On a gray and snowy winter day, Chicago's skyline looks decidedly drab and featureless. Despite the impressive assemblage of towering buildings, including three of America's tallest skycrapers (Sears Tower, John Hancock Center, and Aon Center), the urban skyline doesn't seem...

You probably saw that Apple released a new version of Mac OS X, Leopard, about a month ago. Yet one announcement that didn't get too much attention was about a public beta of a new, Leopard-only image editing tool called...

I recently rediscovered a useful feature of Aperture that slipped my mind a long time ago: the Edit AutoFill List menu command. A few months ago, I imported a bunch of photos from a business trip to Chicago and in...

After my last blog, several people asked for information about using the Tint Wheels. The Tint Wheels can be very helpful to either introduce or remove color casts. They differ from the White Balance tools in that the latter alter...

One scenario where I still regularly make trips from Aperture to Photoshop is when I need to use Photoshop’s Healing Brush tool. Aperture’s Spot and Patch tool does a fine job of removing unwanted dust and imperfections from photographs, but...

Derrick wrote a nice tip on his personal site about using Adobe Camera Raw to correct mixed lighting and it reminded me that I’ve been meaning to share a tip about how to deal with this issue in Aperture. Whether...

This week I’m going to talk about a bug workaround and then give you a tip for using the Tint wheels. Recently I’ve been getting occasional black previews on images that had been successfully transferred from the CF card. Initially...

I frequently teach Aperture workshops and I often end up running my presentation and demos from the same MacBook Pro that I use as my everyday workstation. This makes it easy to prepare for workshops, but it can introduce some...

There was some exciting Pro App news from Apple this week: after almost 3 years, Logic Pro has been updated to version 8. Among the feature updates in this version is what Apple calls a “Next Generation Interface”. This is...

Aperture is a big program. It might not be as big as Photoshop or Final Cut Pro, but it still does a lot! In fact, there's so much in there that it's rare to find someone who uses every single...

&otThis past weekend, I was shooting the Big Air Windjam kiteboarding competition in San Francisco. To help try and drum up some support, I stayed up late Saturday eve putting together a small promotional gallery that I posted to some...

Why Aperture has a very nice collection of image adjustment tools, it lacks the ability to perform any kind of distortion correction. If you're shooting with a wide-angle lens that has trouble with barrel distortion, then you won't have any...

Aperture's Highlight Hot Areas command (which you can access from the View menu, or by pressing Option-Shift-H) activates a highlight clipping display in the Viewer pane. This display shows any pixels that have clipped highlights. You activate this feature by...

I really like the way Aperture deals with cropping and resizing on export. For some reason it makes perfect sense to me. However, many people I talk to just can't get their heads around it. Let's say for instance that...

Coming from the Photoshop world, "Save As" is a familiar term. It often translated into a desk stacked high with hard drives, and if you were like me, multiple, identical versions of photos that made organizing and finding them a...

I like to edit quickly. Heck, a few weeks ago, I posted tips for editing quickly. It even used to bug me that in Aperture, it always took an extra step to move a rejected image from my library to...

Late last year, when Apple was showing off the great new features of Aperture 1.5, I was lucky enough to work the Aperture booth at the PhotoPlus Expo in New York City. There were about 20 Macs running Aperture and...

One of my goals when I photograph is to go beyond the obvious and I'm sure that's true for most of you as well. I'm always seeking ways to do something just a little different. I'll twist into all sorts...

When making adjustments in Aperture, like most image-editing software, there is usually more than one way to arrive at the desired result. To make sure your images are within the tolerances of the final print, it's good to check yours...

Often when I go out shooting, I end up shooting a ton of images in a short period of time. Lately I've been doing a lot of kiteboarding photography, and it's common for me to end up shooting 1,000 or...