Apple Aperture User manual

Aperture

User Manual

K

Apple Computer, Inc.

The owner or authorized user of a valid copy of Aperture

software may reproduce this publication for the purpose

of learning to use such software. No part of this

publication may be reproduced or transmitted for

commercial purposes, such as selling copies of this

publication or for providing paid for support services.

Every effort has been made to ensure that the

information in this manual is accurate. Apple is not

responsible for printing or clerical errors. Because Apple

frequently releases new versions and updates to its

system software, applications, and Internet sites, images

shown in this book may be slightly different from what

you see on your screen.

The Apple logo is a trademark of Apple Computer, Inc.,

registered in the U.S. and other countries. Use of the

“keyboard” Apple logo (Option-Shift-K) for commercial

purposes without the prior written consent of Apple

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Apple, the Apple logo, Apple Cinema Display, ColorSync,

FireWire, iPhoto, iTunes, Mac, Macintosh, Mac OS, and

QuickTime are trademarks of Apple Computer, Inc.,

registered in the U.S. and other countries.

Aperture, Finder, and MacBook are trademarks of Apple

Computer, Inc.

.Mac is a service mark of Apple Computer, Inc.

Adobe, Adobe RGB, Photoshop, and PostScript are

trademarks or registered trademarks of Adobe Systems

Incorporated in the U.S. and/or other countries.

Other company and product names mentioned herein

are trademarks of their respective companies. Mention

of third-party products is for informational purposes

only and constitutes neither an endorsement nor a

recommendation. Apple assumes no responsibility with

regard to the performance or use of these products.

3

1

Contents

Preface 11 Introducing Aperture

12

What’s Next?

