The first thing is that you can use Aperture itself as a media browser for any application that accepts images as drop items. If Aperture has a preview generated – that is what you will get. You can use all of the search functionality and it can sometimes be easier than using the media browser window itself. If you have started to fine tune your preview generation then you might want a couple of ways in Aperture to make sure you are only looking at images that actually have a preview. Since I generate previews for my top rated images I just use that in addition to other search criteria. In some other cases I have an album called previews existing in a project that I use to house images that have previews – that is how I generated them in the first place. I also typically have a smart album for every project that lists top rated images for a lot of purposes. It serves double duty when I am using Aperture as a media browser.

Here is another tip that might surprise you if you haven’t tried it. The media browser that is opened for ANY application works with any other application. It even works if that target application is not “media browser enabled”. What I mean is you can open a media browser for an email message and drop images from it just about anywhere. You can drop them on the desktop, heck you can even drop them in Blurb’s BookSmart book software and bypass that horrible UI for browsing images that is included. Try it, you’ll like it.

RB

When it comes to digital presentation I use a couple of different tools. For quick and dirty stuff, not much beats my laptop, an Aperture slide show, and an HD flat panel of good quality. One of the tricks to using Aperture slide shows is to sequence the images well. This is easy as you can create an album and arrange photos any way you would like. One of my tricks is to arrange the images so that portrait oriented images always display three at a time because I think it looks like crap to have one portrait image on a l6:9 HD landscape display. This can be a bit tricky if you like to mix landscape and portrait images but can be done. To make it really simple just do one or the other.

Another wonderful tool for presenting digitally is Keynote. I have a love hate relationship with Keynote. I love what I can produce from it but some of the things that I have to work around are so irritating that it’s hard to describe the rage that comes over me. I do use the heck out of master slides and templates so I can through together a visually sophisticated presentation pretty quickly as long as I want it to have a look that I have already slaved over. If anyone has any Keynote questions or issues feel free to drop me a line – I may be able to give you a hand or at least you can share your joy and pain with a fellow Keynote lover/hater.

Fotomagico is quite amazing and I highly recommend it if you do more than a couple of image presentations a year. I guarantee that this will be some of the best money you ever spend. If the presentation really counts you want this software.

That brings us to another way to present your photos – Video. Ever since I stumbled across MediaStorm I have known that this is my online future. I just happen to know FinalCut from a previous life not to long ago and have been doing some really interesting things with my still images and audio as of late. If you would like to get a taste of what you can do without laying out the cash for FinalCut Express or Studio you can do some pretty amazing things with iMovie as well. You will lack a lot of the control that you get with FinalCut but iMovie plus your JPG previews from Aperture can make some nice presentations in about five minutes. Give it a whirl, it won’t do real HD but it makes some things that look pretty darn nice.

Here is something I though together in  3 minutes flat with iMovie and some old images laying around, it looks like crap due to the YouTube processing but looks great on my laptop.

If you are interested in this kind of thing FinalCut Express is really amazing in terms of control and is a bargain at $199.00. The only reason that you would really want the Studio version is for the two additional applications – Color and Motion. Both of those are really nice as well but are pretty steep learning curves. For doing things like MediaStorm all you will need is the Express version. If anyone is interested in some how-to’s on this kind of thing drop a comment and let me know. Also let me know what you think of my 3 minute video.

RB

Okay, here is the most basic of basics. We Aperture users have become amazingly spoiled when it comes to asking our computers and software to do copious amounts of work and expect real-time WYSISYG results instantaneously. I remember just a few years ago even looking at a RAW file was slow let alone doing anything to it. Most of the time this works and is just fine but there are the “seven deadly sins” or more appropriately the set of adjustments that when applied to the same image will cause even the most stout of systems to crumble under the strain. I’ll cut to the chase and just list those that can cause performance issues and then offer a couple of additional thoughts.

