Bumped from last week due to 2.1 coming out...

On Wednesday the week before last I went to the Apple Pro Seminar day in London, which is sort of the equivalent of the US Aperture World Tour. Rather than three hours of dedicated Aperture stuff it’s an entire day devoted to the Pro apps, OS-level features and to a lesser extent iLife.

On the one hand I was feeling hard done by due to getting less of an Aperture fix, on the other hand it meant that there was a good mix of people with video, sound and print specialists as well as photographers. The morning had a two hour seminar giving an overview of Aperture, Photoshop, InDesign, Final Cut, Motion, iChat and Automator all integrating together to produce a series of branding items for a mountain bike company, with sophisticated podcasts, web galleries, PDFs with both embedded movies and a high-res image in the same place for print.

Unfortunately, due to the vagaries of the British rail system I missed the first half of that - the train up from the Westcountry was half an hour late into Paddington, then the Circle Line and the District Line on the Tube were closed/running really badly so I had to take a huge detour via Piccadilly Circus and finally walk quite a way to get to Olympia where the seminar was being held. In an effort to keep this digression at least vaguely on topic, while changing at Piccadilly Circus I’m pretty sure I walked directly underneath the Regents Street Apple Store which is the biggest Apple Store in Europe. Without time to stop and browse...

Anyway, what I did see of the morning session was impressive, both in it’s scope and in the professionalism of the two presenters - a lot of live tasks and only one went wrong!

We then broke for lunch, sandwiches and drinks supplied by Apple. No apples provided though, fortunately I’d bought my own. :-) Oh, and a monopod, Canon 5D and fisheye for shooting a few panoramas.

The afternoon separated into three tracks - masterclasses, hands-on training sessions (all booked out by the time I registered) and a series of tech talks. I went to a technical session about podcasts that turned out not to be as useful as I’d hoped, so spent most of the time stitching lunchtime’s panoramas.

Then on to two of the masterclasses. Yay! Dedicated Aperture session at last! This was an hour-long demo by Graham Cooper, Senior Software Technical Marketing Manager for Apple Europe and was extremely thorough and entertaining. Pretty well all of the new features in Aperture 2 were explained and demonstrated, along with quite a lot of general Aperture- and general photo-related stuff. I even learned a few new bits, mainly about the new web galleries which I’ve not touched due to not having a .Mac account.

Last but not least was an iLife and iWork masterclass. Due to lack of time working on other things I’ve not had a really good look at iLife ’08, and was rather shocked to see that the cropping tool in iPhoto ’08 appeared, if anything, more sophisticated that Aperture’s. Of course that changed a bit with 2.1 adding in constrain to display and constrain to original proportions. Which brings me on to another matter...

A Crop Tool Wishlist

In some ways the cropping tool in Aperture still feels a little rough around the edges. Not that it doesn’t work well (I cropped ~1200 JPEGs on the train home, as well as plan out this post) but I have ingrained habits from other programs that deal with cropping, selection and resizing tools - not just Photoshop, but Pages, Keynote etc:

Holding down Shift while cropping/dragging will normally constrain the proportions of the crop. So you could drag out the area, then hold down Shift to expand it and keep the same proportions. In 2.1 the Custom constrain option does actually pick up on the existing crop proportions but it gets a bit messy if you change your mind, having to uncheck constrain, change the crop, swap to another image and back again to get the new proportions into the boxes.

Holding down Option/Alt will normally keep the crop centred on the same spot - very handy if you want to make sure that a certain part of the image is in the centre. Normally this combines with the Shift mode mentioned above.

Arrow keys to nudge the crop area. I can remember back in Aperture 1.0 using the crop tool and being totally confused when I hit the right arrow to nudge the crop area and suddenly I was looking at another image! I noticed that the crop tool was still active, making this a good way of going through and cropping many images one after another, but it’s the kind of surprise that puts people off a program when they are trying it out.
Obviously there are conflicts between arrow keys as the main way of navigating from one image to another, but now we have Command-arrow to do that.

To sum up, all of these behaviours* can be seen in Aperture - in the book layout tools. So if you’re not sure what I was talking about, whip up a test Book, swap into layout mode and start dragging on anchor points while holding down different modifier keys. Now imagine those behaviours applied to the crop tool.

Ian

*Apart from Shift-arrow for a larger nudge.