After using Aperture 3 for quite some time, actually almost immediately my excitement waned somewhat. It is sort of a glass is half full, half empty sort of thing depending on what day it is. I have lived so long without color labels in Aperture that I found them completely unnecessary at this point because there are so many other, possibly superior, ways to control your work-flow (like albums). The reason for my initial excitement was that I envisioned using color labels as a simple and efficient way to provide communication across the many tools that access my RAW master files. That is the only reason I could think of to actually use them – as a signaling device that is shared among software that accesses my masters – that’s it. Honestly I can live without them in the context of Aperture alone.

Alas the one thing that I found them useful for does not work due to the continuing ridiculous split personality that Aperture 3 exhibits. The split personality that I am referring to is that all of the bits and pieces that are there to suggest that it is useful as a universal tool to coordinate a broadly diverse work-flow that plays well with others. The harsh reality is that it goes 80% of the way there but for reasons that I cannot fathom in my wildest hallucinations leaves out what seem to be small but absolutely critical details.

Okay we have core IPTC supported, we have read/write IPTC sync capabilities with our masters from Aperture, we have color labels. Oooops  we forgot one thing – they are on the list of things that DO NOT get written out as part of the sync with the master files – along with rating. What the F…? We’ll why the hell not? We’ll that’s okay – we’ll just make it so we don’t read labels or ratings from masters either – there we go – all fixed up. Again WTF?

The same kind of thing goes for other data elements as well, along with the seemingly “can’t get there from here” behavior with XMP sidecars. Yep you can write them any time you want but… you can only read them at initial import – that’s it. I guess that is an improvement from not reading them at all in Aperture 2 but again – why the F..K not? Why oh why oh why may I ask put in the vast majority of the effort to make multi-product integration via metadata a reality and then stop at the last tiny little bit to make it useful? This has continuously caused me to invent and implement bizarre manual rituals to implement my ethnically diverse products into a cohesive whole sharing my RAW masters.

Just so all of you new readers don’t think I have all of a sudden turned into an Aperture basher (I have always been a bitter critic of Aperture’s shortcomings, there is some good news on this front. The IPTC data synchronization that is there performs brilliantly. Especially compared to the truly bizarre behavior of Aperture 2 (where any tiny little master file change had the more infuriating habit of completely decimating EVERYTHING you did in Aperture without warning or notice – even some Aperture plug-ins caused this). The new behavior, which is largely automagic, does an incredibly brilliant job merging metadata in Aperture – even if it was not previously synchronized to the master file. I actually use this to overcome a bizarre decision by the Aperture team to provide no option to deal with embedding the keyword hierarchy.

No product is perfect – heck Adobe can’t even make bridge play well with Lightroom – it has unexplainable quirkiness and a complete lack of options regarding XMP sidecar vs embedded metadata as well as truly bizarre behavior when there are both present but at least you can figure out a some sort of work-flow with the features it does provide. Maybe it’s just me but due to the lack of ability to communicate color labels outside of Aperture via the way EVERYTHING else in the photographic universe works, I have subconsciously boycotted their use within Aperture. Has anyone found a fantastically good use for them that is not already solved by other long existing Aperture features?

RB

I did this screencast the same day that I did stacks and albums – I decided to release it a little later because I wanted to get some feedback on the first one before putting this out there. I took some suggestions from that you had from the couple that I put up on Places and books and color and incorporated them into stacks and albums. Namely – go slower – use menus instead of shortcuts – etc. My biggest worry was that I was going too slow – heck this one is 20 minutes on Faces but the feedback that I have gotten so far has been positive so here is the Faces screencast.

By all means keep the feedback and suggestions coming – I want to make these as useful as possible. You can get the screencasts here.

RB

It saves me so much time that I made a shortcut key for it. Even if I know what project an image belongs to it is so much quicker jumping to that project with “Show In Project” that this is probably becoming one of my favorite new things. The biggest issue is remembering it is there. Just force yourself to use it for a couple of days – even if you don’t need it and it will become one of those things you just can’t live without. Like when they added two finger scrolling to laptop track pads.

“Show In Project works no matter what you are looking at – smart albums, searches, albums, books. Anywhere that an image shows up except in a project where it lives.

RB

One of the new features – the search box in the project inspector is fantastic and the “why” is obvious if you have more than a couple of projects. Some of the other “little” features by comparison are not so self evident as to their value. Let’s take the new Aperture metadata items available for searches and smart albums. Specifically let’s take one like “album name”. Why would you want to search images by album name – you can do that in the project inspector and go there, or if you know that then why are you searching – etc.

