Saving Adjustments

Ok, I don't like to give recipes for photo editing, but there is one thing that I apply to most of my pictures. I like my photos with a little extra contrast, saturation, and vibrance. While I could use the Lift and Stamp tools to copy adjustments from one picture to another, I can save my adjustments as a preset.

Every controls group has a menu drop down where you can save the adjustments. Once you have the adjustments set, open the menu and select "Save as Preset." A dialog box opens for you to name this preset. Now you can reapply these adjustments to your hearts content by accessing the menu drop down on your other photos. The three control groups that I have presets for are: Enhance (I have a basic and a high contrast that I use for monochrome), Sharpening, and Edge Sharpening.

My big peeve with this drop down is how all the options are ordered. You'll notice that the first item in the menu drop down is to add/remove the controls group to the default set. This option shows/hides this control group by default on the Adjustments Inspector. This option is the one I use the least and it's at the very top. There's been a bunch of times when I've clicked it by accident. The name of this menu item is also rather confusing. The other thing I would like to see Aperture add is a preset for adjustments that span across multiple control groups. I want to add vignette, sharpening, and enhancements from one command -- one that I would like to tie to a keyboard shortcut.

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Stacks

Stacks is an important tool in organizing your files in Aperture. It allows you to group your photos together. When you burst a series of shots or bracket a series of shots, you may not want to see each individual image. To clean up the browser, select all the images and ⌘K. This puts the selected images into a single stack of photos. Initially it doesn't appear any different except now there's a border around all those images. ⇧K will open/close the stack. Stacks eliminates the clutter in the browser.

When the stack is closed, the first picture is all that's visible. That picture is called the pick. If the desired picture is not the pick, select the one that is desired and hit ⌘\. Within the stack, there's additional sorting that can be applied. Promote/Demote (⌘[ or ⌘]) a picture moves it further up/down the stack. The sort within the stack is independent of the sort in the browser. The stack is sorted only against how the pictures are promoted/demoted.

When the stack has been added to an album, a further option is available for picks. The "album pick" allows the album to have a pick that is different from the project. This is useful for when a particular stack may have multiples of the same image but each is processed differently. Unfortunately there's an inherent limitation in that you can't promote multiple pictures within the stack to be album picks. For that, you will have to break that picture out of stack.

I use stacks quite a bit. I tend to shoot on burst mode. Keeping photos in stacks helps me keep the pictures in my browser clear of clutter. It also lets me hide my uglier shots behind a nicer one.

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That's My Email!

I have a very popular name for my email address. So much so that in any given week, I see around 5-8 password reset requests. I also get lots of other people's emails. Today was one of those days. Today somebody used my email address to sign up for an Aperture 2 trial. While I've already got a copy of Aperture, I was reminded that Apple provides a pretty good collection of video tutorials on their website: http://www.apple.com/aperture/tutorials/
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Synchronize Your Watches

When shooting with multiple cameras I like to get all my pictures time synched. That lets me sort all of my images by their time stamps. There's a few of ways to get your shots to report the same time stamps. The most obvious way is to just program the clocks in the camera. But what if you are shooting with other people? That's when post-shoot time synching in Aperture really comes into use. First, get the shooters to shoot the same subject at exactly the same time. Just count to 3 and shoot on 3... or is that after 3? Anyhoo, the picture doesn't need to be any good. You just need to have the same point in time to reference against. You can really do this at any time during the shoot, but it'll be easiest to do it in the beginning. Alternatively, you can bring up the Time & Date System Preference pane (or any accurate clock). Then take pictures of the screen and use that as a reference for adjusting the time. This is a little easier if you're just shooting with a lot of cameras -- which I found myself recently doing with 2 SLRs and 1 waterproof P&S and another P&S. Figure out what the time difference should be. Then select the photos for which you want to adjust the time. Under the Metadata menu, select Adjust Date & Time. Easy!

If you are traveling and change the time zone to the local time zone, make sure to use Metadata > Batch Change to set your photos to your home time zone. Aperture's not that good about handling time zones. Even if you tell Aperture what time zone your photos are, it doesn't really retain it. When you use any plug-ins, Aperture forgets what time zone the original photo came from and then time stamps the new version with the original time but current time zone of the Mac. For example, if the picture was tagged at 5:55PM GMT -5 and the Mac is currently GMT -8, after the picture has been run through a plug-in, the new time stamp on the edited photo will be 5:55PM GMT -8. This is why it's important to make the Batch Change to set photos to the home time zone. Hopefully this will get fixed in some future version of Aperture. I can see how this would be an issue for those photographers on the move.

