By The Way… MacCreate

Readers,

Don’t forget the amazing site MacCreate and its massive Aperture community. I’m contributing there as well, and deliberately not duplicating tips on MacCreate and ApertureExpert. There’s a LOT of activity on the Aperture site right now over there, as it has multiple contributors and some very dedicated people.

I’ll reiterate what I said in the FAQ here… yes I do contribute to both sites, but I’m the only one running this one. ApertureExpert.com is a small community and will never be as big as MacCreate; I have no interest in competing with my friends over there nor in making sites for all the other Mac apps. There’s plenty of room in the world of Aperture support for multiple sites, so by all means, support them too. They even have a paid membership for extra content.

The direct link is aperture.maccreate.com

Finally Started My Own Upgrade…

Updated on Saturday, February 13, 2010 at 7:55 PM by Joseph Linaschke

Updated on Saturday, February 13, 2010 at 10:05 PM by Joseph Linaschke

Updated on Sunday, February 14, 2010 at 11:09 AM by Joseph Linaschke

Updated on Monday, February 15, 2010 at 9:26 PM by Joseph Linaschke

So with a whole 30 minutes to spare, I’ve finally begun my own move to Aperture 3. I took one of my client libraries and am starting with that. The fortunate thing of being forced to wait this week is I have the benefit of learning what has and hasn’t worked for other people. While this particular library is quite small (only 17,398 photos), I wanted to take the extreme-caution route. Here’s what I’m doing for this upgrade.

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Aperture 3—A Game Changer (Multiple Macs, Syncing Projects, & More)

As deliriously silly as this sounds, I’ve barely spent any time in Aperture yet myself. Since Tuesday night, I’ve been preparing for and shooting a series of Aperture 3 training videos for the fabulous wedding photographer Sara France. So most of my Aperture exploration has been limited to watching her and reading websites! Tragic, I know.

Anyway there’s a combination of features that are listed on Apple’s “200+ New Features” page that truly make this a release a game changer, and that’s the ability to Merge and Sync Libraries, and to Export as Library. Why is this so important? Read on…

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Some Tips For The Big Upgrade

There have been reports of a few concerns with the upgrade process on this site, and while I may eventually get to respond to them individually, for the moment I wanted to share a very useful link on apple.com and some general tips on making this update as painless as possible.

First and foremost—make no mistake, this is a HUGE upgrade to your library. A lot has to happen for the library to be completely “version 3” ready. The library structure itself has changed, which is what allows you to do things like switch between libraries without relaunching. There’s a new RAW engine, so the images have to be re-processed by that (that can happen later though) before the new features like Curves and Brushes are available. The images all have to be processed for Faces (again, this can be deferred) and that in itself is incredibly labor intensive. The master files must be polled for EXIF data to look for GPS info, but that is pretty quick.

There’s an invaluable article on apple.com that you should read before upgrading if you have a large library—detailed explanations of what I’ve just stated above in there, clear as a bell.

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Curves. ‘Nuff Said.

For those who follow me on twitter, you’ll know I was very excited about the addition of curves to Aperture 3. I suspect there’s a lot to the Adjustment here, perhaps more than I’m familiar with, but I just had a moment to look at them and yep… them be curves!!

Why do I care? I’m used to working with curves from a lot of different applications, and it’s a familiar way for me to get the look I want. Quarter-tones in Levels are great and can do pretty much the same thing, but frankly I just like using Curves.

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