Aperture: Digital Goes Analogue
Avid photographer and Mac user Augustine Tan has spent a considerable amount of time getting to know Apple’s Aperture digital image management software, and has penned this article to share some of his insights.
Old habits die hard.
Photographers who picked up their cameras during the good old film days still reminisce about how they would pick up a glass loupe, lean over a light table for hours and manually sort out hundreds of negatives for the best shot.
It was not surprising then that these people would resist the onslaught of digital photography, which emphasises sitting in front of a computer monitor and laboriously clicking through many file folders.
But old habits are not necessarily obsolete habits.
The age-old workflow of “loupe and light table” is arguably a faster way of processing huge volumes of photographs than any computer software to date.
The human brain is wired to absorb information in an analogue way – see as many images as possible, let the subconscious crunch the data and make the right choice in a split second.
Digital solutions have struggled to mimic this aspect of photo-editing, that is, until Apple’s Aperture came along.
Raw Power
Many of us shoot our images in JPEG format but the professional’s choice is often the RAW format.
RAW, as its name implies, is the original digital file that is produced once the shutter button is pressed. RAW files have no additional image processing applied to it, and they are not compressed (which explains why they take up so much space on a memory card).
Such untouched files allow for greater flexibility during the photo-editing process, especially when you need to adjust the exposure, colour balance or contrast.
Aperture is designed to handle RAW files from the ground up at phenomenal speeds (with the right Mac hardware of course), letting you import, edit, catalogue, organise, retouch, publish, and archive your photographs without the hassle of file conversion.
And the good news is that your original files are never accidentally damaged. The greatest fear of any photographer is losing his negatives, and Aperture feels your pain.
In Aperture, any adjustments you do to the image (e.g. levels, white balance, exposure, sharpening and noise reduction) are not permanent. You can keep adding new changes and re-arrange the changes in the order you desire.
Whenever you wish to compare the results of your work, just hit a button and the original image pops up in a blink of an eye.
Intuitive Behaviour
A traditional light table can look like a chaotic mess of negatives and slides.
But the pro photographer often needs that kind of workspace in order to make sense of his images.
Which images maximise a layout? Which picture should be dominant and which secondary?
How should an image be cropped to bring out colour and emotion? Which image is the sharpest?
This natural workflow has been recreated in Aperture. The minute you import images from your camera, you can begin to manipulate hundreds of them as you would physical slides.
Stacks
Firstly, you can choose to group them in stacks either manually or automatically.
Imagine coming back from a trip where you had taken many images of the same animal in different poses.
Aperture can detect the brief pauses between your burst shooting modes and separate the photos accordingly.
You can also pull images from any folder or album in your Mac and keep piling up those stacks.
Once you have your stacks, you can bring your favourite images to the top of the stacks, eliminate them or keep reshuffling the images until you get them the way you like them.
Or you could rate them on a six-star system (which include the option to “reject”), collapse the stack and remove unwanted images in a jiffy.
The Digital Loupe
The problem with most photo-organisation and editing software is that it is often a hassle to look at your images at high magnification.
You need to open up the image, zoom to 100% magnification and then scroll around the screen.
Aperture provides a digital loupe so powerful you can even use it on small thumbnail images.
Just activate the loupe with your keyboard and use it to highlight any portion of an image to immediately see the magnified portion.
There is no need to scroll, no image lag and it just plain works like the loupe that you used to hang around your neck.
Fullscreen Editing
Digital images are getting so large in file size that you need all the screen real-estate you can afford to edit them properly.
That is why people get a large 30-inch widescreen monitor (or even two of them) to work with their digital photos.
Now why clutter the cramped screen with window bars and menus when you can let the picture take up the entire screen?
In Aperture’s fullscreen mode, you can sift through your thumbnails using a virtual filmstrip at the bottom or side of your monitor.
Once you decide to edit a particular image, just mouse up to the top of the screen and extract the Toolbar. From here, you can rotate images, adjust their parameters, crop or add keywords to them.
Metadata Management
The key to managing gigabytes of digital images is having proper metadata embedded in each photo.
Metadata refers to the additional information linked to a photograph, which can include data like shooting information (aperture, shutter speed, white balance) as well as the shooter’s data.
Aperture allows you to key in important metadata as you are importing the images from your camera.
So from the start, you know your images are being classified properly so you can locate them easily.
Within the Aperture workspace, you can specify how much metadata information should be displayed, so you need not worry about further screen clutter.
Outstanding Output
Remember making cumbersome black and white contact sheets in a darkroom?
Now you can quickly create your own customised colour contact sheets, specifying details like the size of thumbnails, amount of metadata and even rotating all the images simultaneously on the sheet.
Aperture also allows you to print out the layouts which you have created on the virtual light table, or simply produce lab-quality prints if you have appropriate printer hardware.
You can also choose to create instant online photo galleries, or just compile the images into a high-quality coffee table book or PDF file.
Stop Fussing, Start Shooting
Ultimately, Aperture is not designed to replace photo-editing solutions like Adobe Photoshop or Corel Paint, but to complement them.
What it does is to fill the vital part of a photographer’s workflow that disappeared when digital photography replaced film.
It revives our brain’s fantastic ability to sort through hundreds of projects and images by providing the right interface and tools.
It takes long-standing problems with photo management software and fixes them with elegant solutions.
It takes the quality of RAW images and makes them easy to manipulate and manage.
In short, Aperture wants you to spend less time at the computer, and more time shooting your next masterpiece.