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Some Hidden Treasures - Posters and Text Slides
It’s easy to get accustomed to taking the various features and tools within Aperture at face value without really thinking any further about what they might have to offer. But if you’re willing to think outside the box a tad, you may discover a lot of untapped potential. For example, on the surface, the Book tool in Aperture exists to let you create books from your images. As you know, there are options for various layouts, with and without text. You can opt to have Apple generate the books (and by the way, their quality is now quite impressive) or generate a PDF to send to the printer of your choice. But did you realize that you can use the Book tool to create posters or text slides for use in a slideshow?
To generate a poster, select the image or images, then New > Book. Choose Custom theme and create a page size that you want for your poster. Aperture will open a book with a lot of pages. Click the Edit Layout button - it’s the second one to the right after the word "Theme." Then select the pages you don’t want and delete them. Drag in the image you want to use. Click to resize and position the image. If the page doesn’t already have a text box, add one. Switch to the Edit Content Button to fill in the text. There are some basic font choices available from the Button that looks like a T, but if you right click within the text box with the Edit Content button selected, you’ll access the regular Mac font tools and have a lot more choices. To position the text, click the Layout Button and then drag the text box wherever you’d like it. When you’re happy, press Print and print as usual.
Similarly, to create text slides, begin by choosing Custom and specify the size for the page. I used the default setting. Then select all the slides (Command +A) and click the Set Master page button it’s under the pages to the right of the + and - buttons. Choose a text page. You can add or delete text boxes from each page as you need. Right click within the text box with the Edit Content tool selected to access many more choices for the text including font style, size and color. When you’re done, press Print and then choose "Import PDF into Aperture." A pop-up will appear allowing you to create a new project or to specify an existing one, as well as to save the pages as TIFFs or JPEGs. For a slideshow, choose JPEGs. Now you have text pictures that you can use in a slideshow. The advantage of this, rather than creating the text slides in another program such as Keynote is that you can stay within Aperture and use it’s Slide Show.
The bottom line is that the more familiar you are with the tools, the more likely you are to find that they’ll meet your needs. There’s a lot of power within Aperture!
To all the readers in the US - have a great Thanksgiving! Don’t forget to take lots of family pics - in the long run they’ll be the most valuable of all your images.
The book layout feature is also great for making cards in the style of the late iCards. Mix a photo and some text on a page, print to a PDF, convert to a JPEG in Preview, and mail the result to the recipient.
Thanks Andreas, for pointing that out. Actually you could use the book layout tool to create the card, as you suggested, and then save it back to Aperture and email it as you would any picture.
I have a 44' HP Z3100 coming on Monday, and was thinking along the lines in this post to layout my prints and send them to the printer... because I really don't want to use a rip, and I really don't want to boot into windows to use qimage, and imagenest is horrendiously overpriced for functionality that is included inside aperture...
I have seen it mentioned before, people with large format printers use aperture this way and it should work great, however I do wonder if image enlargements are possible, and at what quality.
Does aperture handle enlargements simply by lowering dpi, or is there some sort of inteligent resampling in the background ?
Ifnot, this may be a nice thing to add to my wishlist for version 3 (if it ever sees the light)
I suspect aperture does not have this functionality, but is there a plugin anyone can recommend that does high quality enlargements (hi quality meaning anything better than adobe)
Ellen,
Good idea with bringing the exported card back into Aperture.
Any ideas on creating a faux postmark?
Andreas, you could create a faux postmark in Photoshop to use as a watermark. Just make sure you save the background as transparent and then save that file as a TIFF with transparency. Then set your Mail export preference to use the faux postmark.
Peter, congrats on the new printer. While you could certainly set up Aperture to print as a pseudo RIP the one thing you need to be aware of is that Aperture doesn't upsize your images - it decreases dpi.(BTW, I agree I'd like to see upscaling options in v3.) So if the output size of each individual image is close to your original file size or smaller, there's no issue to create a layout that contains multiple images. But if you're wanting to reproduce the images and dramatically increase their size, you may not be happy with the results. However, keep in mind that some people print at 360 dpi, some at 300, some at 240, and some swear everything is fine at 180. So you might want to give it a try and see if the results work for you.
Way back I used to use Genuine Fractals for resizing, but I haven't used it in a long time. I've been happy with Photoshop and Bicubic Smoother.
Ellen
Ellen,
Could you please review your text slide instructions. If I follow them, nothing happens when I Select All; therefore, when I click to Set Master Page, only Softcover appears as an option. I can shift click to select all book pages, but, once again, only Softcover appears as a Set Master Page option. The only way I get more options is to select a single book page, then Set Master Page reveals text pages and other options. Having a single page, however, defeats the intent of a text slide show.
I have tried this both simply with New > Book (with no images selected) an--just for comparison--New from selection > Book (with images selected).
Thanks in advance,
-John
Hi John, sorry - you are correct - to select all the pages you need to click the first one and then Shift + click the last one - for some reason Ctrl +A doesn't work. Also you can't change the cover slide, so just let it be and change the rest of the pages to a text option. Ignore the first page and proceed to create your slides.
Sorry for the confusion and thanks for pointing out the issue.