As you'll see in this lesson, the three most important sliders all live in the Exposure tool, and knowing these well will allow you to fix nearly any image in ten seconds or less.
In this chapter we'll look at getting your photos from your camera onto your computer and discuss some long-term strategies to keep your photos well-organized, easy to find, and secure.
Importing Your Photos
The Import dialog is the first interface you'll encounter in Aperture, and understanding its power is critical. In this video we'll take a tour of the Import dialog and learn a few things along the way.
There are two choices when storing your images for Aperture: managed and referenced. In this lesson you'll learn the inherent advantages and disadvantages of each so you can decide how to organize your own library.
Developing a consistent file-naming strategy is an important step in a long-term relationship with your photos in Aperture. In this lesson, you'll learn how to create your own presets and see how you can include a lot of helpful information in the filename.
Developing a consistent project-naming strategy is another important step to ensure you can find your photos quickly and easily years from now. In this video, you'll be introduced to a variety of project-naming strategies.
Metadata is data that is embedded in each file, including some critical information like your copyright and contact info. This lesson will show you how to build your own custom presets and pre-populate them so you can embed consistent metadata every time you import photos.
Correcting exposure or applying effects like black-and-white are typically done after import, but if you have a universal effect or correction that you want to add to your photos, you can do it at the time of import. This lesson will walk you through it.
Although many cameras provide the option to shoot RAW+JPEG, this feature is often misunderstood. This lesson explains not only how to work with RAW+JPEG, but also why you might want to do so.
When you're shooting in the field, instant backup is critical. This video shows just how easy it can be to ensure that no images are lost to a failed hard drive.
In this chapter you'll learn how to sort your photos to separate the merely good from the great. This way you can ensure that people see your very best work.
Rating Your Photos
Rating your photos is the best way to locate your favorite shots down the road. Learning to do it quickly is key to ensuring that you actually do it! There are several keyboard shortcuts you'll want to learn, and this lesson covers them all.
Quick Preview mode allows you to view files faster, but at the expense of quality. In this lesson you'll learn how to get the most out of this mode, including how to make critical comparisons even while in Quick Preview mode.
The key to a fast and high-quality rating session is to look at every photo more than once, and let the cream rise to the top. This lesson details a three-step technique for rating your photos.
Highlighting hot and cold areas will identify potential problem areas immediately-but it's important to know when to pay attention to them and when to ignore them! You'll also learn how to enable clipping temporarily while dragging the sliders in this video.
Aperture allows you to easily make a photo bright or dark, rich or muted, flat or contrasty. But consistency is important in a photo collection. In this lesson you'll learn how to make photos that belong together look like they belong together.
As you'll see in this lesson, the three most important sliders all live in the Exposure tool, and knowing these well will allow you to fix nearly any image in ten seconds or less.
Once exposure is fixed, colors can be enhanced quickly and easily with the Enhancement tool. In this lesson we'll look at Saturation vs. Vibrancy, as well as Definition.
The Brightness and Contrast sliders are two that should never be used because they don't offer precise enough control. In this video you'll see what they do so you understand why to stay away from them.
Exposure is one of the most versatile adjustments in Aperture and often delivers a very successful result in record time. If your photo is just a little too dark or too light, this tool will often set it right. In this lesson you'll learn how this tool works, and also see how to recover blown-out highlights in a shot and add punch to your shadows.
There are a lot of ways to enhance an image, but many of them are a bit over the top. This video looks at the Enhance tool, which contains some sliders that make subtle adjustments, helping your photos pop just a little bit more.
Understanding Levels is a basic requirement for advanced digital imaging. In this lesson you'll learn how to set the In (black) and Out (white) points of an image, which can make the starting point for the rest of your image editing that much more controlled.
Curves are the ultimate in exposure control, allowing you to make finite adjustments over any range of a photo, from the deepest shadow to the brightest highlight. This lesson introduces you to the basics of Curves and shows you some tricks for squeezing the most out of it.
Perhaps pink wasn't the right color for that jacket-and it's too late to reshoot! Enter the Color Adjustment tool. From subtle changes to dramatic reversals, you can isolate a color range and spin the hue wheel until it lands on a color you like. In this video you'll learn how to take control of the colors in your photos.
