Setting Up Apple Aperture

Series Summary

Apple Aperture is a photo editing program for Mac computers used by professional photographers to do post-production photography work. If you like the simplicity of Apple's iPhoto software, this is probably not the right photo editing software for you. The user experience is also somewhat different than that of Adobe's Photoshop as well, as the thinking in the development of Aperture was to create a software more instinctive to the processes of a professional photographer.

In this series of free videos photographer and Mac expert Brandon Sarkis shows you the basics of using Aperture photo editing software. He demonstrated how to setup the software, how to import your photos, and how to adjust your images using various features, like Light Tables and the Loupe. He also shows you how to manage your photo libraries and how to export your photos in various formats.

Video Transcript

"BRANDON SARKIS: My name is Brandon Sarkis on behalf of Expert Village. Today I'll be showing you how to use Apple's Aperture program for the Mac. All right the first thing you'll see when you open Aperture is a window that looks like this. On your left hand side over here you're going to have all of your projects, which is all of your photographs, basically, filled up into whatever order you decide to put 'em in. Your bottom window down here is going to be what's called your browser window, which you can scroll through and see all the photographs in the current project. Above that, you'll have your viewer window, which shows whichever the currently active photograph is. Click on one here and change it. And over here to the right hand side you'll see your adjustment window. This allows you to make basic adjustments to the actual photograph itself. If you don't like the way this is laid out, you can, for example, I feel as though I need more room in the main viewer window, I can drag this piece down and I can drag this piece over actually it's as far as--over it will go. So's this one already. Or something else you can do is you can choose to show or hide certain parts. For example, I could decide to hide the project window, or I could hit the W key to bring it back. I could also decide to hide the-well I could hide the adjustment window if I want, or include up here to show adjustment window. Or if you don't like the layout of the windows, if you don't like the order they're in, you can hit shift and W, which will flip them, which is kind of a nice way to do it, or you could also go up here and go to rotate workspace--I'm sorry, swap workspace, which will actually swap the actual locations. That's your option or alternate, and W. Let's get this back to where I had it. All right, this is the way I typically work with it right here. All right, so there's your intro."