One of the great features of Aperture has always been that the functionality works together in very useful ways to support what YOU do in your work-flow. Just to connect a couple of dots that you might not have yourself and to get you thinking along the right lines of evaluating the new Aperture 3 features let’s look at searching by “album name” in conjunction with the new project “Duplicate project structure” function. Hypothetically let’s say you always product projects that have a couple standard albums in them – one being an album called “published”.

Putting that together with a smart album at the top of your library that searches for all images that are in an album name called published is a really really simple way to consolidate all of those images across all of your projects. You may do something completely different than that but I just wanted to get you thinking about some of the new Aperture 3 features in that kind of light so you can make the most out of it in your own personal work-flow.

RB

In a nut shell the new functionality is fantastic. I love that any combination of objects you select in the project inspector works. I love that you can open each exported thing as it’s own library. I love how smart it is in dealing with combinations of referenced and managed images. I love how it deals with off-line images. It for the most part works as you would expect, maybe even better. Apple did a great job covering the needs of just about everyone no matter how simple or complicated what you envision it should be not only possible but easy or easier than it was. The key to using this and having it work the way you really want it to is the judicious use of the consolidate and include preview checkboxes. You can make just about anything happen between multiple computers, libraries, whatever.

First – you are perfectly fine if all you do is add new big objects in multiple libraries. Big objects being albums, books, etc. You are also fine modifying the contents of those objects like adding or deleting images from those things or modifying book pages. If there happens to be conflicts  Aperture asks you which library takes precedence when merging. You get this choice once on import – not project by project or item by item so beware. If it does not ask you then there are no conflicts. Well almost – I have been able to create conflicts with individual image items that have gone undetected that just disappeared but I tried hard.

File status for master files (referenced/managed/off-line, etc) is completely independent for each library and works just like it should. Example – if you export a project from your main library that has referenced masters using the consolidate masters checkbox and import it on your laptop – everything works fine. If on your laptop you relocate those masters to somewhere completely different and then import that project back to your main library everything for both projects stays the same and works just like it should. Why would you want to do something like that? Well… How about sharing projects between computers and speeding up the transfer to sync them by NOT transferring the masters every time. No matter whether it is a computer in the same room or across the world this speeds common images/project transfer up a lot – especially if you choose NOT to include previews. I had a work-around for Aperture 2 but this is much faster and easier. Heck all of those associations are image master by image master so you can do all sorts of nifty things.

One might be a shared project with those masters that you work on on the road and at home. You could also select your 5 star smart album for your entire library as a separate export even if they had overlapping images. In the first export you consolidate masters and do not include previews. In the second export you don’t consolidate masters but include previews. When you import both into your laptop library you can relocate the masters for that shared project so they will never transfer again. You will also have previews with off-line masters for all your 5 star images that you can share with iLife on your laptop. It doesn’t matter that some of those have masters and some of them don’t. When you ship the project back to your main library everything will be just fine when you merge. Very cool – completely independent file status per library. Go wild any selection can be exported using this do a couple of different exports some with masters some without. Some with previews some without – go wild.

Now about adjustments to images that exist on both machines. The short answer is only adjust image versions on one machine at a time before merging the changes. If you must do it on both machines to the same set of images do yourself a favor and make a new version when you do. Even this has it’s drawbacks – I don’t know if it is a bug and will get fixed or that is just the way it is. Heck it could be my Aperture 3 installation at this point but here is what happens even if you don’t make new adjustments of both machines – let’s say some new versions.

Say you had a couple of albums that contain those image versions already. You create a new image version on your laptop and ship it back to your desktop. That version will show up in the stack at the project level but… it will not be in the stack in the albums that already existed for that stack. No this is not a feature – in fact the album will show the correct number of images after everything is merged but when you open it in any album that existed before the new version was created on the laptop you will NOT see the new version. Not earth shattering but definitely confusing considering stacks are stacks. This could have serious consequences to your work-flow and overall organization scheme. The image at the top shows this if the words are not clear – also note the version names!

On another note – even if you move masters back and forth with completely consolidated managed libraries projects etc. Changes to the master files are NOT picked up in a merge. For instance write metadata to the masters for a project that already exists in two libraries and then merge them the library that you DID NOT write the metadata to will still not have the metadata in the masters. Get it? Again not a giant deal just be aware in your planned work-flow.

By the way you do not have to drag and drop one library onto another to import/merge there are a million ways to do it – file import->lbrary/project, double clicking a different library while Aperture is open with a different one, etc. That is probably obvious but just wanted to put it out there.

Hope this helps some of you that have large libraries and sophisticated multi-computer workflows.

RB

I think the new import options are fantastic. Having the option to import them together, together but as separate masters, or even just the JPEGs and then later the associated RAW are great and could help with a lot of diverse work-flows out there. I think the new image badges are a nice improvement as well. Knowing whether you are looking at something based on the RAW master or the JPEG master is added functionality.

