In many ways, Aperture needs no introduction. It’s professional photo management done by Apple, the same folks who brought you iPhoto, iPhone, iPad, and more. We could lavish it with praise for the next few hundred pages and describe to you how happy we are with the photographic workflows we’ve developed with Aperture, but while that praise would be completely true (perhaps garnished with a touch of hyperbole to add some humor), that wouldn’t leave much room to explain how Aperture can help your workflow. Instead, we’ll simply say that Aperture has helped us optimize our digital workflows more than any other piece of software (and between the two of us, we’ve tried them all) so that we can quickly process thousands of images and spend more time shooting and less time at our computers. The latest revisions to Aperture continue to make it more powerful and user friendly.
When you first look at it, though, it’s tough to understand how this neutral-gray window can do so much, and more importantly, what all these weird words like stacks and projects mean. Don’t worry: We’re here to help.
The next few hundred pages will take you through Aperture, from understanding the basic terms in Chapter 1 to using skin tone mode to remove a color cast in Chapter 6 to creating books that include a map showing where you took your photos in Chapter 7 to advanced backup topics in Chapter 10. As you read, we encourage you to import some images and videos into your Aperture library and to try clicking the buttons we describe for yourself.
Don’t feel obligated to read this book from start to finish, however. While we’ve tried to build the text so that the chapters follow roughly a digital workflow order and build on each other, feel free to skip around, especially if you’ve used Aperture before.
Finally, while it’s easy to sometimes feel overwhelmed by all the features in a program like Aperture, don’t be. There’s no test at the end of this book, and you don’t have to use every possible feature to its fullest to integrate Aperture into your workflow. That’s part of what’s so great about Aperture — it’s flexible enough to fit into your workflow instead of forcing you to fit into its workflow.