Using Aperture, you can produce high-quality prints and contact sheets, design customized books, and create impressive websites as beautiful as the photographs you take. Best of all: you can do it all with drag-and-drop ease.
Preview before your print
The Mac prints to a wide variety of professional printers. You’ll find profiles for each of them listed in the Print dialog’s ColorSync Profile menu.
(And don’t worry if you don’t see the profile for your printer. You can always download one from the printer manufacturer’s website and add it to your system.)
In fact, once you select the profile for your printer, you’re ready to take advantage of an Aperture feature you’re going to use over and over again: Softproofing onscreen in the live Preview area of the application’s robust and resizable Print dialog. If the image you see isn’t perfect, fine-tune your output by making Gamma adjustments or by turning on black-point compensation.
Aperture even lets you save output profiles as presets. If, for example, you find yourself printing a lot of 5x7-inch prints on semi-gloss stock on your Epson 9600 with Black Point Compensation activated and a 1.00 Gamma adjustment dialed in, you can create a profile with just those specifications and save yourself some time and mouse strokes the next time you print.
Printing contact sheets
If you’ve ever tried to print contact sheets using other photo applications, you’re probably familiar with the expression, “there’s gotta be a better way.”
Now there is. Aperture lets you print contact sheets more quickly and easily than you can using just about any other photo application available today.
Just tell Aperture how many pages you’d like to print, and it will resize your photos on the fly to fit. Want more customization options? Aperture lets you define the number of columns and rows, set border widths, identify the metadata (if any) to include on the contact sheets, even choose the font size you’d like Aperture to use.
You can also save your presets, speeding the process the next time you want to print contact sheets using, let’s say, a 4-column or auto-rotated 3x3 grid. Once you get used to printing contact sheets in Aperture, you’ll never want to print them any other way.
Need Lab Prints?
There’s more good Aperture printing news. In addition to helping you create your own color-correct prints, Aperture also provides an integrated print-ordering service that lets you order silver-halide prints directly from Kodak and Fuji at highly competitive pricing.
Color managed for consistency, the prints assure predictable results and are available in standard sizes and large formats.
You can also depend on Aperture’s built-in color management if you use a service bureau to print your photos. Aperture’s Export Preset editor lets you simply select the ICC profile recommended by or obtained from your service bureau from a drop-down menu. Aperture embeds the profile in your files upon export, so you’ll know what to expect when you get the photos in the mail. Beautiful, color-accurate prints.
Create custom-designed books
Presenting prospective clients with a handsome, bound and printed Stock Book sends a powerful message. And Aperture makes the production of such high-quality bound books both simple and affordable. To help you put a unique stamp on them, Aperture includes a sophisticated book-layout engine that offers significant design flexibility.
You can manually drag or have Aperture automatically place photographs in a layout for you. Double click on any photo, and you can zoom in or pan the image until it’s perfectly positioned. Aperture also lets you add both text and photo boxes; move, resize, and rotate photos; insert multi-columned text; even use your own photos as full-bleed, ghosted background images. Need another page? Add a blank one whenever you’d like or simply duplicate an existing page and replace its photos or text.
With Aperture, you have total control. And when you’re ready, you can print your completed book on your own printer, save it as a PDF, or take advantage of Aperture’s integrated ordering service to order hard- or soft-cover books printed at 300dpi for optimal print quality.
Showcase images on the web
Want your website to be as beautiful as your photos? Aperture makes it drag-and-drop easy.
No need to learn HTML or to use cumbersome wizard-based page generators. Aperture includes professionally designed Gallery and Journal templates to get you started. With the former, you can create pages of thumbnail galleries; with the latter, narrative-style web pages that mix photos with text and can include your own photos as custom headers.
Unlike other photo applications, Aperture templates aren’t set in stone. Using the web gallery template, for example, you can decide how many rows and columns of images appear on each page, how large the thumbnails should be, and what metadata should accompany the images.
What’s more — and this is important — Aperture’s web-authoring environment is WYSIWYG. Any change you make happens on screen in real time, so you can see the effect right away. This offers a significant advantage over the many wizard-based applications that force you to step through one dialog after another. Cumbersome to use, they don’t let you see the results of your changes until the very end. Aperture offers a welcome change, letting you see your site develop right before your eyes.
And when you’re finished with your site, you can publish to your server or to .Mac, or you can export your completed site to disk. As part of the export process, you can select several presets for image quality and instruct Aperture to add visible watermarks to protect the exported images that will appear on your website.
Stunning prints. Customized contact sheets. Beautiful books. Impressive websites. They’re just a few clicks away with Aperture.
