Subtitles of the Movie

In this movie, I'll give you an overview of Aperture, talking about exactly what it's designed to do. Aperture was the first software designed from the ground up just for photographers. What this means for you is that it's designed to meet your needs, not the needs of a graphic designer. You'll find that each step of the way the program is designed for convenience and quality. The interface is quite customizable, letting you create the view that suites your needs the best. For example, I can get rid of the keywords down here; I can change the view to just show a preview of the image or thumbnails. I can get rid of the Inspector, whichever view suits your needs the best at any particular time. It's just a click away. Aperture itself has five main components. The first involves importing the images. The Import Window is designed to let you access your images whether they're on a memory card, on your camera, on an external drive or CD or DVD or local files. You can opt to copy them into the Aperture Library or leave them where they are and simply have Aperture access them. While importing the images you can add essential metadata such as your contact and copyright information. You can even stack a series of similar images to make your editing easier later. The second component of Aperture is organizing your images and there are really multiple aspects of Aperture that are designed to help keep your organized. After all, what's the use of having great images if you can't find them when you need them? Of course, Aperture enables you to readily add keywords to your images and there are a lot of ways to do this. You can directly type in a keyword, you can click and drag it onto your image and we'll talk about this later. You can type it in here and there are even some other nifty ways to add keywords individually or in batches. But there are other components to the organization as well. Your images are kept in projects, but without creating any additional memory needs, your images can appear in multiple places. For example, this image is in my Provence project, but it's also in an album called The Best of 2007. Your masters are kept in the projects and you name and create them to fit your needs. But then you create the albums and there can be multiple albums and smart albums that contain the same image. We'll go into more detail about this in another movie. But for now, understand that means you can create subgroups or collections of your images without having to duplicate the files. So if you're getting a slideshow together or submission together, you can move files in and out of the albums no matter what project holds the master files. That way you can work with a group of images to make sure you select the best ones for that situation. The third component of Aperture is optimizing the images. Aperture enables you to adjust raw images, TIFFs, pfscs, JPGs etcetera with equal ease, but it's not just the fact that it's easy that's important. The fact is that the raw conversion engine is excellent and the adjustments are precise and accurate. In fact, while you're deciding whether to keep or delete an image, you can set a few sliders and know whether the image is a keeper. For example, I could come down here; I can adjust the brightness, etcetera. We'll go into more detail on this later. With a single keystroke, I can access the loop tool and I can quickly tell whether my image is sharp. If you want to use Photoshop or a plug-in such as Viveza or Image Nomik, Aperture automates the procedure seamlessly so that a new file is created and automatically imported when you hit Save. If you come up here to Image, Edit With and you get the choice. The fourth main component of Aperture is easily outputting images. With a single click I can create an email, a slideshow, I can print my images, I can create a book, I can even upload them to a web gallery or a web journal or a web page. And one of the really nice things about the web gallery is that it enables people that you give permission to to download either the optimized version, the small version or even the large size file. That way you can avoid having to deal with trying to send large files via email. The fifth main component of Aperture is backing up your images. One of the pitfalls of the digital evolution has been that when hard drives fail, which they do, we're at risk of losing our images as well as all our edits that we've performed. Aperture has a one-click method called The Vault for backing up your library and all the images and information that are stored within it. It's down here at the bottom of the Projects Panel. You can add Vaults, you can see your Vaults and with a single click, when they're connected, you can update them. That way even if your computer does the unthinkable and has a hard-drive failure, you can restore the library. In addition, you can opt for online storage to some of the popular services and you can upload directly in Aperture to them. The bottom line is that Aperture is designed to meet your photographic needs so that you can spend less time at the computer and more time with your camera.