Today I'm going to write about a feature of Aperture that you've probably heard of but maybe never tried. We all establish our own personal workflow style pretty early on when using new software, and I'm no different. I've been...

Before Aperture, the missing piece of my workflow puzzle was a cataloging-archive system. Now that I'm transferring my archive into Aperture, I'm making important decisions about Aperture's Library system, and how best to use it. The good news is that...

A friend called a couple of weeks ago with an Aperture workflow question. As we worked our way through her problem I finally realized that part of what was complicating her methodology was that she wasn't using one of Aperture's...

As 2006 comes to a close I find myself taking a moment to reflect on all of the wonderful things that have happened to me over the past year. As of this moment, I am writing this post from my...

Based on the e-mail I receive, there are some common problems in Aperture that can be easily solved with some simple tips.

One of the areas in which Aperture excels is in managing, applying, and searching metadata about your images. To get the most of this feature, however, you need to make sure you add the appropriate metadata to your images in...

Today I'm going to stray away from Aperture a bit and discuss a post processing technique that, while it can involve Aperture for part of the processing, it uses other software for the majority of the post processing. The process/technique...

Old habits are hard to shake. The first thing I did when putting together my Heroines book after returning from Africa, was to squeeze the best frames from my 250gb hard drive of raw images into a pile of color...

One of the most important tools to have when prepping files is a RGB on-screen color value readout (a.k.a. floating densitometer). This is especially important when working on files with a lot of highlight or shadow data. As we get...

Last week, Ben Long penned a post, Aperture Alpha Channel Aberrations, in which he showed an organization trick for how he keeps different versions of the same Photoshop file stacked together in Aperture. His example underlines an important point that...

If this were a movie plot, you'd assume Aperture was the black-hatted bad guy and that the Adobe Photoshop fanboys were wearing the white hats, riding in to save the day.

One of my favorite things about Aperture 1.5 is its extensible architecture. This means that third party software developers can create plug-ins for Aperture, opening up endless possibilities for integration with their applications. One such application, which jumped on...

Some of the younger readers might not recognize the title of this post as a line from the 1980's movie Top Gun, and others of us barely remember it because it was so long ago :) But this post...

Books are arguably the ideal display for a photographic project, giving the photographer ultimate control. You can choose the images, the order, size, text and design that best communicates your photographic vision. I love photo books. I collect them and...

A lot of Aperture's functionality comes not from Aperture itself, but from Core Image, lower level operating system features that Aperture can tap into. For example, the Mac OS has built-in routines for opening and displaying various file types such...

First, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Micah Walter and I am a freelance photojournalist, writer and teacher. I'll share a bit more about my background in just a few minutes. But first that iPod tip I promised......

For those of you who have been wondering, can a MacBookPro and Aperture peacefully co-exist, in my opinion, the answer is yes. I realize that your mileage may vary.

There was one "feature" in version 1.5.1 that really annoyed me. It was in the export module, it you specified a watermark file Aperture would apply the watermark before it resized the image. So if you were carefull to create...

Aperture users can download version 1.5.2 (a whopping 129MBs) via Software Update. According to the accompanying notes, this update addresses issues related to overall reliability and performance in a number of areas, including: Contact sheet printing - Smart Albums -...

This December, I'm taking some time to work on a few fundamentals before heading into a busy schedule of event shooting next year. One of the things I'm working on is a way to let other people "tap" into the...

Today, Connected Flow released FlickrExport for Aperture 1.0. Yay! I've been watching the development of this for a while, and am happy to see it go 1.0 and get out of beta. FlickrExport's sublime feature is that pulls the Title...

I think most of us agree: digital photography is where we need it to be, and it's getting better. Issues of quality, speed, storage, ease of use and affordability are all working. And now Aperture fills in the one...

It's been said that the most sound investment is Real Estate ... the same seems to be true when using Apple's Aperture. A little extra screen real estate can make your experience even more pleasurable. How do I know? Well,...

I don't actually think you should stop using Aperture. In fact, in my own work, I've pretty much abandoned all of my other workflow tools and am using Aperture exclusively. However, people keep asking me questions about renaming master files,...

One of my favorite things about this new adjustment is that it works only on luminance, not in the RGB space. Long ago I'd learned the trick of converting images in Photoshop to LAB space so I could sharpen without creating color artifacts. Now I don't have to do anything. Aperture does it for me.

Two weeks ago, I wrote that Color Management is Essential. The resulting comments, as well as personal discussions, I've had since then have been interesting indeed. One of the biggest questions that I've gotten has been: "So, what exactly makes...

In my last two entries I outlined a few strategies for renaming master files during import into Aperture. However, if you've already got files in your Aperture library and didn't rename the masters on import, and now find that you...

A lot of people struggle with the decision to buy Aperture because they believe that even if they own aperture they will still need to do some editing to their images that Aperture cannot do and therefore they'll need to...