Aperture gives photographers a chance to make quick, easy and attractive web sites full of photos. But for some photographers, the standard choices that ship with Aperture are not enough.

As I've written about before, in the last few months I've been using lots of different tools to work with my digital photographs. For example, I've been maintaining my main image library in Aperture, but using Lightroom to create large...

This morning I woke up to make an 8 a.m. bus ride to a couple of Dominica's waterfalls. First on the list was a nature hike along a river and up a mountain to the Sari Sari Falls. The...

It was reported some time ago that many Aperture users were seeing strange lines on their images after exporting to JPG. While it seemed that this problem was solved in v1.5.1 it seems that some people (including myself) are still...

Well, it has been a really nice weekend here in Dominica. Yesterday I spent some time volunteering at the Portsmouth library where I did my best to tutor some kids in math. Math was never my strongest subject, but...

I've been shooting with the Canon EOS 20D and 30D for quite a while now and I do a lot of sports shooting. While I think these camera bodies are great performers for the money I do have a few...

I am officially overwhelmed by the comments I have been receiving. The discussions on the last two posts have been great, and some really great points have been brought up. I hope to answer some of your questions when...

I made a bonehead mistake yesterday by shooting a series of landscape shots with the white balance set on "custom" from the night before. Fortunately, I shoot in Raw, so I was able to correct the blunder quickly in Aperture....

One of my favorite added benefits of shooting in RAW format is the ability to set my camera to Black and White and still have the color information preserved. To do this, all I do (on my Canon 20D)...

BIDOA, SOMALIA-- It is very interesting to observe the process that Dr. James Orbinski, the former head of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), who accepted the Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of MSF in 1999, goes through in determining whether we...

The more I use Lightroom, the more I am beginning to love the program. I think I made that same statement when I first started using Aperture about a year ago. Maybe it has something to do with it...

In January, I posted quite a few entries here about my shoot at Macworld 2007. At the time, however, I didn't go into specifics about who the client was or what the project was all about. Well, I can now...

Many Aperture users are finding multiple libraries to be the key to their organizational woes. As Derrick Story described here, Aperture 1.5 provides a simple way to switch between multiple libraries. However you choose to make the switch from one...

I have never been too satisfied with the Aperture Import panel. Although I think it was well thought out in some regard, it seems to lack in others. First of all, I think they have given way too much...

One of the more valuable bits of metadata that comes along with digital images is the date and time at which they were taken. When I'm traveling, however, I never remember to change the time on my camera when I...

Aperture works well with every printer I've hooked up to my Mac. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that this $89 portable works as well as the others.

Today at around 11 a.m. I headed off to photograph the local Carnival celebration in Portsmouth, Dominica. Portsmouth is the second largest city in Dominica, though it is not really a city, but more of a fishing village. I...

Well, it is early Monday morning here in the West Indies. I'm sitting here in my apartment sipping my morning coffee and waiting for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 to download. That's right! Adobe has released version 1.0 of Photoshop...

I recently discovered another great use for the Auto-Stack feature in Aperture. I was shooting a large regional swim meet and wanted to make sure I didn't miss any critical shots, but I could not get a second a shooter...

I've been testing the HP Pro B9180 inkjet printer for the last few months, and for much of my printing, using Aperture. Why? In short, because it's easier. I was running a variety of paper stocks through the B9180 (and...

GOMA, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO (DRC)-- A documentary film crew and I have made our way here by car from Kigali, Rwanda. We are following Dr. James Orbinski, the former head of Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), (who accepted the Nobel...

With Lightroom looming on the horizon, we're going to see more and more comparison articles pitting Aperture head-to-head with Adobe's offering. Lightroom certainly has some very nice features, but it currently lacks one enabling technology that gives Aperture an advantage...

During a recent chat with Joe Schorr about color management, he reminded me of a tip that I use a lot, but haven't discussed much: onscreen proofing. This is very handy when reviewing a batch of images that you know...

One of my favorite ways of using Aperture is in Full Screen mode. In this mode, you get as much real estate as possible focused on the most important thing: Your photographs. When I first started using Aperture, however, there...

"It's the photographer that takes the picture, not the camera" This is a very popular saying, and a lot of people agree with it ..... but I'm going to play devil's advocate and take the opposite opinion tonight. Some people...

One of the standard first operations that you might perform on a photograph is to apply auto-levels. Aperture makes this easy, and it's become almost a reflexive action for me. Usually, I almost use the Luminance auto-levels tool as that...

Thanks to 12MB RAW file sizes and the sheer joy of taking pictures, my Aperture libraries get big fast. I toss 120 GB hard drives in my saddle bag like sandwiches in a lunch box. We all know that you...

KIGALI, RWANDA--From what I've seen of this country, like so many places in Africa, it's beautiful with lush vegetation, rolling hills framed by mountains and active volcanoes. But there is also poverty and the burden of HIV/AIDS and the legacy...

Apple has just announced a series of free workshops aimed at wedding and event photographers. The workshops will focus on Aperture, Apple hardware, and will feature presentations by professional photographers who are yet to be named. Each attendee will also...

We shoot still images for lots of reasons, of course. At different times, I've been hired to shoot for the usual print or web projects, but I've also had to shoot images for inclusion as stills in video projects, and...

Step one, is to acquire the profile. If you have your own colorimeter, then you can build your own profiles. If you use a standard inkjet printer from a major company like Epson or Canon, you will receive profiles with your printer. Lastly, if you work with an outside service such as MPIX, you'll be able to obtain profiles from the service provider.

Last week I talked about batch changing your images date/time stamp using the Metadata Batch Change dialog. This week I want to explore a few more options available to you in the batch change dialog. There are several cases where...

Long time Aperture users might want to double-check the Raw Fine Tune panel in the Adjustments HUD before printing and other critical output. Why? Well, as I learned the other day, there is sometimes a big difference between Fine...

It has been a mad scramble as usual to pack for my trip to Africa. I always fantasize about being a James-Bond-like-traveler; relaxed, in a tux with martini in hand, bored and checking my watch to see if it's time...