Step 1: The Preferences Panel

After opening Aperture’s Preferences window and choosing the Import tab, you can adjust a few rudimentary options. The biggest decision you will have to make is whether Aperture will open when a camera is connected. If you do not use an iOS device in addition to your digital camera this can be an easy choice: set it to open Aperture. Your decision can get a little complicated if you do use an iOS device. OS X detects iOS devices as cameras, so every time you sync your device, Aperture will also load. This can get annoying, so I load Aperture manually when I plug in my camera (or SD card).

The Default Import Location allows you to choose between a New Project or another selected location in Aperture. I’ll get into this a little deeper in later, but in my case I’ve accepted the defaults here.

Autosplit into Projects lets you adjust the time frame on how Aperture auto-creates projects (One project per day, One project per week, Two-hour, or eight hour gaps). This is going to depend on your shooting style. If a day-long shoot for you constitutes true event or project, like a wedding shoot, you’ll be well served with One Project per Day. On the other hand, if you shoot a lot of little things all week but wouldn’t call it an event, you can set it to “One project per week.” I fall into that category, so that’s the setting I choose.

Step 2: Importing Photos

Once Aperture has loaded, click the Import button at the top of the screen. This will bring up the Import window. By default, all images on the camera are checked for import. If you don’t want that, simply click Uncheck All and you can select what ones you do in fact want to import.

By default, Aperture wants to import the photos into a new, Untitled project. By clicking in the field next to Project Name you can change the name of the newly-created project. Also, if you click an existing project in the left pane the photos will be imported there.

Again, what projects you import to will depend greatly on your shooting style. If I’m shooting a true event, like a concert or show, where I’ll have an empty SD card at the start of the shoot, I’ll create a project based on that shoot (the band name and date of the event). However, most of my shoots tend to be onesey-twosey shoots, or nothing that coherently falls together in a project of any stretch. For those, I have a generic dumping ground project called Imports where I put the shots while I sort through them.

There’s no hard and fast rule on assigning projects, and your method will change over time. The good news is, assigning photos to a project isn’t a one-time affair. If you’re not happy with where a photo is assigned, you can just drag it to a new project.

Step 3: Cleaning Up and Taking Out the Trash

Arguably the most important part of the import is accepting that not all your photos are fantastic shots. It’s important during the import to give your capture a critical eye and unless there’s a good reason to keep it, trash it. Don’t litter your library with substandard shots if you can help it. That said, sometimes the only shot of a memorable event is a poor shot, in which case a bad photo is sometimes better than none, but try and take a critical eye to your art.

Another good habit to get into when you import photos is to geotag them as well as assign keyword. If your camera doesn’t have a GPS, and you have an iPhone, you can use your iPhone to geotag the photo. Just take one photo on site with your iPhone and in Aperture, go to Places, and then choose “Import GPS from iPhone Photos” from the GPS button.

Keywording is one of my OCD habits. I like to assign photos some common tags (Boston, Outdoors, Night,) so I can easily find them later.

That’s my basic guide to importing photos with Aperture. If you shoot RAW, or if you want to get more complicated, your process may become much more involved. If you feel like I’ve missed any major tips for new users, please include them in the comments.

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• new advanced editing tools: layer mask, content-aware spot healing
• new organizer software
• improved repair tools
• copy and paste photo “styles,” texture, contrast, tone, tint, etc.
• new guided editing effects: portraits, out-of-bounds, pop art
• improved panoramic photo merging
• create calendars, greeting, cards, and photo books for printing or purchase
• more sharing options, including Facebook, Flickr, and Adobe Online albums

However, the bulk of the program really boils down the first two points: the organizer and a couple of editing tools.

Adobe Elements Organizer 9 replaces the previous Bridge software, but it’s clearly designed as an iPhoto replacement, too. Organizer can access the iPhoto library, copying photos into its own directory in the Pictures folder of your User directory.