Part I Interface and Acquisition

Chapter 1 15 An Overview of Aperture

16

A First Look at Aperture

17

Creating Projects and Importing Your Photos

20

Photo Editing with Aperture

31

Image Processing

32

Distribution

37

Backing Up Your Work

Chapter 2 39 The Aperture Interface

40

The Aperture Main Window

41

Projects Panel

42

Viewer and Browser

43

Control Bar

45

Toolbar

49

Adjustments Inspector

50

Metadata Inspector

52

Import Panel

53

Vaults Panel

54

Book Layout Editor

57

Webpage Editor

60

Light Table

61

Heads-Up Displays

64

Workspace Layouts

65

Customizing the Toolbar

67

Setting Aperture Preferences

4

Contents

Chapter 3 71 Working with Aperture Projects

72

Basic Components of Aperture

78

Working with Projects

79

Creating and Naming Projects

80

Opening and Closing Projects

82

Creating and Showing Favorite Projects

82

Deleting Images from Projects and Albums

83

Deleting Items from the Projects Panel

83

Working with Library Files

85

Quickly Accessing Commands

Chapter 4 87 Importing Images

88

An Overview of Importing Images

89

File Formats You Can Import into the Library

90

Planning Your Import Strategy

91

Importing from Your Digital Camera or Card Reader

97

Importing Image Files Stored on Your Computer

105

Automatically Naming Your Imported Images

108

Adding Metadata to Images During Import

109

Creating Stacks Automatically During Import

11 0

Adjusting the Image File’s Time When Importing

11 0

Dragging Files from the Finder to the Projects Panel

111

Importing Folders of Images from the Finder

11 2

Importing Your iPhoto Library

11 4

Transferring Projects from Another System

11 4

Making an Immediate Backup

11 5

Where Aperture Stores Your Managed Files in the Library

Part II Photo Editing

Chapter 5 119 Working with Images in the Browser

12 0

An Overview of the Browser

12 2

Navigating Through and Selecting Images

12 4

Working with a Selection of Images

12 5

Working with Images in Grid View

12 6

Working with Images in List View

12 7

Searching for Images in the Browser

12 8

Rearranging Images in the Browser

12 9

Sorting Images in Grid View

13 0

Rotating Images

13 0

Creating Versions of an Image

132

Deleting Images from the Browser

Contents

5

13 4

Dragging Images into Different Projects and Albums

135

Working with Referenced Images

141

Working with Two Projects Open

142

Displaying Specific Metadata with Your Images

Chapter 6 145 Displaying Images in the Viewer

146

An Overview of the Viewer

148

Showing or Hiding the Viewer

148

Changing the Viewer Background

149

Changing the Number of Images in the Viewer

150

Comparing Images

151

Viewing Stacks

151

Viewing Images with the Loupe

152

Using the Color Meter

154

Showing Hot Areas in Your Images

155

Viewing Images at Full Resolution

156

Viewing Master Images

156

Setting Up the Viewer for Onscreen Proofing

157

Viewing Images on Multiple Displays

158

Displaying Metadata Associated with Images

160

Selecting Image Preview Options

162

Quickly Accessing Commands

Chapter 7 163 Viewing Images in Full Screen Mode

164

An Overview of Full Screen Mode

165

Entering and Exiting Full Screen Mode

165

Working with the Filmstrip in Full Screen Mode

169

Working with the Toolbar in Full Screen Mode

171

Using HUDs in Full Screen Mode

173

Changing the Display of Metadata in Full Screen Mode

174

Using Keyboard Shortcuts in Full Screen Mode

174

Quickly Accessing Commands

Chapter 8 175 Stacking Images and Making Picks

175

An Overview of Stacking Images

177

Creating Stacks

180

Working with Stacks

186

Keyboard Shortcuts for Working with Stacks

6

Contents

Chapter 9 187 Rating Images

188

An Overview of the Aperture Rating System

190

Rating Images

192

Sorting Images by Rating

194

Including Image Rating in Your Workflow

195

Comparing and Rating Images

197

Keyboard Shortcuts for Displaying Images with Specific Ratings

Chapter 10 199 Applying Keywords to Images

200

An Overview of Keywords

202

Viewing Keywords Applied to Images

206

Applying Keywords Using the Keywords HUD

213

Applying Keywords Using Keyword Controls and Keyword Presets

218

Applying Keywords Using the Lift & Stamp HUD

222

Applying Keywords Using the Metadata Inspector

223

Applying Keywords to Images in the Light Table

223

Removing Keywords from an Image

224

Importing and Exporting Keyword Lists

Chapter 11 225 Working with Metadata

226

An Overview of Metadata, Metadata Views,

and Metadata Presets

228 Displaying Metadata with Your Images

231 Turning the Display of Metadata On or Off

232 Viewing and Changing Metadata in the Metadata Inspector

235 Working with Metadata Views

238 Working with Metadata Presets

241 Batch Changing Metadata

242 More Information About IPTC Metadata

243 Understanding Badge Overlays

Chapter 12 247 Searching for and Displaying Images

248 An Overview of Searching

252 Controls in the Query HUD

253 Searching Across the Entire Library

253 Searching by Image Name, Caption, or Other Text

