Before the idea of Aperture’s ”all-in-one“ post-production methodology came along, a lot of the things we wanted to do with our digital images required a somewhat inordinate amount of time, expertise and effort to process. The steps to prepare the final photos, email pictures and post images on the web were a bit convoluted, and we often have to use two, three or more software. All that has changed. Almost everything we want to do now can be quickly and easily done, and even only with Aperture.

Take for instance the online delivery and sharing of images. Aperture gives you many options to do this. The tight integration with Mail allows you to send out previews and even high resolution pictures on the fly. You can also export the right image file specs with Apple’s presets as well as through user-initiated presets. And, because of the many third-party export plug-ins, you can immediately push final, appropriately-spec’d images to various commercial online services such as Flickr, Phanfare, SmugMug, PBAse, ZenFolio, Picasa, PhotoShelter, Soundslides, Corbis, and others. And, one of the things that you can also easily do is to instantly create your own website or web pages from your own web server or through your .Mac account.

Many photographers however may still not be taking advantage of Aperture’s straight-forward, easy-to-use web creation tools. Because of the focus on project organization and photo management tools, as well as the built-in adjustment tools and editing plug-ins, it is easy to forget that we have the means to showcase or present our photographs on the web from within Aperture. There are three ways to go about it: create a live Web Gallery, put-together a Web Journal, and, come up with Web Pages. You can do all of these in minutes.

When creating a Web Journal or a Web Page, Aperture provides six elegantly and appropriately designed templates: Art Collection, Picture, Proof, Special Occasion, Stock (White, and Stock (Black). We can select from any of these that we like for our web presentations. Incidentally, these themes, with the addition of Formal, Modern Lines, and Snapshots, are available as book layout themes as well. If you have been using this functionality, and you’ve grown quite weary from the limited theme template selection, or, if your web presentation requires a somewhat different look or style, you might be wondering if it is possible to use other, third-party template styles. Well, it is now actually possible with Jumsoft.

Jumsoft recently introduced five custom-themed templates: Frames Gray, Grid Black, iPhone, Mental Image, and Rounded Black. Click here to see the Aperture themes. These templates can be used from within Aperture when creating your Web Journal and Web Page presentations. You can download each of these templates from Jumsoft’s website for only $19.99 each. Installing and using them is easy. When you install, the custom themes are added to Aperture’s contents folder located at Aperture.app/Contents/Resources/WebThemes and it is automatically and readily accessible through the theme selection dialog box. The themes can also be installed, seemingly without restriction, in several copies of Aperture. Likewise, should the need arise, the non-Apple custom themes can be removed by deleting them from the same contents folder.

The main advantage of using these themes is that it provides a different web design and style when presenting your images. ”The idea is to make solid, delicious, like Apple style themes for Aperture,“ says Martynas Limontas of Jumsoft.

Right now, Jumsoft is the only third-party developer with custom themes for Aperture. There are currently five Jumsoft-designed themes that are available, and more will be introduced in the near future. However, themes for books and slideshow is not in Jumsoft’s ”nearest future plans.“

Applying these Jumsoft themes is similar to applying any of the built-in Apple themes for web journals and web pages. Setting the number of columns, rows, and even the photo captions using the metadata of the images is just as easy. Moving the images within the template, to change the order and sequence, is also easy. When fitting images into the alloted photo slots of the templates, however, you might be able to get the best fit by selecting the square instead of the rectangle or width option. This gives you a more uniform image size that looks great on the theme’s layout specially if the orientation of the images are a mix of horizontals and verticals.

Once done, you can export the web pages to your hard drive and publish them to your server, or upload them directly to your .Mac account. When publishing, you can set the title as well as the sizes of the thumbnail images and detail images presets. From my experience, publishing for the first time a set of brand new web pages with a little over 40 iPhone photo images took about 5 minutes on a typical internet connection. Re-publishing is faster since only the changes from the last publication needs to be uploaded. Click here to see a sample of the web pages created from Aperture with Jumsoft’s Mental Image theme.

Jumsoft’s Aperture themes earns a rating of 4.0 out of 5.0. The five new themes certainly provide Aperture users with a refreshing addition to the existing Apple-designed built-in web themes. It would be very interesting to see more themes from Jumsoft, and hopefully, at a more ”affordable“ price.

[Note: Photo in screenshot by Dominique James of The Studio and The Playground. Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.]