It’s the biggest, most taxing job you have as a photographer. You’ve finished your shoot. You’ve taken thousands of photographs. Now you need to quickly edit the shoot, reviewing all of your photos and identifying your very best. Aperture helps you accomplish this with powerful and flexible tools designed specifically to address the needs of the professional photographer.
Compare ’em in Stacks
If you’ve shot transparencies, you’re familiar with stacks. You’ve almost certainly created piles of similar images for fast comparison on your light table. In Aperture, you can employ the same technique with digital stacks.
Aperture lets you create stacks manually, pulling images into Stacks from any album, project, or folder in your Library. Or you can have Aperture automatically create Stacks for you based on the time interval between shutter clicks (1 second to 1 minute). This provides a quick and easy way to compile a sequence of bracketed or sequentially shot images for review.
To further aid image comparison, Aperture lets you quickly rate your images using a six-level rating system (1 to 5 stars plus “reject”). When you’re finished, you can collapse the Stack to eliminate clutter from your workspace.
The image you’ve identified as the best shot in the sequence, your “select,” tops the Stack. It’s the only image you’ll see unless you expand the stack again.
Enjoy a Full Screen workspace
Of course, with that large, high-resolution screen right before your eyes, wouldn’t it be great if you could take advantage of all that real estate and review your images full screen?
With Aperture, you can. In fact, Aperture lets you view your images full screen as large as screen real estate permits. And if you have two displays, you can take advantage of Aperture’s expansive full-screen mode on both of them to create an incomparable working environment.
Using the Filmstrip displayed along the bottom or side of your monitor, you can see thumbnails of all the images you’re reviewing. You can navigate through them quickly and easily to find the images you want to see, even organizing them on the fly.
As you work on your images Full Screen, mouse up to the top of the screen and a Toolbar pops out. With a click, you can rotate images, promote or demote them, create new “versions” to adjust or experiment with, crop or adjust them, and more.
Open any of the Heads-Up Displays (HUDs) available in Aperture to adjust levels, increase brightness, modify color temperature, assign keywords, straighten horizons, or make any other adjustments you’d like.
It’s also great for experimenting. For example, after quickly creating one or more “versions” of an original image, you can keep the original onscreen while you make adjustments to the “versions.” Working full screen makes it easier to evaluate the adjustments you’re making and to determine which, if any, you want to keep.
View multiple images side by side
Aperture lets you view multiple photos side by side, offering a great way to evaluate similar images or multiple versions of the same image.
To help you select your best shot among several strong candidates, you can identify one photo as your “Compare” image and assess it alongside its contenders. Use the cursor keys to step through each of the challengers, moving each one, in turn, alongside the “Compare” image. You can even simultaneously zoom in on several selected images to get a closer look.
Metadata on display
With metadata, you have a significant amount of information about your photos available to you, and Aperture lets you see it in the Metadata Heads-Up Display, Tooltips, and wherever you view images. What’s more, with Aperture you can customize the display of keywords, ratings, EXIF information, and IPTC data to fit your needs. Aperture lets you see as much or as little of your metadata as you’d like.
With Aperture, you have all the tools you need to compare your photos and select the very best.