The biggies are:

• Straiten
• Highlights and Shadows
• Sharpen (regular or edge)
• Noise Reduction

To a lesser degree or more when combined with the above:

• Retouch
• Spot and Patch
• Red Eye

Hey it is seven! Actually I added the bottom three to make it seven on purpose, they generally do not cause any tremendous pain unless you have 4000 retouch spots but if you are having an issue look to those last three as well. Each of these by themselves are usually nothing bothersome on most modern systems with a reasonably healthy graphics subsystem, RAM, processer, etc. Where they become an issue for almost any system is when you combine them or heaven forbid – use all of them and expect aperture to be capable of showing you real time WSYWIG as you wildly yank the slider on one of them back and forth. It’s not going to happen – well maybe it will, just not with the current crop of systems and just when it does the number of pixels and bit depth of your RAW files will probably increase by a square to leave you right back where you started.

So what to do about it? Simple do some of these things last. If you want to tweak one of these turn the others off while you are doing it. For instance if you want to tweak noise reduction there is no reason to have edge sharpen turned on while you are playing around with noise. I picked those two because some of you may instantly react that there is a reason – of course there is a reason to look at the over all effect when everything is added together – What I am getting at is that it may be more productive to get the optimal settings for these processing intensive heavyweights individually while getting real-time feedback rather than having Aperture reprocess all the pixels through all of them while driving you insane that there is a 5 second delay between you moving the slider and anything happening.

A couple of other things to think about regarding the seven deadly adjustments are the way that they affect preview generation and what happens if you don’t have previews generated by Aperture. First off, if you remember way back last week in a post that I put up on managing previews I hinted that part of my work-flow is to turn preview generation on when I am done with my major adjustments. You may want to think about this if you use a couple of the seven deadly adjustments regularly. If Aperture is set to manage previews for the project that you are working on and you have say H&S plus Edge Sharpening on most of the images in the project that you are going through and tweaking contrast etc on it will almost guarantee  that Aperture will be constantly generating previews for images in the project – I do mean constantly. For some systems and some work-flows this will be a non-issue, for others it may be a substantial holdup. The other thing to consider regarding previews is how they help you browse through your library at lightning speed. Thousands of images with a bunch of adjustments rendered real-time, amazing. Well if you don’t have previews generated for them you may notice that your scrolling, arrowing, and other viewing gymnastics could be slowed down considerably. This doesn’t mean you need previews for everything if you don’t want to eat up the space, especially on a laptop. The cure if you need to scroll around real fast and you don’t happen to have previews built for everything – the quick preview button. The results can be quite ugly but it will get you to where you are going fast. I use it mostly on my really slow MacBook Air.

If this helps anybody out let me know – If you think “no kidding” let me know – If you want some other thoughts on managing Aperture performance, what helps, what hurts, and what doesn’t matter based on my experiences let me know.

RB

Okay, enough of the review, so where does this leave us? If you are feeling a little clostrophobic on your current Aperture machine you can easily move some or all of your image masters to an external drive using the functions just discussed. After doing so you will notice a little badge on your image thumbnails that indicate that the image is using a referenced masters. Aperture functionality will be idendtical right up until you unplug the external drive. When you do unplug the external drive that contains some or all of your master images a different little badge indicator will show up on the image thumbnails that have masters on that drive showing that the master is “offline”. When a master image is offline there are a number of things that you cannot do in Aperture with that images but there is also a surprising number of things that you can continue to do even without the master images. The usefulness of what you can do will somewhat vary depending on the size of the previews that you chose to generate or if previews exist at all. You can set up preview size in the Aperture menu under preferences. I personally use HD sized previews (fit within 1920×1920) so that all of my previews are at full resolution on my presentation device of choice – HD flat panels and projectors. So part of moving to referenced masters is learning how to manage your preview images and fine tuning this as well.

Here is a succinct list of things you can and cannot do with “offline” masters:

You cannot:

• Use any of the adjustment controls – they will all be greyed out. Surpisingly you can see the adjustments made and even lift/stamp them to other images that are either on-line or managed as the adjustments are merely metadata.
• Use any of the export functions.
• Use any plugins
• Use the email from Aperture (kind of stupid if you have previews)
• Print any images that are offline from Aperture