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Your Favorite Aperture 2 Tip
I'm down in Ventura, CA this week recording the "Aperture 2 Essential Training" for Lynda.com. This will be my fourth Aperture title with Lynda, and I really like the idea of spending this week immersed in the application. It should be ready for release in June.
I thought it would be terrific to include a few tips from Inside Aperture readers. So if you have a favorite 2.1 trick that you're willing to share, please put it in the Comments section of this post. That way everyone can learn about it, even if they don't watch the video. If I use yours, I'll add a comment saying so, and I'll give you credit as I show it off in the video.
We have such a great community of experts here. I'm excited about including some of our knowledge in the Aperture 2 title.
Comments (4)
This is something I use all the time: when you have converted an image to black and white you can still adjust the luminosity sliders in the color brick to change the brightness of different areas of an image based on what color they were originally. This is a great way to fine tune black and white conversions.
One of the ricks that I like the best is the use of the Option key when using the Brightness, Exposure and Color temp to let you exceed the set range the these slider. I use brightness in particular to cut the haze in an image. For example when you shoot from airplane
So a couple of these might be really geeky but I suppose I'll list them because they could be useful:
Open up the aperture preference file. com.Apple.aperture.plist is located in ~(Home folder)/Library/Preferences
The file is an xml file which contains all of apertures prefs. I recommend you use an application such as Property List Editor (Apple Developer tool, free) or Pref Setter (free) to view it. Text Edit will work, but it ain't pretty.
One item or key is GPUForAdjustments it's value is a number default is 1. I would like to know what each value does but here is what I think should happen. In binary 1=yes 0=no. If you don't have dedicated graphics memory you can change the value to 0. I'm on a MacBook and it's hard to say exactly how much difference it makes. Anyway it's in the to be investigated category.
This next one is more practical. There are 2 keys limitPreviewSizeHeight and limitPreviewSizeWidth which do exactly as they say and each accept a number. It's greater control than what Aperture allows.
Well the next two aren't necessarily unknown but they are useful. The keywords hud supports import and export of keywords using text files and you can even use tabs to create hierarchies. It's a nice way to edit a bunch of keyword and to rearrange them. It's nice to use sometimes and is best used to just import keywords. It can't quite fully manage keywords.
Then there's things like the Edit Auto Fill List button (under Metadata menu) that save a lot of time. Metadata us a great part of Aperture and one that should get more credit for the small things. It's also something almost all of us (myself included) could quit being so lazy about. Some day that time "in the summer when I'll....." will come.
I'm using a script to import files from a folder into a project in Aperture.
I've set up my old scanner, to use the folder, when importing images.
So I drop something onto the scanner, hit the scanner button, and wait for Aperture open up, add a keyword (and a comment). It's done.
So what makes this simple tip so useful?
(Here's a hint...) keyword - "Business Receipts".
All backed up, easily sorted by month, and ready to email to my accountant at the click of a button.