Using Light Tables in Aperture

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. The next feature I'm going to show you is the light table. For all of you all who, listening to this who were photographers that ever used you know real film and real physical light tables, it'll be a nice welcome addition to you. It's also good if you're a web designer or doing page layouts to give you an idea of how the photos are going to layout without having to actually print them and set them all up on the table. So what we're going to do is we're going to go over here, we're going to click on this little looks like a miniature light table to start a new light table. Alright so we're going to create this. We're going to start off creating it with one image. So we're actually going to drag the image right under the light table, there you go. And so say I wanted to use that picture and say I decide that I'm going to go back to our wedding folder and let's say I'm going to use, you know what, we're going to go to this one. I'll use this photo. I'm going to put this photo on the same light table and I'll also take this photo, put it in the same light table. Alright so we're going to click back on that light table and we're going to see that these are the available photos to work with they're not actually on the table yet. So we're going to click on them and drag them up into the table. And you know what, let's say I also like this lighter color picture too so there you have the entire stack on the table. Alright so now what I can do is I can move the photos around as I see fit. I can decide that maybe I want to make this one bigger, there I go. Let's say I want to take this picture of [PH] Chango, my dog and make it--and also the table will scale automatically to whatever size you choose to make it and there you go that's how that works. It can also--once I'm here, I can also go in through and make color adjustments so I'll just supersaturate the colors on [PH] Chango and make him turn kind of a weird orange color, let's kick up the shadows too. Now he looks like a cartoon. I can go to this feature where I can make all the adjustments I want on this one too. And what you want to do with this is this is just a way to work with photos, a way to actually move them around on the page and see how they work or compare and contrast different photos from a set, and then when you're done, you can actually print photos directly off of this, you can print a contact sheet from this, you can go right off this, you can actually print layout sheets off of this and so. It's a really really handy feature and it's nice to actually have somewhere to do this digitally as oppose to have them printed out and lay them out on the light board myself. "