Looking at the Aperture interface for the first time, with all the many different panes and buttons spread menacingly across the monitor screen, can be intimidating. That's how I actually felt the first time I saw it. It seems unwieldy and inflexible.

Through the years, I've actually seen photographers stopped on their track when they first encounter Apple Aperture's seemingly daunting, professional-looking interface. On several occassions, and confronted with such an interface they take the flight instead of the fight approach. A lot do give it a half-hearted try at least, but sooner than later gives up on Aperture. Unless, someone teaches them what it can do.

From the start, I'm glad I had a very solid introduction to Aperture's interface. That made the whole thing easy for me, beginning with how to manage the seemingly unwieldy, professional-looking, and intimidating interface.

If you are looking at the Aperture interface for the first time, you might not easily know what to do. Everything looks familiar, and yet, at the same time, it is also not quite familiar. A "learning curve" needs to be hurdled to gain some sort of working mastery of Aperture's interface. It's not as intuitive as photographers may have liked, but everything begins to make sense as photographers learn about Aperture's commands, setup and tools.

One of the laments I hear from novice Aperture users who are quite unfamiliar with the interface is that they think Aperture is clunky. This is not my experience at all. The Aperture interface is smooth, easy, and easily configurable. At any stage of post-production work and wherever in Aperture you may be, there is an easy and quick way to arrange and rearrange the workspace to conform with and fit into your work requirement, moment by moment.

In case you don't know yet, you can arrange, rearrange, resize and move elements interface in Aperture. What seems unwieldy turns into flexible fluidity. That's what the Apple Aperture is all about. And it's not as hard as you think it is, to manipulate and interact with the Aperture interface.

You can begin with a handful of easy and quick interface shortcuts. Here are a few of them that are absolutely easy to remember such that you can start using them right away. (In fact, after reading this.)

I'd like to think that Aperture has three essential interface commands. Just three.

Let's begin with the letter W. When you click W, the project panel, with all of your organized library projects, disappears. Click on it again, it shows up. That's how easy it is. Let's take another letter: I. Toggle on the letter I to show and hide the information pane that allows you to access the adjustments and metadata commands on the right side. And the other important letter is the letter F, for full-screen. These 3 letters will really get you started. Along the way, you can discover other instant methods to manipulate the interface.

Oh, let's add one more letter! When you are in F (full-screen) mode, click on H to bring up the Adjustment Hud.

I'm not a shortcut guy myself but with Aperture, I somehow ended up really remembering these four single letters, and reaching out for each of them when I need to instantaneously change Aperture's interface.

Now, here's the thing, you can add to these four key interface letters a few commands that will make Aperture look always the way you want it to.

From the topmost Menubar, click on Window. Try and click on the different items in the drop-down menu. You might just be amazed at how Aperture can look the way you want it to look like. You can Minimize, Zoom and change the Layout Views. You can reveal both the Adjustments and Keywords HUDs (heads-up displays). You can show and hide a combination of various Panels (Projects, Vaults, Viewers, Inspectors, Controls, Metadata, Task Lists, Import, Download, and others). And you can even Swap and Rotate the Workspaces. Personally, I find that these easy commands give me total control over how the Aperture interface looks like.

Oh, and one more thing, you can customize the Toolbar by populating it with several one-click icons that allows you to execute all the commands you often use . Right-Click on any blank area of the Toolbar to start customizing it. And, you can also make the bottom-most Control Bar appear when you need to access commands from there, or disappear when you need a bigger space to view images.

If you use these interface controls often enough, you will soon master it and you can work better, faster and easier. You'll have the clear and perfect view any time and anywhere you may happen to be in Aperture.