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Highlighting a Few Aperture Features
Recently I’ve had several emails from people who were puzzled as to why they suddenly were unable to make adjustments to their images in Aperture. A little questioning revealed that in all cases the “problematic” images had either yellow or green borders on them. Images that have yellow borders are in Quick Preview mode - meaning that what you are seeing is the first available JPEG preview for the image, not updated with your Aperture settings. As Josh explained in a recent blog, Quick Preview allows you to quickly view the contents of a folder, rate, and delete images. You access Quick Preview mode by pressing P or the icon in the lower right of the interface. Quick Preview prevents that annoying beach ball while an image “loads” when you’re trying to just flip through them quickly. However the tradeoff is that you can’t adjust an image when it’s in Quick Preview mode. So if you have an image with a yellow border and you want to adjust it, press P to have Aperture create the normal preview and then all the adjustments will be available again.
Images with green borders are in the Compare mode. Compare mode lets you establish one image as the standard and then compare other images to it to make it easy to decide which is your favorite. To use Compare mode, first select two images by Command clicking on them. (Be sure to have your Viewer set to Multiple so you can see both images next to each other.) With both images selected, click on the one you wish to use as the “standard” and then press Return. That image will have a green border and move to the left of the Viewer. When you click on other images, they will appear to the right of it. If you find one that’s better than the initial “standard” or favorite, press Return. That image will now have the green border and replace the earlier favorite one. To exit Compare mode, press Command + Return. Whenever an image has the green border, you can no longer adjust it. You can only adjust the image with the white border. After exiting Compare mode, you can once again adjust the image.
The third feature that I want to mention is Web Galleries. Web galleries make it easy to quickly generate a web page on your .Mac account for others to view. Depending on the parameters you set, you can limit access to these pages or have them available to the public and you can even allow others to download the images. This saves trying to figure out how to send large files via email and can be a huge convenience. Web galleries can be used for a variety of situations when you need to share images, ranging from teaching situations to delivering images to friends or clients. To create a web gallery, select the images, click New (in the Toolbar at the top of the interface) >Web Gallery and follow the prompts and click Publish. Depending on the number of images you select it may take awhile to load. You can view your Web Galleries in the Projects Panel and after it’s published you can access the page by selecting the Web Gallery in the Projects Panel and then clicking on Web Gallery > Visit Web Page in the lower right part of the interface. When you visit the web page, I think you’ll be impressed with the viewing options and how easily you created the page. The more I use this feature, the more impressed I am with it!
Comments (10)
I have used Web Galleries with iPhoto before Aperture 2. Is it possible to access pre-existing web galleries from Aperture, and to transfer photos into them?
Thanks -
One note on web galleries that until it gets fixed makes them almost useless to me. I use the web gallery feature mainly to distribute images for printing to casual/consumer clients, most of who have no idea what they are doing when it comes to viewing/printing images. The problem with Aperture 2 web gallery feature is that the full size images are uploaded as Adobe RGB color profile images. There is now way to change or fix this as far as I can tell.
As I said this makes web galleries useless to most of the windows user customers that I have who are the only ones that I want to use web galleries for in the first place.
RB
You can rotate images (with [ and ]) when in Quick Preview mode, but this doesnt work properly (for me at least) the images get rotated but the aspect ratio gets 'inverted' so the image will rotate, but be disformed... its hard to explain properly, just try it out and see what I mean.
Arne, I don't get the aspect ratio issue when rotating images in Quick Preview. What camera are you using?
Hmm - my earlier reply seems to have disappeared. Dudley, I'm not sure but since in iPhoto you can go to File >Show Aperture Library and see your Aperture web galleries, I would think you could see your iPhoto web galleries by going to File >Show >iPhoto Browser in Aperture. Have you tried this? Let me know if it does or doesn't work please.
RB I can see the advantages of being able to specify sRGB, but still it's quite easy to view and download images that your clients/friends can then print - and most printers use Adobe RGB space. Have you experienced major issues with this?
Ellen
You are right, you can see web galleries published in iPhoto by pulling up the iPhoto browser in Aperture and vise versa. You can not cross publish images from one program to another, however. You can go to the gallery site on the Internet, and both the galleries published by iPhoto and Aperture can be viewed. This functionality is great.
Thanks -k
Dudley, actually since you can access your images from either program, you should be able to use them in the web galleries you create in either program. Have you tried?
You can use iPhoto images that are in albums and pull them into a web gallery in Aperture. It would be even better if you could manage web galleries created in iPhoto and Aperture from only one program. By that I mean being able to delete galleries, combine images in one gallery, etc.
Thanks for focusing on the web gallery feature.
Ellen,
Sadly a lot of my consumer customers are windows users and users of one of a million different discount printing services. My general experience with delivering digital files to windows users that have no knowledge of color management etc. is that it has more often than not been a disaster if I deliver digital files that are anything but sRGB. I have not tracked the exact products, services, or procedure that these customers were using because I really don't care to debug every combination of possibilities that may or may not work correctly with non-sRGB files. I just want the ability to upload sRGB as the full size downloadable versions.
Another note, from some very quick and dirty testing the full size versions are converted to Adobe RGB even if the master is sRGB, this is completely foolish.
RB
RB, I discovered the same thing - that even files that are sRGB initially arechanged to Adobe RGB. Hopefully this will be changed before too long.