Great shots are just the beginning.
You’ve taken a great shot. Now you’re ready to make it even better. Aperture 3 gives you all the tools you need to turn your photography into so much more.
Import
Preview and adjust images while you import.
Organise
Organise easily with Faces or Places or by project.
Compare and Select
Use colour labels and flags to make selects in the full-screen Browser.
Perfect and Enhance
Retouch and enhance photos using powerful adjustment presets and brushes.
Share
Share photos on popular sites such as Flickr and Facebook.
Import
Aperture 3 lets you get to work faster.
The fun begins even before you finish importing your photos. Double-click thumbnails in the Import window to view images, play videos and hear audio files before they’re fully imported. If you’re on a deadline, you can begin adjusting an image even if it’s still being copied from your memory card to your Mac.
While the files are importing, Aperture 3 grabs data like shutter speed, aperture, lens and focus points, and starts sorting it right away. You can even add your own keywords and automatically apply an adjustment preset on import.
For extra flexibility, Aperture lets you store your images wherever and however you like — directly in Aperture 3, on external drives or in their original folders. Choose to import RAW and JPEG images together or as separate images so you can work with them individually. The photos you import can also be added to your Photo Stream in iCloud.* And Aperture 3 can automatically back up your master images to a second drive during import.
Doug Menuez on Managing Libraries
Professional photographer Doug Menuez uses Aperture 3 to manage his photos on location and sync edits back in the studio.
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Importing Basics
Start using Aperture 3 right away by importing photos from your camera’s memory card or from a hard drive.
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Organise
Organise by Faces.
The popular Faces feature in iPhoto ’09 comes to Aperture 3, where it has even more power. As in iPhoto, Faces uses face detection technology to find faces in your photos. Once you identify a person, Faces quickly scans your library, or an individual project, to find more photos of that person. Let’s say you want to find photos of the bride’s father in the O’Rourke wedding project. Once you’ve identified his face in one photo, Faces finds other photos he appears to be in. You simply confirm the suggested matches to apply his name to those photos.
Faces
Organise by Places.
There’s no easier way to organise photos than with Places. Places converts location data from GPS-enabled cameras and geo-tracker devices into common location names. Then it displays those locations as pins on the Places map. If your camera doesn’t capture GPS data, you can assign locations by dragging your photos to the map. Later, when browsing your photos, just click the location pin on the map and all the photos shot there are instantly displayed.
Jim Richardson on Places
Aperture 3 helps National Geographic photographer Jim Richardson connect pictures with places using GPS mapping.
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Places
Organise any way you want.
Group your projects by year or organise them in hierarchical folders to bring order to even the largest photo library. Add descriptive keywords, captions or information such as copyright and contact details to any of your photos. Then use the powerful Aperture search engine to find photos based on almost any criteria. You can even search for photos based on the image adjustments applied to each photo.
Organise Using Faces and Places
Find out how to organise your photo library according to where photos were shot or who’s in them.
Organise
Your Photo Stream takes care of itself.
Your Photo Stream in iCloud is a rolling collection of your last 1,000 photos, ready to view whenever you want with a single click. Once your photos have been imported from your Photo Stream into your library, you can edit or rearrange them any way you like. You can choose to have all the photos in your Photo Stream imported to your Aperture library automatically, organised by the month and year they were taken. Or turn off auto-import to manually move the photos you want, when you want.
Learn more about Photo Stream
Compare and Select
Browse photos full screen.
Use every inch of your beautiful Apple display to make selects and compare images side by side. Browse your photos at high speed, instantly navigating between projects. When it’s time to make selects, use ratings, flags and colour labels to organise your best shots. Use the Loupe to examine detail, or zoom and pan multiple images at once.
Ratings, Keywords, Labels and Flags
Learn to work with ratings, keywords, colour labels and flags that make it simple to keep photos organised.
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Compare and Select
Perfect and Enhance
Perfect and Enhance
Adjustment presets.
Dozens of ready-to-use adjustment presets let you apply professional-style imaging effects to a single photo or across an entire project. Quick Fix presets can take care of common problems including blown highlights and low contrast. Other adjustment presets apply processing techniques and styles, such as a toy or vintage camera look. You can also create your own adjustment presets or import presets from colleagues. And since all adjustments are nondestructive, you can revert back from the changes you make at any time or even restore your original master images.
The Zoom Navigator displays a thumbnail to help you move around a zoomed image, so it’s even easier to find and perfect details.
Precision brushes.
Nondestructive brushes let you make selective adjustments to specific parts of your image without creating masks or layers. Control brush size, softness and strength while you dodge and burn, or apply effects such as blurring, skin smoothing and polarisation. Fifteen Quick Brushes handle the most common touch-up jobs with a few strokes. Detect Edges makes it easy to retouch areas with greater accuracy — deepening the colours of a mountain range, for instance, while leaving the sky untouched.
Chase Jarvis on Brushes and Adjustment Presets
New image enhancement tools in Aperture 3 help professional photographer Chase Jarvis bring his portraits of musicians to life.
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Adjustment Presets and Brushes
See how easy it is to refine images with new adjustment presets and precision brushes.
Share
Custom multimedia slideshows.
Create impressive multimedia slideshows with photos, custom titles, HD videos and layered soundtracks. It’s as easy as dragging your photos and videos into one of the themed slideshow templates in Aperture. If you want a more customised slideshow, you can choose the Classic or Ken Burns theme and control transitions, background and border colours, and the font, size and style of your titles. Sharing slideshows is simpler, too. Aperture exports your slideshows to iTunes so you can sync them to your iPhone or iPod touch, then share them anywhere.
Creating Slideshows with Audio and Video
See how easy it is to expand your multimedia slideshows using audio and HD video with precise transitions.
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Bill Frakes on Slideshows
With Aperture 3, photojournalist Bill Frakes creates a multimedia slideshow that combines still photos, audio and HD video.
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Spectacular Slideshows
See how professionals use the powerful tools in Aperture 3 to create multimedia slideshows.
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Export. Easy.
When you’re ready to share your photos, you can send them to Flickr or Facebook with a couple of clicks. Or take advantage of a variety of export plug-ins to upload photos directly to sites including SmugMug, iStockphoto and PhotoShelter. Because Aperture is integrated with the Mac OS X Media Browser, you can easily include photos from your library in iLife or iWork documents. Or make them “to go” by syncing them to your iPhone, iPod or Apple TV.
Printing Prowess
You have many printing options with Aperture 3. Customise the margins, crop on the fly to match the aspect ratio of your paper, and add borders in custom widths and sizes. Create a sheet of wallet-size prints or passport photos. Take advantage of the colour-managed print engine for reliable colour rendition. Adjust brightness, contrast, saturation and sharpness to fine-tune your images. Add metadata to large prints or contact sheets with your choice of font, size and style. Include watermarks or your own header — including a logo — on every printed sheet. And when your settings are just the way you want, save them as a preset for future prints.
