 3 show a large slanted photo, one with a large block of text, one without.
Layout 4 uses a sunken frame, while Layout 5 does that weird mosaic thing. All of the one-photo layouts vary slightly depending on the original orientation of your photo.
There are two basic two-photo layouts. The first displays photos in floating frames at an angle. When you have two horizontal photos, one is shown a good bit smaller up in the right hand corner. Two vertical photos, or one of each orientation, are displayed at roughly the same size.
With Layout 2, the photos are shown in sunken frames. Two vertical photos are large while two horizontal photos are a fair bit smaller. If you mix orientations, the layout stays the same (well, except for having two different orientations.)
There are two three-photo layouts. The first displays three photos of either orientation in floating frames. The layout does not depend on the orientation of the photos.
The second layout uses sunken frames. There is a large vertical frame to the left next to two stacked horizontal frames. If you put differently-oriented photos in those frames, they will be cropped to fit.
The four-photo layouts are much the same as the three-photo ones. The first layout displays four photos of either orientation in jaunty floating frames. The second shows four horizontal sunken frames, regardless of the original orientation of the photos (which are cropped to fit).
The six-photo layouts repeat the same story with a minor twist. The first layout shows the slanted floating frames. While the orientation of the photos is preserved, it does not change the essential layout. With the second layout, there are six rigid frames, three vertical and three horizontal. If you put a differently-oriented photo in one of these frames, the photo is cropped to fit.
Here's my description of the Watercolor theme in iPhoto '08.
If you have any comments, questions, or suggestions, I'd love to hear them.
Copyright 2007 by Elizabeth Castro. Please don't copy this page. Instead, link to it!