Small tip that helps me with Billing Jobs

I often get 3-4 places to photograph for a magazine. Sometimes they are not billed at the same time and have to be held back for the next month. I get confused on which jobs Ive billed and which ones I haven’t. This is especially true for the lower paying jobs, the High dollar ones I usually remember and bill first. Anyway I found it very helpful for my organization to add the invoice number, (from QuickBooks) to the project folder name. For example 01-10-13 PHG Rugs i2305 refers to “job date Phx Home & Garden Navajo Rugs invoice 2305” I can easily see if I have forgotten to bill something.

If there is no incoice number, then it hasn’t been billed!

How to copy (not move) an image to another project and why should I do that?

I am not sure if the following hint is mentioned somewhere in the manual but I couldn’t find it anywhere.

Before I explain the reason, here’s the simple solution.

The solution

Drag the image (it can be a version) from the browser or the viewer to the target project in the Library Inspector with the alt/option key pressed. This key press is the secret! A green plus sign near the cursor gives you the certainty that the image will not be moved but copied to the new location.

Why should I wish to have the same original in two projects?

In my case: After scanning every page of a very old photo album at high resolution (an album page with multiple photos on it, that is), I wanted to “cut out”, aka crop, every single photo to finally get a collection of separate images from that album. But I also wanted to keep the original collection of pages together at another place, to be able to browse through the pages.

That was the reason to copy the scans to a second project before starting to cut the pages.

Cutting out the images

For the cutting procedure I followed these steps (with the keyboard shortcuts in brackets): 

Select the image of the album page in the viewer:

• Choose crop [C]
• “Cut out” (crop to a single photo) and straighten [G] the first photo
• Copy the version [Option V]
• While still in the cropping mode, cut next photo
• Copy the version [Option V]
• Cut out the next photo, etc.
• End with the [Retun] key

 While viewing each of the images, you can toggle the original page where it came from as well by hitting the [M] key (master image). Nice!

Straightening tool enhanced in Aperture 3.3.2: mentioned nowhere!

Besides all the amazing enhancements in Aperture 3.3.2 already mentioned everywhere, there is one even Apple didn’t talk about (or I have missed it): the straightening tool rotates images now plus and minus 45° instead of just plus and minus 20°; which is a huge improvement.

Aperture 3.3.2’s Straighten tool now goes all the way to +/− 45°

I was ‘digitally cutting’ old photos from a scanned photobook from the first half of the last century. Many pictures were placed on the pages very oblique to the right and the left for fun. In Aperture 3.2 it was not possible to rotate them till they were horizontally (so, more than 20° rotation), therefore I had to edit them in Photoshop. But after upgrading to version 3.3.2 the problem was solved! Thank you Apple!

—Rudy

Creating “Masks” for Adjustments

Perhaps this isn’t new, but it was to me. I’d been reading lots of people (elsewhere) complaining that you couldn’t mask or make selective adjustments.

What I discovered is that 99% of Aperture adjustments can be brushed in. Simply add an adjustment (or a second copy of a previously used one) using the adjustments drop-down or gear, and using the gear, select brush in.

Careful use of the brush (I find zero softness and edge detect very effective) and the eraser can select the area you want to work on. Using a colour overlay (using the brush’s gear) makes this strait forward to do.

Even curves can be brushed-in (great for dramatic skies by pulling down the left dark side of the curve).

These adjustments behave much the same a Photoshop masked layers - check or uncheck them to turn the “layer” on or off.

EDITORS NOTE: While this is a well documented and discussed capability, it’s good to hear from users who may not have discovered every feature yet. It’s easy for those of us who use the app every day to dismiss these as “everybody knows that!” capabilities, and this serves as a good reminder that not everything is obvious! Thanks John. — Joseph @ApertureExpert

Fast Aperture library switching using the Dock

Switching from within Aperture from one library to another can be a bit tedious and the dialog window that Aperture presents to choose the right library is not one of the most straightforward ones.

I will suggest here two faster ways, using the Dock.

The fastest way is for people who use almost always the same set of libraries. A static list of libraries is put in the Dock and from there any library can be started.

The second way is for people who make often new libraries. The advantage of this method is that a list will be made that updates dynamically. 

The description of the methods is based on Snow Leopard. It is possible that in Lion the actions are slightly different.

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