Aperture 3 for the Wedding Photographer

Have no fear, Aperture 3 is here!  That is right Aperture 3 has just been released.  I am screaming YEAH, I can finally talk about it and share it with the rest of the world!

There will be a lot of people out there talking about Aperture 3 today but I am want to talk to you about Aperture 3 for Wedding Photographers and give you a little insight from someone who has been using and testing it.

First I wanted to tell you about a couple things we have planned over the next few weeks to help you get acquainted with Aperture 3.

1. We have already started filming a brand new Aperture Intensive Training 3.  We will have sections of the training ready for WPPI.  This time you will be able to get individual sections or the whole thing but I will be letting you know when each section is ready so make sure and put your e-mail address in to be notified when the trainings are ready.
2. Adjustments Presets – I have already create a little set of Adjustment Presets that I have been using and they are available for download on shop.sarafrance.com already
3. Really exciting news is that a couple weeks ago I recorded a really great workflow video with the team at Aperture Users Network.  They got it produced and ready in time for today’s release.   So the video is available for download right now at APU.  It is an hour + of workflow and shooting with me.
4. UPDATE: I forgot to mention my WPPI Master Class that is only 3 weeks away.  The Class is Tuesday Morning from 8am to 10am.  There is still room and now I can tell you that it is going to be an Aperture 3 Master Class!  Yeah!  You have to go through and register WPPI first if you have not already and the class is an additional $50.

I am going to give a FREE copy of the workflow training that is on APU away to the 100th person to leave a comment on the post so hit me with your best question in the comments below!

I would love to keep you in the loop and let you know when the other Aperture Trainings are ready to ship.  Just leave us your e-mail and we will make sure you get that.

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With no further ado I give you Aperture 3 for the Wedding Photographer.  This is my list of 15 of the best things about Aperture 3 for Wedding and Portrait Photographers.

1) Sharing Libraries/Projects made easy – This has to be one of the things I am the most excited about.  They have completely changed the way that Aperture 3 Libraries and projects are able to be used and shared.  You can now merge libraries which is huge but even bigger is that projects will now sync!

• Merging Libraries – You can now merge Aperture Libraries which is awesome!
• Sync your projects – That is right, now when you drag a project into an Aperture Library it will look for that project and sync the two projects together to give you all the latest work that has been done to it without duplicating the project.  On top of that when you export a project it becomes it own Aperture Library and you don’t even have to import it into a library to work on it.  You can just take it to another computer, work on it and send it back.
• Switching Aperture Libraries without relaunching the Application – Now you can switch libraries or create new ones right from the File menu.

• Example: I import a project (selection of images) into Aperture on my Computer A.  I then decide that I want my studio manager to narrow down the selection so I drag it onto the desktop.  My studio manager navigates to my desktop through the network and launched that library on her computer.  At this point that library is really small so it is easy to move around.  The images are being stored on my external drive, not in the library.  She then rejects images that do not need to be considers and closes the project.  I then drag the project back into the Aperture Library and continue to work on it from there or I can just keep it as it’s own library and continue to work on it from where it is on the desktop.  No longer will it create a whole new project when I bring it back into Aperture.  No longer will we have to switch computers to do things or have multiple versions of the same project on different computers.  Hello merging & syncing I am so happy to have you!

2) Duplicate Project Structure - You can now take any project structure that you have created, no matter how complex and duplicate it to use it for a new project.  This is great for the use of Smart albums especially since you have already created the perimeters for them.  You can duplicate that project structure, drag or import images into project and it will start to fill the smart albums right away. Beautiful, Simple, and clean organization is one of the things that Apple and Aperture are known for and this just makes it that much more powerful.