The only issue I have is the useless and really slow needless change from Aperture 2′s ‘New Version From Master JPEG” to Aperture 3′s TWO different functions “Set JPG as master’ and ‘Set RAW as master”  - these are senseless. There are maybe 3 occasions ever you would want to do this for already existing versions – one of them being you picked the wrong import option. The others being you had adjustments that were anywhere near appropriate for both masters. In either case the old functionality was no slower or no more complicated dealing with this.

Enough of that – to make life more bearable I setup some new custom shortcut keys to deal with it a little closer to my existing workflow. I set up Control-J to “Set JPEG as Master”. Just to keep things symmetric I also set up Control-R as “Set RAW as master”. Now I can have similar functionality to the old way. Here it is;

• Select all images (Command-A)
• New album from selection (Command-L)
• New version from master (Option-G)
• Set JPEG as master (Control-J)

Similar but one additional shortcut key and a lot slower for some reason – the actual set JPEG as master seems to take way longer than the old way.

This is a quick one covering something obvious but there are a couple of little hints in here that even you experts might have missed. As you know I am a big fan of stack mode if you have been reading some of my other stuff. Stack mode helps me get to selects really fast. I use compare mode as well but to a much lesser extent and usually use it way down the road in my work-flow to compare very different images.

One of the things that we all need to do is compare similar images – not just overall composition but also images that are very similar compositions in a quick sequence to get to our selects. Aside from an overview we photographers compare detail – usually at 100% – sometimes for sharpness but mostly for subtleties.

The Aperture loupe tool is the worst way to do this. Really it is. The zoom tool (Z key) is the best way. Especially if you are in stack mode or compare mode. Both images get zoomed to 100% and you can drag them around with the space bar. Better yet you can drag them both around at the same time using Shift+Space. Using Z and Shift+Space to compare two images is about 900 times more productive than trying to go back and forth using the loupe.  Try it.

But wait there is more – zooming and shift space works on any number of images in a selection when you have more than one being displayed in the viewer. Yep it works with three or four or… I do this all the time and it is by far the fastest way to do things in a lot of cases. Esp if you are a shortcut key junkie like I am.

Hold on – we do have one more thing (as Steve would say). You hecklers out there may be saying to yourself – dragging images around zoomed in or using the loupe tool is so slow it sucks. Well you are sort of right but you are actually wrong. You are right if you do not have any idea how to do things effectively in Aperture – If you have a fantastic machine two images with a ton of performance killing adjustments layered on that you want to compare you should be fine. If you want to do it on not so great a machine with those same adjustments it will drag. If you have 4 images up and they have a tone of stuff going on even the biggest machine will be brought to it’s knees.

So what to do – well that’s easy instead of complaining over on the Aperture support forum of how bad Aperture sucks because it allows you to ask it to do a lot of work easily – just do it smarter. Even on the lowliest machine this works great. Before you start dragging the images around zoomed in just hit the “M key” to disable all the adjustments – drag – hit the M key again – bang no performance lag. Now if you use the menu for everything instead of shortcut keys this would be cumbersome. If you learn to use Aperture well it can be a joy in terms of responsiveness and work-flow productively. So…

1. Select images
2. Z key
3. M key
4. Shift+Space drag them
5. M key

I swear I can be about 4 times as productive even on a 13inch last gen MacBook with Aperture, its shortcuts, and it’s UI options than I can with Lightroom. If you didn’t know this or have not thought about it before give it a try and be sure to get used to the shortcuts so they become automatic – I swear it will feel like you got a new machine and a new version of Aperture.

RB

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

Aperture blows the living crap out of anything else out there in terms of an organizational tool combined with a lot of really really nice RAW processing and adjustment tools. People that complain about it usually have no idea what they are doing. So I will address some of what I complain about with a little context of expecting perfection.

I don’t think you have ever heard me complain about Aperture’s speed – that is because I haven’t. I run Aperture and have since the beginning with the appropriate hardware and appropriate expectations for the files that I am dealing with and the amount of work that I am asking it to do all at once. I am serious here – try Capture One Pro, or Nikon NX2 and then let me know what you think. Aperture blows the crap out of them in terms of RAW performance. Yeah yeah yeah a bunch of people will chime in about how wonderfully “fast” Lightroom is – bullshit.

Here is why it is bullshit. When I first started hearing this from some people and dug into it guess what I found. They were trying to run Aperture on like a first gen white MacBook with intel integrated graphics and a gig of RAM. Yeah right – brilliant. The second thing that I found is that most of this is perception – Aperture lets you do way more – way faster than LR from a workflow perspective. It is easier to ask Aperture to do a lot of work than it is to ask LR to do a lot of work. The third thing that I found is that humans are easily distracted by gee-gaws and shiny objects. When LR is doing a couple of common things ti is actually SLOWER but… It moves stuff while it is doing it. Aperture doesn’t. Not faster just no look at me I am doing something while the work is going on.

