Most serious Aperture users like myself no doubt get very excited about new plug-ins for the program because they add just one more feature (or solution, as some of us like to call it) to our workflow. Well a new...

Last week while hunting for some info on Apple.com, I stumbled upon Apple’s online seminars website. This is a great resource of high-quality overviews, seminars, and demos, available as streaming Quicktime videos that can be watched anytime. And the best...

In the second part of my Aperture In Slovakia post, I wanted to mention how I used Aperture to plan out the final exhibition. At the end of the week, we made some tough decisions to come up with our...

Aperture makes it easy to add a copyright to your images by including an option to add a watermark when you establish presets. The problem is that the colors of generic watermarks are hidden in some images and clash with...

One of the most common questions I hear Aperture users asking is "how should I organize my library?" At first Aperture seems pretty straight forward as far as organization goes. You create Projects which contain the images from a single...

Often, when I'm asked to speak at amateur photo events, the organizers have specific topics they want me to address. For example, last weekend I covered Adobe applications at Popular Photography's Digital Days. Adobe, Sony, and a handful of other...

I don’t shoot much digital video. In fact, I don’t own a camcorder, so any video I shoot gets captured as an .avi file on my Canon point-and-shoot. So it may seem surprising that I have any use for iMovie....

Why Aperture has a very nice collection of image adjustment tools, it lacks the ability to perform any kind of distortion correction. If you're shooting with a wide-angle lens that has trouble with barrel distortion, then you won't have any...

I'm here in beautiful Liptovsky Mikulas, a four-hour train ride from Slovakia's capital Bratislava, teaching a workshop on digital documentary photography. Of course, I have brought along Aperture, which has proven to be a teacher's best friend and assistant extordinaire....

One of Aperture's features is its ability to integrate with external editors, like Photoshop. But given the image adjustments that we can make within Aperture, one has to wonder why we really even need Photoshop. After all, between buying expensive...

I recently came across a cool add-on for Aperture. David Riecks, who currently chairs the SAA Imaging Technology Standards Committee, has a small but very useful product called Controlled Vocabulary. The keyword dictionary is available for Aperture users as well...

If you glance back on my previous posts, you'll notice that I've largely written about ways I try to increase my productivity workflow in Aperture. Like many of you who process large volumes of images, I'm always looking for hacks...

Aperture is great for adding metadata to digital photos, but I recently discovered a shortcoming while trying to modify some metadata on a series of images. Last week, after importing photos from two cameras into Aperture, I realized that the...

When it comes to color correction--skin tones are probably the most difficult to get right, and the most closely scrutinized. After all, if the skin tones are off, we immediately know something is amiss and it's hard to get past...

One of the most useful advantages of the digital evolution has been the histogram, but surprisingly few people know how to interpret them. Simply put, a histogram is a graph of the tonal values in an image - whatever they...

Recently, I reported that Apple has scheduled a series of lectures titled Aperture in Action. If you tried to register for this tour and didn't receive a confirmation email, try re-registering again. Apple experienced a database glitch that has now...

In my first post about my new iPhone, I wrote that I wasn’t interested in uploading its photos to Aperture. Now that I’ve had a few days to explore my new gadget, I’ve started using its camera, so I decided...

Aperture's Highlight Hot Areas command (which you can access from the View menu, or by pressing Option-Shift-H) activates a highlight clipping display in the Viewer pane. This display shows any pixels that have clipped highlights. You activate this feature by...

One of the greatest resources for learning Aperture is made available by Apple, 24 hours a day in the form of tutorials on their website. When you go to www.apple.com/aperture and click on "Tutorials" you will see a range of...

To all of our American readers, happy 4th of July! When we think about the 4th of July, the first thing that comes to mind is that we get the day off. The second thing is fireworks! Fireworks are a...

I really like the way Aperture deals with cropping and resizing on export. For some reason it makes perfect sense to me. However, many people I talk to just can't get their heads around it. Let's say for instance that...

As Charlie mentioned in his iPhone post, there's a nice two-way connection between iPhone and Aperture. I'm not as interested in uploading my iPhone images to Aperture, but using the iPhone's beautiful display for my Aperture photos is very appealing....

I went down to the Apple SoHo Store on Friday night to witness the craziness that was the iPhone launch. Took some photos of the line around the block and the mob of press at the front door. The store...