Since I'm talking about time and complaining about bugs, here's a related problem. When exporting photos with the subfolder set to "Current Date," sometimes Aperture forgets what the current day is. Sometimes it thinks that yesterday is today. Just a minor issue, but one to look out for.
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Watermarks

Watermarks in Aperture can be boiled down to the following steps:

1. Go to Aperture > Presets > Image Export...
2. In the Presets window, click "Show Watermark."
3. Select an image to use
4. Adjust position/opacity
5. Select to scale watermark or not
6. Repeat steps for each export type you want a watermark

Sounds pretty straight forward until you get into the subtleties of how this feature behaves. First, to create your watermark you have to have made the raster image in some external editor (Photoshop, Pixelmator, etc.). Save that file out as PSD, JPG, or (my personal preference) PNG. Now here's the thing about that watermark file you just made. The resolution of your watermark has a big impact on how it's finally rendered. For the sake of this argument, I made my watermark and just trimmed out all the excess. That left me with a 508x283 file. I'm going to export out two images. One is a healthy 3892x2586 image. The other is a relatively petite 1774x1183 image. Take a look at the results:

If you click through the two photos you'll see how the watermarks are rendered. Aperture will only scale DOWN your watermark not up (if you selected "Scale Watermark" in the preset). Depending on the resolution of your photo compared to your watermark, your watermark can be really big or really small. In order to get around that, I went back to edit my watermark file. I changed the canvas size of the watermark from 508x283 to 4000x283. I go back into the Aperture presets and reload my file (Aperture seems to make a copy of this image, so you can't just save over your previous file). I also make sure that I've checked "Scale watermark." I'll export the same two files again. Now you'll see that the watermark in the pictures are relatively the same size. Before Aperture wasn't scaling the watermark. Because I made my watermark file so wide, it forces Aperture to scale.

Using the super wide watermarks also ensures that your portrait photos are watermarked with a similarly sized watermark.

Once you have your watermarks all sorted out, there's two things that I really like about using watermarks as export presets. One, this works with the Flickr export plugin. Since the Flickr export plugin just uses the export presets, those watermarks will get uploaded with your photo. Two, you can make different watermarks for different export presets. Sounds dumb, but this allows you to make a watermark for your 800x800 export that looks different than your original size exports. You can also keep one export with watermark and another one without.

I'll wrap up this post with some wishlist things for watermarks:

• Text based watermarks from EXIF - Sometimes all I want is a simple watermark with my name or some other EXIF data. There's no way to do this without using an export plugin.
• Scale watermarks relative to image - Instead of making me hack my image, I want to have a simple stamp and have that be consistently sized relative to the photo.
• Borders - Not quite watermarks, but I would like to have some rudimentary borders support for Aperture. Just some desaturation or blurring would be nice.

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Lift & Stamp

Lift & Stamp is the equivalent of copy & paste for all your image adjustments and metadata. To "copy" or Lift your adjustments, you can either select the button or use the keyboard short cut ⇧⌘C. I'm kind of a keyboard shortcut nerd if you haven't noticed already. When you Lift the adjustments, the Lift & Stamp window pops up with all the adjustments. You can use the checkbox to selectively apply items or you can select the item and hit delete remove the item from the stamp. The problem with using the checkboxes is that it's not particularly granular. You're bound to these high level buckets of stuff. So if you didn't want to apply Crop but wanted to apply all the other Adjustments, you can't use the checkbox. Instead, you have to select the Crop item and hit delete. If you want to apply all the adjustments and the Crop, then you have to go back to the source image and re-Lift the adjustments. Once you've got the adjustments you want, now you Stamp the adjustments. The great thing about stamping is that it can be applied to multiple items at once. Select whatever pictures you want to stamp, and then hit ⇧⌘V (note the similarity in keyboard shortcut to copy & paste). Voilá! All of your chosen adjustments are now applied to your pictures. This should save some time when you have a lot of similar pictures. Sometimes when I forget to add the Credit keyword on import, I'll make the change to just one image. Lift the IPTC keyword, select all the pictures in the album, and stamp! Easy.

I don't use the Lift/Stamp tool (O / ⇧O). It lets you Lift from or Stamp to an image that you currently don't have selected. It doesn't really jive with my personal work flow. I like going to the source image and using the keyboard shortcut to Lift. Then browsing to my target image(s) and Stamping.

Wishlist item for future Aperture: checkboxes next to each adjustment in the Lift & Stamp window. I want to selectively apply my adjustments to some images but not others.

Update: Looks like the Aperture team broke one of the most useful features with Lift/Stamp. You can no longer use the keyboard shortcut to stamp metadata and adjustments across multiple pictures. You have to use the button from the Lift & Stamp window. If anybody on the Aperture team out there is reading this, fix it or at least explain why.

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I Love Vignettes

There. I've said. I don't care who knows. That (sometimes) subtle edge effect can take a boring photo to a slightly less boring photo. But at least the vignette helps to focus to viewer's eyes in the photo. ^+V will add the default vignette to your photo. You could use your mouse and do some clicking around, but that's rather inefficient for something that you'll probably end up using all the time.

When you use vignettes and cropping in Aperture, your vignette will be reapplied. The vignette's center will always be at the center of the image. It's best to vignette AFTER cropping.

As far as settings go, it's totally personal preference. I find that I use Gamma vignettes more often than Exposure. The Amount and Size are really dependent upon the individual picture. But for both values, I tend to go a little heavier than the default. The picture that I used for this post was from me testing to see what the max Amount of vignette I can apply to a photo. It looked cool, so I'm using it here.

Here's an extra tip about sliders in Aperture. Whatever is the max value the slider can go, you can usually enter in a higher value. For example, in the Vignette adjustment palette, the Amount slider can only go to 1.0. In the input box, you can enter in any number up to 5.0.

Adding to my wishlist for future Aperture:

• Vignettes that lighten instead of darken
• Square instead of round (or any permutations in between)
• Redefine center of vignette

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