Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

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The Digital Photographer's Software Guide
The Metadata Panel
Aperture automatically reads the Exif metadata when you import images to the Library.
In the Metadata Inspector you can add more details, such as captions and keywords, using
the tools provided. For editing, you can select from around 18 metadata views, including
Name Only, Caption Only, IPTC Basic, IPTC Expanded, and so on. This helps
considerably to cut down the clutter of information, giving you just the details you need.
It is easy to save metadata presets and to replace existing metadata with a new set, on
single images or in batches. You can also lift and stamp metadata from one image to
another, without affecting any image adjustments. As well as standard IPTC and Exif
tags, the AppleScript Dictionary supports access to other types if you need more flexibility.
With all these facilities there is little excuse for not including at least a photographer
credit and a copyright notice when distributing your images electronically.
Any image can be rated from 1 to 5 stars or marked as a reject. However, you do not
have to go to the Metadata panel to do this. Just select the image and press a number
key (1–5). The rating is then stored as metadata. To filter the images, you can use the
Ratings Search pull-down menu to select the desired star rating.
Keyword filtering is more powerful than the ratings tool, if not as cute visually. If you
activate Keyword Controls (from Window in the menu bar), a control bar appears
beneath the browser, from which you can add new keywords. You can also use preset
buttons to stamp images with a set of keywords, as well as easily create a new preset button
using drag-and-drop selection from a list of words. Yes, it is still the most tedious
task in the whole of photography, even using Aperture’s sleek Query HUD version of
it, but without keywords it is very difficult to search large collections of images.
Once keywords are in place, you have plenty of search options to help you find images
that meet the criteria you choose. You can refine search criteria with filtering options
such as “include any of the following,” “...all of the following,” “...only the following,”
and so on. You do not need to be a Google PhD to figure out how to use it, but a logical
mind is helpful. Specialist libraries will almost certainly need more powerful indexing
and search facilities, but many working photographers will find it adequate.
The Adjustments Panel
The Aperture Adjustments menu starts with RAW Fine Tuning, and then goes on to
provide a full set of image-adjustment tools. Their function might be called “image processing”
in other software, or “Develop” in Lightroom, but together they constitute the
software’s main workshop.
RAW Fine Tuning
With the RAW 2.0 Converter, RAW decoding now gives better noise handling, highlight
recovery, and color rendering, plus some innovative RAW Fine Tuning controls.