3) Whole new Import Dialogue box with:

• Customizable Import Settings – this means that you are able to select the things that you use on import and set that as your default so you do not have to see things like “Rename Files” if you never rename your files on import.
• sRAW and many more file handling additions but I am the most excited about sRAW for the Canon 5D MKII
• Apply Adjustment Presets on import – Okay, I let the cat out of the bag a little early but yes I said Adjustment Presets.  I do not think anyone is surprised about this one.  This feature allows you to apply a preset to the images on import.
• Actions – For the geek in all of us you can create Apple Script and have it run on on any import.  I talk about this more in the AUN Video
• Backup Location – You can choose a second location to import your images to and the speed is still wicked fast.  Yes, that is the technical term.

4) Organizational Additions

• Color Labels – Now you color label images.  There are 7 different color labels
• Flags – You can now flag images as well and there is a great place set up specifically for you to see all the flagged images that are in your library.

5) Adjustments – First Adjustments have moved to a new drop down menu that is easier to get to and see.  The bigger news is that there are some really great new adjustment tools.  On top of all the Brushed tools that I will talk about next, they have added:

• Curves – This is a really powerful Curves tool.  If you are used to working with Curves you will love this new Adjustment
• Chromatic Aberrations

6) Adjustment Presets – Yep they are finally here and I am so excited that they are finally here.  No more work around for this and I could not be happier.  A couple cool things about Adjustment Presets besides the obvious.

• The organizational structure that they created is awesome for these.
• You can customize your custom keyboard shortcut to presets
• Exporting and Importing Presets

7) Brushes – Now you can use non destructive brushes in Aperture with just about any one of the adjustment bricks.

• Brush in or out adjustments
• Choose how you see the brushes: Color Overlay, Brush Strokes, On White or On Black
• Brush an adjustment in or out – so if you apply and adjustment and you like what it did to most of the image accept for this one area, you can just brush that area out.
• Edge awareness on the brushes – this is so awesome if you are as bad at coloring as I am.  This senses where the edge is and does not apply it to to the area that you are trying not to affect.  For instance if you were trying to darken the background but you did not want to darken the subject, you could easily color around the subject and it would avoid the person based on where the edge of that person is.
• You can not have more than one brick of the same adjustment.  So for instance if I wanted to add contrast to one area but remove contrast and saturation from another, I could create one brick with the adjustment and brush it in.  Then create another brick of the same group of adjustments and brush that in to the 2nd area of the same image.
• You can also change that adjustment after you have brushed it on.  So if you get done working on an image and think you might need a little more or that adjustment you brushed in, no need to bring the brush back out.  Just adjust the levels on the brick to bring it up or down.

Quick Brushes – Along with new adjustments and the introduction of brushes they took it one step further and introduced Quick Brushes which takes some of your most popular things that you might have left the application for in the past and gave you the capabilities right here!  My favorite Quick Brushes include:

• Skin Smoothing
• Dodge – this is not the same took that was in Aperture 2.  That was a plug in and this works 100 times better and it is an adjustment layer so it does not a new version of the image and you can just take it off or adjust it’s intensity without touching the original image.  Same for the Burn tool
• Burn
• Polarize
• Intensify Contrast
• Contrast
• Saturation
• Definition
• Vibrancy
• Blur
• Sharpen
• Noise Reduction

9) Full Screen Mode - You really have to see full screen view to fully appreciate how powerful and pretty it is.  You know when the beautiful Apple Screensaver starts on your computer and for a second you are just transformed into the land of that little island or those mountains?  It is like that.  Some of the enhancements that I am in love with:

• Make the Adjustments disappear – Hold down shift and move a slider and the hud disappears so you can see the whole image
• Browser View Option
• Lock the hud in place and watch as it moves the images to the right or the left to move out of the way of the image