255 Searching by Keyword

256

Searching by Date

258 Searching by Rating

259 Searching by IPTC Information

260 Searching by EXIF Information

261 Searching by Import Session

262 Searching by File Status

Contents 7

263 Searching by Other Metadata

264 Searching by a Combination of Criteria

265 Saving Your Search Results

Chapter 13 267 Grouping Images with Smart Albums

268 An Overview of Smart Albums

270 Collecting Images in a New Smart Album

271 Searching Within a Smart Album

272 Revising the Contents of a Smart Album

272 Transferring Smart Album Images to Another Project or Album

273 Deleting a Smart Album

Part III Distribution and Backup

Chapter 14 277 Printing Your Images

277 An Overview of Printing

279 Controls in the Print Dialog

281 Printing a Single Image

282 Printing a Series of Images

282 Printing a Contact Sheet or Series of Contact Sheets

283 Printing a Book

284 Printing a Light Table Arrangement

284 Creating and Modifying Print Presets

286 Proofing Your Images Onscreen

287 Turning Off Color Management in Your Printer

Chapter 15 291 Exporting Your Images

292 An Overview of Exporting Images

293 Exporting Copies of Digital Master Files

296 Exporting Image Versions

306 Working with Export Presets

Chapter 16 311 Creating Slideshow Presentations

312 An Overview of Slideshows

314 Creating a Slideshow

315 Controlling a Slideshow

315 Arranging the Order of a Slideshow’s Images

315 Controls in the Slideshow Presets Dialog

317 Creating Slideshow Presets

318 Modifying Slideshow Presets

319 Creating a Growing Grid of Images

320 Playing Your Slideshow on Your Main Display Only

321 Displaying Your Images to Music

8 Contents

Chapter 17 323 Using the Light Table

324 An Overview of the Light Table

325 Creating a Light Table Album

326 Placing and Viewing Images in the Light Table

327 Moving and Resizing Images in the Light Table

328 Aligning and Arranging Images in the Light Table

330 Adjusting the Light Table View

331 Setting View Options for the Light Table

331 Transferring Images from the Light Table

332 Printing a Light Table Arrangement

332 Deleting a Light Table Album

Chapter 18 333 Creating Webpages

334 An Overview of Creating Webpages

336 Creating Web Galleries

339 Creating Web Journals

341 Viewing and Navigating Through Webpages

342 Choosing and Modifying Themes

345 Working with Web Gallery Pages

346 Working with Web Journal Pages

348 Exporting Webpages

351 Working with Web Export Presets

Chapter 19 357 Creating Books

358 An Overview of Creating Books

363 Planning Your Book

365 Creating a Book Album

366 Controls in the Book Layout Editor

369 Choosing a Theme

370 Viewing Pages

372 Placing Images in a Book

374 Adding and Removing Pages

379 Working with Pages

383 Working with Images

388 Working with Text

393 Working with Master Pages

396 Copying a Book Album

397 Printing Books

Contents 9

Chapter 20 399 Backing Up Your Images

400 An Overview of the Backup Workflow

401 Planning Your Backup System

402 Working with the Vaults Panel

404 Creating Vaults

405 Updating Vaults

406 Disconnecting a Vault’s Hard Drive from Your System Temporarily

406 Reconnecting a Vault’s Hard Drive to your System

407 Deleting a Vault Permanently

407 Backing Up Images from a Portable in the Field

409 Restoring Your Aperture System

Part IV Appendixes and Glossary

Appendix A 413 Setting Up an Aperture System

414 Setting Up a Basic System

415 Optional Equipment to Consider

417 Setting Up Your System with Two Displays

419 Configuring Mac OS X for Multiple Displays

Appendix B 423 Calibrating Your Aperture System

423 An Overview of Color Management

427 Calibrating Your Camera

428 Calibrating and Profiling Your Display

430 Calibrating and Profiling Your Printer

Appendix C 431 Credits

Glossary 433

Index 453

11

Preface

Introducing Aperture

Aperture is a powerful and easy-to-use digital image

management system that can track thousands of digital

images and provides the professional photographer with

high-quality image management and adjustment tools.

Designed for the needs of professional photographers, Aperture is an all-in-one

post-production tool that provides:

Â An advanced RAW workflow: From capture to output, you can work with your images

captured as RAW files, without having to first convert them to another format before

viewing, adjusting, organizing, or printing them. Aperture supports RAW formats

from leading digital camera manufacturers (including Canon and Nikon).

Â Flexible image management: A new, open Library structure lets you store photos

anywhere you want. You can have Aperture either store image files in the Library or

simply link to image files in their current locations. You can also have Aperture link to

your iPhoto Library without copying the images into the Aperture Library. Aperture

can work with photos stored on any number of hard disk drives and other storage

media. You can catalog and search for images that are stored on multiple hard disks,

including offline volumes, CDs, and DVDs.

