Interesting... I'm still pretty new with Aperture and had only very briefly tinkered with Light Tables - and had written them off. But I do like to tinker with stitched sets of shots, so this might be a good use for them after all. Thanks!

I didn't use light tables for a long time either, until I realised that I could use it to roughly lay out a wedding album in front of a client.

We make the selections for the album, then I add them to a light table and then quickly lay out the left and right pages (page 1 on first row, page 2 and 3 on second row...). It is a great way for the clients to be able to get a feel for how images work together and gives me the ability to determine how many pages are needed (and relate that to their budget). Sure, I could use the book layout tool (which I also now use), but you are unable to freely move images around between pages.

I think the light table may appeal to photographers who used to shoot film. If you used to sort and group transparencies on a real light table, or move groups of polaroids around on a table then the Aperture light table seems very intuitive. Perhaps if you've always been used to digital work where you're always looking at files in a folder or in a grid view, then the light table may not seem such an obviously useful thing.

The whole paradigm behind Aperture (as opposed to LR et al) is that you can do anything to your images, anywhere. Once you've selected laid your images in the light-table it doesn't stop there. You can then edit new versions of those images right there to match colours etc, create new albums from groups within the light table, print the light table and send to the client (or PDF) or open a new album layout and use the light table as a basis to your design.

It is a really flexible scratch pad and if you think of it as moving polaroids around on a table you'll probably grow to like it more.

Perhaps now that Polaroid is totally dead in the photographic world, Aperture will be used by many more people; what other application lets you move images around so freely (and resize them) while letting you edit, reize and do whatever you like to them right there? Maybe when Apple fully deploys multi-touch into desktop screens then the Light Table will become more useful.

I didn't ever use this the light table feature (and I've been a user since the beginning) until I started printing books. I found it incredibly helpful in helping me layout and the photos for my books. It's a great tool once you start using it.

Michael

I've been using them to lay out web pages, with a mix of smaller images (to tell the story) an larger ones. Unfortunately this is only for the rough idea, I then have to take the pictures to dreamweaver to put it together.

I too used to edit slides on a big light table, and liked this very spatial way of working. But I don't find the light table as easy to work with as I'd like. For doing layouts I wish you could ask for a set of fixed-size pages instead of the magic unlimited automatic resizing/scrolling thing. And for just sorting I'd like to have a mode where things snap into a grid, to make things quicker... with the current setup I find that the time I save being able to arrange things in 2D I lose again in actually arranging them with the mouse. (Maybe if you have a tablet and a big screen this isn't a problem.)

Light tables is one of the main feature that kept me into Aperture and from leaving to Lightroom.

I use Light tables all the times when I design my wedding albums. I create a Light table per spread and it helps me to visually organize my images before I lay them in Page Gallery or in InDesign.

That's a great bunch of comments. I'd meant to ask at the end what other people use Light Tables for, but it looks like you all answered it anyway...

I'll definitely be using it more in the future, it's also a good way of seeing how different images would look together on the wall in an exhibition.

Rob - 'do anything anywhere' is still one of my favourite aspects of Aperture.

improbable - as a possible workaround, try setting up a 'template' Table by placing a series of blank images evenly spaced along the top and side, then duplicate the Table each time you need a grid and the extra images should snap to the horizontal and vertical positions of the blanks. To make the blanks, either make a small black, white or grey image in PS and make multiple Versions, or take a random image and drag the Exposure text field to get +10 or -10.

David - have you tried the Aperture-InDesign automation stuff?

Ian

Grids 'n stuff - I just came across a blog post by Ben Long, listing some of the contextual menu controls in the Light Table, including 'distribute' and 'align' functions...

http://blogs.oreilly.com/aperture/2007/06/light-table-shortcuts-1.html

Ian

You can also use light tables to print out huge wall murals. Instead of actually printing it, save it as a PDF with your chosen size. Run it down to Kinko's and have them print out a 4' x 10' graphic panel for your living room. Yes, I did say 4 feet by 10 feet. Great projects for you contemporary people.

I've thought about this a little bit more since yesterday. I had previously assumed that I would group both stitched sets of images and bracketed sets of exposures using stacks (one stack per set). I wasn't entirely happy with the idea, because I could well have stacks for other purposes too and it would not be obvious which sort were which.

But now I can see that a simple light table for each shoot where such images exist should call them out quite nicely. They don't have to have anything too fancy with their layout.

Not as sophisticated a use as some of the ideas discussed above, but I think it should work nicely for me. :-)

I shoot products for use in printed catalogs and commercial web sites. I use the light table to layout the products quickly before putting them together in InDesign & Dreamweaver.

I also use them after shoots for print ads to get a feel for how the images look together. It's great not having to drop into InDesign to do this each time.

Now I feel stupid/blind. :-(

Look in the top right of those screengrabs and you'll see two buttons and a slider.

Button 1 is a 'Zoom Navigator' which let's you see the whole Table and move to another area at the same zoom scale.
Button 2 scales the Table to fit all included images on screen.
The slider is a standard zoom scale slider, like the one for the Browser pane and Book layouts.

So creating a snapshot of the whole set of panos would have been really easy just by hitting the 'scale to fit' button... oops. The Light Tables feature is even more sophisticated and useful than I'd realised.

I've been looking at the XML file that Aperture creates for each Light Table Album, down in the depths of the Library, and all the relative sizes and positions are included. This opens up a couple of interesting possibilities - creating a set of Albums based on groupings of images on the Table (very useful for my panoramas) and exporting some kind of text file or XML file that could perhaps be used by InDesign to start building up the page layout. Not that I know anything about InDesign scripting.

Ian