I know that there are a lot of you that will argue me on this point – I have settled this debate many times in person by challenging various LR users whose primary reason for using LR was “speed”. Out of more than a dozen or so such challenges that I went end to end on a real world work-flow (their work-flow) I won. Yes there are a lot of variables in this but who cares – Aperture gets to the end faster. Oh – you don’t know how to use Aperture, then you are right a much much dumber software will make you faster, maybe.

Let’s move on to RAW processing. I am a Nikon shooter (and a Leaf and a Phase One….) I complained about Aperture handling of NEF files. My complaint was exactly the same complaint that I had with ALL other software and I did not start complaining until ACR 5. My complaint was – 1) Handling of WB and 2) No profiles. This was because up until ACR 5 nobody handled it better except Nikon. In reality Aperture’s RAW processing is about as good as it gets. It is really really good. There is just one extra step that I have to do in a lot of cases. Now that ACR can do it – Apple and everyone else should figure it out. I do have to say that the newer NEF’s are even better in Aperture than the older NEF files.

Capture One – widely regarded as one of the “BEST” RAW converters out there in terms of quality. Compare it to Aperture sometime – Aperture is better in quality in a lot of ways. Apple’s RAW conversions are actually very very good quality.

On to adjustment tools – Apertures tool set is one of the best out there in terms of usability and capability of very very fine control. Yes the noise reduction is not capable of dealing with horrendous noise. To be blunt this is getting to be more and more moot but if you need really really “good’ noise reduction you will need a 3rd party no matter what. The rest of the built in tools are fantastic – forget the lame dodge and burn – I do not consider that to be built in. If you end up in PS for a lot of your images then who cares. If you don’t retouch your images or do effects to them then again who cares. I find LR’s local adjustments to be a giant pain in the ass to be honest. I end up shooting things to Photoshop in either LR or Aperture.

The most gigantic mistake that Apple made with it’s built in adjustments are the UI with the levels control – functionally it is pretty much the same as the “curves” in Lightroom but nobody in the universe is used to dealing with curves that way. Apple should change that – really, the entire click at the top and play and then click at the bottom and play is not what you want to be doing – it is counter productive because there is no visual feedback to tell you where you want to be when you adjust one of the top and bottom “quarter tone” sliders – it takes too much messing with comparde with manipulation of a single point. Okay that was negative but over all it is positive.

The other thing that I noticed was that “newbies” didn’t think that the adjustment controls did “much” – I guess that is because they are so used to the exaggerated effects of having sliders that move a tiny little bit in the range and produce HUGE effects. That’s fantastic – all of the useful range of motion is only 13 pixels wide out of 300. Reminds me of camera dudesgrabbing a lens in a camera store and looking through it and immediately concluding it was “sharper” because the focus throw was only about an inch verses a lens with 4 times the focus throw. Yea right.

RB

Ps. That “crappy” Aperture NEF RAW conversion is at the top. The one at the bottom is from Capture One Pro V5. Both are “good” if not fantastic conversions.

As long time users know one of the secrets to using Aperture effectively is taking full advantage of the way Aperture stacks, albums, and album picks work. As usual I promote the extremely liberal use of albums and new versions for just about everything imaginable. I was coaching a fellow Aperture user on a particular nuance that was frustrating him and thought his issue might be frustrating more than a few people.

Typically if you make a new version in the context of an album it automatically becomes the album pick. This is fantastic as I have described numerous times in many of the workflow related tips on this site and in the Aperture organization eBook. Here is the rub – a lot of external editors and plug-in’s do not behave the same way. In many cases when you create a new version via “edit with…” the new version using the external program is NOT made the album pick. Adding to the frustration is that you cannot select a bunch of versions and make them all the album pick at the same time – this doesn’t work. There is no way to promote a selection of images to album picks or stack picks. Only the primary selection is affected. Now what – tedious one by one promotion to album pick for your plug-in adjusted images? No way, that is way way to slow – we may as well use Lightroom’s feeble organizational tools and mouse heavy UI.

Here is the answer. After creating new plug-in edited versions with reckless abandon in say Nik SilverEFX select all of the adjusted new versions. Make this easy on yourself and just use the search box to search for file types of TIF or something like that (version names if you need to). Then use Command-A to select them all. How every you do it when all the appropriate versions are selected – hit Command – L or use the context menu to create a new album from selection. Done! That’s it – all of the versions selected will be the album picks in the new album.

Hope this helps shave a little time off your work-flow. (Us Aperture users are a demanding lot aren’t we)

RB