Â Professional project management: Aperture allows you to manage thousands of

projects and provides flexible organizational tools, comprehensive metadata support,

and powerful search tools that let you find files instantly.

Â Nondestructive image processing: Designed to protect your images from the moment

they’re imported, Aperture identifies your original images as digital “master files,” and

it has built-in safeguards to help ensure that you don’t accidentally overwrite or

modify them.

Â Versatile printing and publishing: Working directly with your RAW images, you can

create color-accurate prints, custom contact sheets, stunning websites, and unique

bound books with tools that are intuitive and powerful.

12 Preface Introducing Aperture

With Aperture you can efficiently import digital images, perform a photo edit, adjust

and retouch images, publish images for the web or print, and back up your entire

image library for safekeeping. Aperture lets you work with high-quality JPEG, TIFF, and

RAW image files directly from your camera or card reader and maintain that high

quality throughout your workflow.

What’s Next?

This manual is only one of several types of documentation you can use as you work

with Aperture.

Â For instructions for installing Aperture software, see Installing Your Software.

Â For an introduction to the basic concepts, procedures, and digital photography

workflow for using Aperture, see Aperture Getting Started.

Â For an overview of Aperture, an introduction to the Aperture interface, and

detailed instructions for using the many features and tools in Aperture, continue

reading this manual.

Â For information about making image corrections and adjustments in Aperture, see

Performing Image Adjustments in the Aperture Help menu.

Â For a list of the keyboard shortcuts you can use to perform tasks in Aperture, see

Aperture Quick Reference.

Â For an introduction to the fundamentals of digital photography, see

Digital Photography Fundamentals in the Aperture Help menu.

Â For information about ordering printed books of your images, see

Ordering Books and Prints in the Aperture Help menu.

Â For the most recent technical and release information about Aperture, see

Late-Breaking News in the Aperture Help menu.

Â For information about new features in Aperture, see New Features in the Aperture

Help menu.

Â For the latest articles about technical issues and solutions, go to the Aperture

Support website, available from the Aperture Help menu.

I

Part I: Interface and Acquisition

This section provides introductory information about the

application and its interface. It also explains how to set up

your image management system and import images into it.

Chapter 1 An Overview of Aperture

Chapter 2 The Aperture Interface

Chapter 3 Working with Aperture Projects

Chapter 4 Importing Images

1

15

1 An Overview of Aperture

Aperture is designed to be the center of your digital

photography workflow, from capturing new images to the

final delivery of professional-quality photographs.

This chapter provides an overview of how Aperture works and what you can do with it. If

you’re new to Aperture, this chapter is for you. If you’re familiar with the Aperture features

and interface, feel free to skip this chapter. The chapter doesn’t provide all the detailed

information and instructions needed to perform work on your images. Once you’re

familiar with Aperture, you’ll find in-depth explanations and instructions in later chapters.

This chapter covers:

Â A First Look at Aperture (p. 16)

Â Creating Projects and Importing Your Photos (p. 17)

Â Photo Editing with Aperture (p. 20)

Â Image Processing (p. 31)

Â Distribution (p. 32)

16 Part I Interface and Acquisition

A First Look at Aperture

When you first open Aperture, you see the following areas:

Note: Because you can customize the toolbar, adding and deleting the buttons you

want, your toolbar may appear different from the one pictured in this manual. For more

information about changing the toolbar, see “Customizing the Toolbar” on page 65.

Click here to open the

Import panel.

Your projects appear

here.

To create a project to hold your

imported images, click here.

Browser

Viewer

Click here to open the Vaults panel.

You select a hard disk to use for

backing up images here.

Toolbar

Chapter 1 An Overview of Aperture 17

I

After you import images into a new project, your screen will look similar to this:

Creating Projects and Importing Your Photos

To use Aperture, you first import your photos. You can import digital photos directly

from your camera or a card reader and from hard disks or other storage devices where

you’ve archived digital files. After a shoot, you can connect your card reader or digital

camera to your computer and Aperture automatically detects it. You can then easily

import your new images into Aperture.