Like iPhoto, Organizer scans photos for faces and other attributes, and automatically tags them, often with similar mixed results. Also like iPhoto, Organizer has editing features like automatic color and levels, as well as the one-button Smart Fix, which is much better than Enhance in iPhoto. As in iPhoto, you can make cards and books, as well as share photos online, though not with MobileMe. If it weren’t for the lack of integration with MobileMe and iTunes syncing (which isn’t Adobe’s fault), I’d switch to Organizer in a heartbeat.

In terms of editing, to my surprise, I found Layer Masks. Until now, that’s been an “advanced” feature found only in Photoshop. Even better, the Spot Healing tool is now content-aware. Using that tool, it took four stokes to remove the unwanted people in the waterfall photo above. The Spot Healing tool draws on surrounding content, so the bigger the “spot,” the less impressive the results. Still, it’s a nice feature.

If there’s one problem with Photoshop Elements 9, it’s probably the price: $79 after an annoying $20 mail-in rebate. While that’s over $500 less than Photoshop CS5, it’s also the price of iLife ’09, which includes the adequate iPhoto along with iMovie, iWeb and GarageBand. Luckily, there’s a 30-day free trial that lets you judge for yourself. If you’ve tried both, let us know which you prefer in the comments.

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For basic photo editing, if you’re running OS X 10.5 Leopard you don’t need Photoshop Elements or Pixelmator. Leopard’s Preview graphics viewer application is much more than a viewer; it now incorporates some very handy image correction tools that are not only user-friendly and intuitive to use, but also work really well.

Consequently, if you take digital photos or scan transparencies or prints onto your computer and want to optimize them, you may not need a traditional image editor application at all. Preview can do the job for you.

New Tools

Check out Preview’s new Tools Menu. If you’re familiar with the Tools Menu in OS 10.4 Tiger Preview, you’ll note that there are some new selections.

Now, say you’ve downloaded a photo from your camera, and you’re not quite happy with the exposure, color rendering, or other picture attributes. For example, here is a photo of a beach near my home. It’s straight out of the camera (an old, 3.2 megapixel unit) and is a bit underexposed, has a greenish tinge, and it isn’t as sharp as it probably should be.

So, open the image file in Preview and choose Adjust Color from the Tools Menu. A translucent black color and exposure adjustment palette will appear, with ten sliders that facilitate the adjustment of exposure, brightness, contrast, saturation, temperature, tint, sepia, black level, white level, and sharpness.

Real Time Feedback

The adjustment sliders give you real time feedback, and I have found that they work beautifully. I love to play with all possibilities, and after my adjustment efforts, my beach photo now looked like this. It definitely has more brightness and pop and I like the color balance better. I was also able to make it sharper, although in cranking up the brightness I lost the cloud detail in the sky.

However, if you’re pressed for time, or are not quite sure what adjustment/correction effects you would like, just click the Auto Levels button and the program will make its best guess as to what the optimum values should be, automatically adjusting the sliders. You can still tweak individual qualities if you wish before saving the image. Here’s Preview Auto Levels’ best guess for my beach shot. I like my manual effort better, but it does retain the cloud detail.

Best All Around Tool For Simple Image Correction?

What both surprised and delighted me the first time I used it is how well this all works, and from one simple palette too. I’m not sure that this isn’t the all-round best tool I’ve ever used for this sort of image correction. It’s certainly the most convenient, and has added a great deal of value to the Leopard Preview application from my perspective.

But there’s more. Preview now has an image scaling and resizing tool as well, allowing you to conveniently and quickly change a photo’s resolution. Just select Adjust Size from the Tools Menu, and either manually enter the desired dimensions in the provided fields, or pull down the menu and choose one of the resolution selections provided. You can also change the resolution of your picture (number of pixels per inch) by setting it in the resolution box.

Of course, if you need to do more advanced correction such as red eye or spot removal, or retouching, you’ll still need an application like Photoshop Elements, Pixelmator, or iPhoto. But for basic exposure, color and sharpness correction, Preview is now a very quick, handy, and effective tool.