10) Books -

• You know I had to have SOME news about books in Aperture and of course I do.  Books has now created the ability to use layouts and design albums for 4 of the best Wedding Album Companies in the business; Leather Craftsmen, Queensberry, Couture Book and Graphistudio.  Not only did the companies create great layouts for you to use if you like but you can still create whatever layouts you like.  The best part?  Just hit the “Send Book…” option and you get a great dialogue box that lets you make your cover options, and uploads the layout to the company you created the book design for.  That is it!  So easy.  I have one being delivered today from Leather Craftsmen.  Super excited!
• UPDATE: The links above will take you right to the page to download their plugins or you can go to Apple’s site to get the links.  Check out the images they used for the samples too!  You might remember that wedding.  That is Josh and Carrie Cox, one of my favorite wedding clients and friends.  Josh is a professional runner.
• I will be doing separate training videos on how to design books for each of these companies and we are planning to have those ready for you at WPPI which is only a couple weeks away now.  Make sure to stop by the booth of the Album company you work with or are interested in working with and ask them about the Aperture Book Training Videos.

11) Faces -  YES! I knew when I saw faces in iPhoto that this was something we could really use in Aperture.  What a great way to find more pictures of the Bride’s mom or Grandmother.  Also faces looks into your address book to auto fill the name in based on what you are typing. Faces is really going to help us organize and sort through our library in totally different ways.

• If you have not used faces in iPhoto and have no idea what I am talking about, faces is face detection that allows you to tag an image and say who it is and find more images of that same person based on their facial structure.  It is incredible.

12)Places

• This is another tool that works similar in iPhoto as it does in Aperture but again this tool being used in a professional manor is going to really help us to track our images in a whole new way.  Also, if you do not have GPS in your camera as many of us do not have or have not seen a reason for there is great news.  You can take an iPhone photo at the even and it will pull the GPS coordinates from that or you can just go into the map and type in the location and it uses google maps to find the location so that you can then assign that location to a group of images or the whole project of images.  I have a ton of fun applications in mind for this tool and some really great business tools for it as well.  Places feels like one of those things you buy for your business that you secretly feel excited about on a personal level.  Like a new toy that you “just had to get for the business.”  I am really glad I have it as a tool and even more excited to get it out of the box so I can play with it.

13) Video and Audio – Aperture 3 has introduced not only the capabilities to import video and audio it takes that to the next level.

• For the Wedding Photographers that have embraced the new video capabilities of the Canon 5D MKII, 7D and the Nikon D3S Aperture 3 brings all your media into one application.  You never even have to leave the application to create a great multi media product for your client.  I am not sure I am stressing how huge this is.  I will talk about it more when I talk about Slideshows.

14) Slideshows - This is not your father’s slideshow.  This is not like any slideshow tool you have seen.  Here are just a couple things that it does:

• Themes – there are themes 8 themes to choose from right off the bat including our old favs like Ken Burns.
• Titles and Text
• Multiple Audio Tracks including Audio from video files and multiple song tracks
• Video and it ducks the audio when you use Video with Audio.
• Timing – Customized timing that you set.  This works similar to how Showit Slideshows works accept that you use the return key instead of the spacebar.  Also, it will set the timing for you to the beat of the music.  That is a really cool feature!
• Edit your Ken Burns Crop and Transitions
• Control the background color
• Export – You can export to the iPod, iPhone, MobileMe, YouTube, Apple TV, HD1080p or go custom and export as any size you want.

Note: In the Video I did with Aperture Users Network I go through creating a slideshow and show all the great options it has.  I create a slideshow with the Ken Burns theme and show how you can do custom timing to your own song selection and adjust the Ken Burns to be just like you like it.

15) Social Media – Now there are big pretty buttons in the interface for sending images to Email, ModileMe, Facebook, and Flickr

16) Trash - now if you delete an image it does not leave the program.  It goes into the trash right in the program and you can get it back easily instead of digging through tall your trash.

That is my list of amazing things.  I hope you are as excited about this release as I am!  Don’t forget to leave you e-mail in the box below and a comment in the comment box!  Come back and let me know how you experience has been.  I would love to stay connected with you and hear about how you are using Aperture.  Happy Aperture 3 launch day!

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