Small blemishes, stray hairs, sensor spots, and more can easily be retouched directly in Aperture. In this video you'll see how to use options like edge detection and controlling the opacity help to make those marks truly disappear.
Aperture's Lift & Stamp functionality allows you to copy your retouching efforts from one photo to many others. But this lesson shows that knowing when and when not to use this can save a lot of time and frustration.
Skin smoothing can easily be overdone; sure some people would like to look 20 years younger, but it just won't look natural. In this lesson you'll learn how to give your subjects the gift of youth, but with taste.
Aperture's retouching tools are amazing, but sometimes you need something more. In this lesson, you'll see how you can integrate tools like Photoshop into your workflow.
This chapter looks at Flickr, email, and export plug-ins - the tools pros use to market their work and integrate their photos into their blogs.
Online Sharing
Creating watermarks is an art unto itself. In this lesson, we'll look at some simple watermarks that you can create in Photoshop and make sure they're prepared correctly for Aperture.
Watermarking on export is an option that can be built into any export preset. In this lesson, you'll learn how to control the watermarks and build a preset for it.
Email is by far the easiest way to share your photos with a small group of people. This video shows you how to set up a preset for email so sharing any photo, watermarked or not, is only a keystroke away.
There is an extensive collection of third-party plug-ins available for exporting from Aperture to FTP servers or even directly to services like Smugmug. In this video we'll look at a few of the most popular and see where to find more.
Flickr is one of the largest photo-sharing sites in the world and is used by amateurs and pros alike. Aperture has a direct link to Flickr, making it extremely easy to share, add, and remove photos-all without leaving the Aperture interface, as demonstrated in this video.
For those times when you just need to get a file out of Aperture, there's the good ol' Export dialog. In this lesson you'll learn how to build presets for your photos so your exports are easy and consistent.
When you just want to show your work without any fancy effects, start here. In this lesson you'll learn how to build presets so that any slideshow is just one keystroke away.
If you want to make a slideshow that's simple and elegant, with music, movie clips, and custom timing, you can do that with the Classic slideshow theme. In this video you'll see how to get the timing precise and play it back the same way every time.
The process of building a slideshow with animated images, reflections, and more can be completely automated, or you can take control over certain parts of it. In this video you'll see how to add music, change the timing, and reorder your photos with ease.
Once your slideshow is built, it's easy to export it to any format you like, including sending it to your iPad or iPhone, or streaming it to your Apple TV. This video shows you how it works, and how presets for MobileMe and YouTube make online sharing easy - but watch out, the default settings aren't always HD quality!
Aperture makes it easy to create unique, hardcover photo books to share with friends, family, and clients - from vacations to portfolios, the printed book will never go out of style. In this chapter you'll learn all about creating books with Aperture.
Creating Photo Books
Aperture's Book tool is incredibly powerful - and it can be incredibly easy. In this lesson, you'll see how you can create a book in just a few minutes.
There are many different book themes to work with in Aperture, and each has its own highlights. In this video we'll take a look at a few of the more dynamic ones, as well as the cleanest ones for just showing off what really matters - your photographs.
When you create a book, you can add or remove pages and choose what layout you want from a series of presets. This lesson shows the easiest and quickest way to build a book while still maintaining control over it.
Every page in an Aperture book can be completely customized if you like. In this video you'll see how the simple layout tools let you create a totally unique page for your photos.
While you can order printed books through Aperture, you can also print them yourself - which means you can customize the size and format to anything you like. This lesson shows you how.
This video looks at some third-party book plug-ins that you can install in Aperture. These are designed for professionals and the book printers require proof that you have a photography business before they'll let you in-but if that's your market, this is an incredible way to print the absolute highest-quality books available.
These chapter offers some important tips that don't fit anywhere else in the training... enjoy!
Addenda
Learning keyboard shortcuts is the best way to speed up your work in Aperture. In this video we'll look at the keyboard controls in Aperture, walk through setting up your own shortcuts, and discuss the best way to remember them.
The preferences contain many controls for basic behavior and functionality, and learning about them will help you to understand what Aperture is doing and why. In this lesson, we'll look at every tab and explain nearly every single option in Aperture's preferences!
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