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Jade, a different sort of digital image processing utility, doesn’t do anything you can’t achieve using tools and filters in Photoshop, Pixelmator, or other image editors, but it can transform your less-than-perfect shots (dark, dim, feeble, pale, badly lit, vague, gloomy) into images you can be proud of with minimal effort.

Jade leverages advanced graphics algorithms to enhance color, contrast and dynamic range with no user adjustment required for individual shots or batch lots, and also provides manual control to fine-tune intensity values, image contrast and color correction values if desired. I found this seldom necessary. Jade delivers a pleasing result by default almost every time, amazing me by how it can take shots I’ve expended serious time tweaking with Photoshop Elements’ or Pixelmator’s formidable arsenals of image correction tools, and improve them even more almost instantly. Jade is a staff pick on Apple’s download website with good reason.

Jade version 1.3.1, released late last month, adds Picasa Web Albums upload support, keychain support to remember Flickr and Picasa login data, and an updated Picasa/Flickr batch save process, plus extensive fixes in the Help files and some renamed menus. An Apple Aperture Plugin that uses the same algorithms and correction parameters as Jade is also available.

Jade’s interface window has two panes; one a size-adjustable (slider) thumbnail gallery of available images that can be positioned left or right, and the image display panel where you preview originals and the filtered results.

To activate the correction/enhancement filter, click on the Jade Enhanced Icon on the toolbar or select the Enhance command in the Image Menu. Once an image is selected from the thumbnails or dragged into the window or to Jade’s Dock icon, the enhancement filter starts processing the image. Jade does its thing so quickly you won’t spend much time viewing the unprocessed image. You can click on enhanced photos to temporarily revert to the unprocessed image for comparison (Jade unfortunately doesn’t display before and after side-by-side comparisons).

Here’s a sampling of what Jade can do with a single click compared with a couple of full-featured image editors. The original image as it came from the camera isn’t really bad, but a bit dull with little detail visible in the dark areas.

Below is the result with Photoshop Elements 6′s “Smart Fix” command. There’s more snap to the image, and the grass color is more pleasing, but the blues have taken on an aqua tinge.

Pixelmator’s “Enhance” command produced this result. I like the sky color better than what PSE produced, but the cloud detail is a bit washed-out and the grass color isn’t as good although it’s got more detail.

And finally, here’s Jade’s default result. In my estimation the best sky and lake color, the best detail and color in dark areas, and the best grass for both detail and color of all.

Now here’s what Jade did with this underexposed, backlit shot.

For a different sort of example, here is a product shot, with the original at the top, Pixelmator exposure correction in the middle, and Jade’s automatic correction at the bottom.

Jade can batch-process and save many images in a single operation or filter and save all selected images in a folder, a capability that theoretically allows you to filter thousands of images sequentially with no intervention, but one that should be used with care.

I found Jade lively and responsive even on my old 1.33 GHz G4 PowerBook, so it must really fly on a MacIntel machine. Jade gives you an awful lot of almost effortless image correcting power priced at $30 for the Home version (functionally identical to the Pro version, but with a Pro registration key you can use Jade commercially). It’s not a comprehensive image editor, but I figure that about 90 percent of the time Jade will do the trick very satisfactorily for my purposes, and it can save a ton of time fiddling with images.

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From the information I’ve read about Pixelmator’s latest update, some parts seem to have been rewritten to tie more closely into Core Image in Mac OS X, as well as to chase away some of the crashes I experienced.

Acorn adds stability to an otherwise already awesome app – great for the average Joe who doesn’t need all of the crazy complexity of a Photoshop-type app, but wants a slightly better tool than iPhoto provides (including awesome scripting capabilities, Web image tools, vector drawing, and easy manipulation of layers). These both kick Photoshop’s butt when it comes to processing ability – they use the GPU, rather than relying on the processor to perform operations.

I personally still use Photoshop for my day-to-day stuff, but anything to keep some nice competition on Adobe’s case is all right with me. If CS4 ends up being a mere upgrade to 64-bit for Windows only, with no real features, I’ll definitely consider jumping to Pixelmator when the time comes for an upgrade.

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