Digital Photographer's Software Guide - Bertemes - Net

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The Digital Photographer's Software Guide
Color Management
Aperture uses Mac OS ColorSync technology to ensure color consistency between imaging
devices, such as scanners, digital cameras, displays, and printers. To benefit from it,
you need to calibrate your monitor regularly, but if you do so, you will get good color
balance in everything from contact sheets to full-sized prints. As long as you have an
ICC profile for the output device, Aperture can simulate on your screen how the output
will look when it is printed, a technique called soft proofing.
Contact Sheets
Another of Aperture’s strengths, contact sheet creation is versatile and highly automated.
Unless you direct otherwise, the program prints only “pick” images at the top of the
stacks, fitting them into a preset format. Among the formats is a “best fit” option, which
makes full use of available space. You can then go ahead and print the contact sheet,
with selected metadata if required, or save the contact sheet as a PDF file.
Custom Books
Another well-conceived print option is Custom Books, which provides attractive templates
for creating and printing books containing both images and text. When you have
put one of these together you can have it printed via Apple’s print service over the
Internet. This output option is no afterthought: the tools are surprisingly versatile and
the customizing features make it even more flexible. Perhaps its most striking feature is
the ability it gives you to zoom and drag individual images once they have been placed
in the layout. It is an operation that makes the simulated book on the screen look even
more attractive than the printed version. Clearly it is time for someone to design an animated
“soft album” in which choreographed pictures can move, zoom, and, on occasion,
burst into song.
Slide Shows
Aperture’s slide shows do not quite go as far as the proposed “soft album,” but you can
put them together with timings and background music. Apple calls these shows “proquality,”
but like those in Lightroom they stop well short of the slide show mastery
reached in the heyday of audio visual presentations using real slides on banks of computer-controlled
Kodak Carousel projectors.
Saving to DVD
Even if you have backed up your Library to a vault, you may still want to burn a DVD
of your most valuable images. One quick way of doing this in Aperture is to use the
Smart Folders feature. It allows you to populate a top-level folder according to chosen
criteria, such as star ratings, date, keywords, and IPTC metadata. Top-level folders span
different projects, allowing you to take all your best images and store them safely on DVD.