Creating Projects

As you work with Aperture, you create projects to hold your images. A project is similar

to a folder that can hold dozens, hundreds, or even thousands of images. For example,

after completing a travel shoot to Antarctica, you might create a new project named

Antarctica and import the photos into it.

Aperture imports the

images into a project.

Click the project to

see its images in

the Browser.

Select a thumbnail

in the Browser.

Your project’s image

thumbnails

The Viewer shows the

selected image.

About Aperture Sample Projects

The Aperture installation disc includes several sample projects containing high-resolution

images. When you first open Aperture, a dialog appears asking if you’d like to install a

sample project. Other sample projects are available in the Sample Projects folder on the

Aperture installation disc. You can import these projects into Aperture from the Aperture

installation disc at any time after installing the application.

18 Part I Interface and Acquisition

Your new project appears in a list in the Projects panel.

As your portfolio increases and you create more and more projects, you can organize

your work into hierarchies of folders, projects, and albums.

You can create as many projects as you need and name them according to any naming

scheme you prefer. It’s important to name projects so that they will be easy to identify

and access. When you need to further subdivide and organize images in a project, you

can create albums.

Over the long term you may be using Aperture to track years of projects, so you’ll want

to develop a naming system that is easy to use and understand. For more information

about organizing your images in projects and albums, see Chapter 3, “Working with

Aperture Projects,” on page 71.

Examples of items in

the Projects panel

Projects

Folders

Chapter 1 An Overview of Aperture 19

I

Importing Images

When you connect a camera or card reader to your computer, the Import dialog appears.

You can select your camera or card reader and see the images you’re about to import.

You can select all the images on a memory card or select and import only those you

want. You can also select image files on your hard disk for importing.

You can then specify options for importing your images. For example, you can specify

that your images be imported into the Aperture Library in your Pictures folder, or

specify another location to store them. If you have images already stored on a hard

disk, you can simply allow Aperture to access them without changing their current

locations. You can choose how images are named and include other information that is

recorded with each image to help identify it. For example, you can specify the event

name, date, time, photographer, and location, as well as copyright information.

You can also specify other import options, such as whether you want Aperture to

group related images together in stacks. For example, if you have bracketed images or

images shot in quick succession, you can have Aperture import and stack these images

together to make reviewing and working with them easier.

Specify import

options here.

When you click

Import All, your images

are imported into the

selected project or a new

project.

Select your camera, card

reader, or hard disk here.

20 Part I Interface and Acquisition

Importing Files from Your Body of Work

You can easily import your collection of archived digital images into Aperture from any

hard disk or storage device connected to your computer. When importing legacy

images from your portfolio, you can move them into the main Aperture Library, or

simply identify where the images are located, and Aperture adds them to its

management system without changing the image locations. This means that with

Aperture, you can still work with your images in their current organization and on

multiple hard disks without relocating or reorganizing your current files. You can also

move or copy images to new locations when needed.

Aperture can also import your iPhoto Library and files stored in a variety of common

file types and formats, including:

Â GIF

Â JPEG

Â JPEG2000

Â PNG

Â PSD

Â RAW files from a variety of supported digital cameras

Â TIFF

Note: For a list of supported digital cameras, go to http://www.apple.com/aperture.

For more information about importing images, see Chapter 4, “Importing Images,” on

page 87.

Photo Editing with Aperture

Aperture allows you to easily view and work with your images onscreen. It provides

easy-to-use tools and controls, as well as efficient methods for rating images, searching

for images, and comparing and adjusting them.

Viewing and Working with Images in the Browser and Viewer

To work with your images, you select a project in the Projects panel and Aperture

displays that project’s images in the Browser. You use the Browser to review, organize,

and select images.

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