I am very pleased to announce Aperture Plugged In, a new website dedicated to, you guessed it, Aperture plugins! This new site is what I hope will become a meeting place for all those interested in using, developing and thinking...

In my recent article, Photo Workflow on the Road - A Hitchhiker's Guide to Aperture, I talked about a few online storage options including PhotoShelter and Digital Railroad. A few days after posting the article a reader mentioned Jungle Disk...

Be sure to calibrate your monitor under the lighting conditions that match the way you work. If you work (God Forbid!) under florescent ceiling lights, then calibrate under florescent ceiling lights.

Starting last evening, and continuing into today, word about the official upcoming release of Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 has criss-crossed the Internet. Even though this is a blog for and about Aperture, I think it's important to acknowledge and discuss...

Here is a cool little tip if you have taken a bunch of photos in a time zone other than your camera's "home" time zone. Select all the images that are showing up with the wrong time data in...

When I was growing up, learning photography was pretty much an exclusively black and white exercise. A color darkroom was prohibitively expensive - and complex - and black and white film was much cheaper than color. Nowadays, for the price...

Well, it's official, I have now been named (by more than a couple of people), "The Plug-in Guy." I never meant for this to happen, but I guess I just get way too excited when I see digital photography applications...

Further to my post about editing last week, I have been thinking about it and have looked around and found some interesting posts about deciding which digital images to keep and which delete. From Derrick Story's website, The Digital Story,...

One of our readers clued us into an Aperture plug-in which streamlines exporting and uploading images to "Gallery." For those of you who have never heard of Gallery before, it is a web based, open source, photo album application available...

With the exception of the RAW fine tuning controls, every command in Aperture that works with RAW files, also works with JPEGs. It just works faster. And of course, all the compare, select, keywording and publishing tools work with JPEGS too.

For a long time, I was perfectly happy with the managed library structure introduced with Aperture 1.0. The simplicity of having the application manage all those pesky RAW files outweighed the fact that they were packaged in an opaque structure....

A question I'm constantly asked is: "How can I set my favorite image adjustments as the defaults when I open the Heads Up Display?" For a while, I didn't know the answer myself until I found this post by Jacob...

This week I'm going to show you how you can create an online image gallery in only a few minutes. Aperture makes this so easy that you can probably create a gallery in less time than it takes to upload...

After blogging during the experience of my recent Macworld 2007 assignment, I think I can safely say that it was a really good way to think in detail about my workflow and my use of Aperture. As well, some really...

With the ability to import referenced files, Aperture 1.5 makes it much easier to manage a large archive of images than it was under version 1. However, depending upon your storage strategy, you're probably also using the internal, managed library...

Over the last month, I've taken a look at a few of Aperture's comparison features (such as compare mode and stack mode). These features allow you to easily compare images within a project to determine which images you want to...

The art of editing has always been one of the most challenging tasks for me. It's a crucial part of our work that is almost as important as the shoot itself. If we select the wrong photographs, no one gets...

Over the weekend I made a couple of quick posts pointing out updates to the handful of plug-ins that are now available for Aperture 1.5. Aperture’s extensible architecture was really one of the best additions that came with the update...

If you come to understand only one thing about Aperture's approach to image management, understand this. Each master image can exist in only one Aperture project. Period.

After wrapping up my last day of shooting at MacWorld on Friday, it was time to sit down and sift through photographs. And, boy, there were quite a few to go through. I shot 943 frames for my assignment. During...

One of the things I like to do on this blog is to discuss features in Aperture that I've recently discovered or perhaps just started using. And with the hundreds or thousands of features in this program it looks like...

A friendly commenter noted in my last post that the guys over at Digital Railroad have also just released an export plug-in for Aperture. You can read about it and download the plug-in for free here. Thanks to Eberhard for...

The developers at iStockPhoto have released an update to the plug-in for uploading images to iStockPhoto from within Aperture. The new version adds built in disambiguation, which is a part of the iStock uploading workflow. To download the latest version...

As I write this, it's Thursday evening and the end of MacWorld is in sight. It's a good thing too. I've lugged my camera gear all over the place and had my camera tugging at my neck for too many...

If you're an Aperture blogger on this site, you're either on a beautiful tropical island, or at the Mac paradise of MacWorld. I might choose the island if given a choice, but I'm happy to be one among the sea...

MacWorld continues to buzz on. The Keynote yesterday was incredible and, along with many of the other Inside Aperture bloggers, I was lucky enough to have a great seat right up front. Both the AppleTV and the iPhone look great...

One of my favorite things to talk about having to do with Aperture is how easy it is to use. Really, Aperture is marketed to professional photographers, but I believe it is a program that could appeal to many...

An interesting Aperture question showed up in my email box last week from a user with a curious problem: several people use his computer, which means that if any of them launch Aperture, they stand a good chance of finding...

Imagine being able to call up your web portfolio or a gallery of images you've created in Aperture on your phone? Since Aperture now links its library to iPhoto, the ability to seamlessly integrate Aperture photos with iPhoto will give iPhone users the ability to show off their photos in amazing ways.

The buzz level is very high at MacWorld. As the ever-insightful John Gruber noted over coffee, tomorrow will either bring what everyone thinks will come—namely the ever-rumored iPhone—or we'll see something else that's so good that we won't care that...

I'm revved with anticipation about MacWorld. But it's not for the same reason that most of you might be. Sure, I'm looking forward to the iTV, some sneak peeks into Leopard, some new hardware, and maybe a new phone. But,...

The Inside Aperture blog has been online for about 2 months now and I've made several blog posts that are of a technical nature or about specific techniques. Today I wanted to do something kind of fun with the blog...

With the deadlines for a wide variety of photo contests looming, if you want to try your luck against the best of the best photos taken in 2006 you need to get moving. It's important for me to reflect on...

In my last entry, I extolled the virtues of Aperture's Compare feature, which makes it simple to compare a group of images in a project to find the one you like best. As I stated then, I've been very surprised...

I just received my first royalty payment of the New Year. This one came as a small surprise from one of my wire service clients who pay me residual royalties each quarter. It wasn’t much, enough to pay for some...

Aperture makes it very easy to convert a color photograph into a black & white image. Open the Adjustments Inspector and choose the Monochrome Mixer (Control-M). Open the disclosure triangle. You can use the presets or make and mix your own adjustments.

In a comment to my blog post from last week, Set Up Your Metadata View, a self-described N00b asked the question: What's an IPTC? Well, it's a good question with two primary answers. The first is that IPTC stands for...