Aperture Adjustment Bricks

So there’s no Aperture ver­sion 3 to talk about this week. :( That means I’ll just go on with my Translating Lightroom “series.”

Aperture and Lightroom were built to do basi­cally the same thing — allow pho­tog­ra­phers to orga­nize, manage, adjust and output their work. It should comes as no sur­prise, then, that lots of things, maybe more things than not, are the same between Lightroom and Aperture. The fea­tures often go by dif­ferent names, but they do the same things:

Lightroom/Aperture

• Blacks/Black Point — sets the level of the blackest black
• Exposure/Exposure — sets the level of the whitest white
• Recovery/Recovery — brings detail back into blown highlights
• Brightness/Brightness — adjusts the tonal value of the mid-tones
• Contrast/Contrast — makes black blacker and whites whiter
• Saturation/Saturation — increases the inten­sity of the color overall
• White Balance (WB)/White Balance — the tem­per­a­ture and tint of the color “white”
• Clarity/Definition — increases mid-tone contrast
• Vibrance /Vibrancy — adds sat­u­ra­tion to less sat­u­rated colors and pro­tects skin tones
• Virtual Copy /Version — a copy that ref­er­ences the same master image
• Keywords/Keywords — tags applies to images as metadata
• Star Ratings/Star Ratings — image rating sys­tems of one to five stars
• Stacks/Stacks — an orga­ni­za­tional tool to group like images together

There are also a number of fea­tures that are so close to being the same that we can just call them that and worry about the small details in dif­fer­ence in another post one day:

Lightroom/Aperture

• Collections/Albums — vir­tual image groups (Lightroom’s phys­ical image groups are Folders; Aperture’s are Projects). For an thor­ough expla­na­tion of file man­age­ment and orga­ni­za­tion, see Robert Boyer’s Aperture ebooks.
• Presets/Presets — saved set­tings for such things as export for­mats or image adjustments
• Grid View/Browser View — a view of resiz­able thumb­nails of images
• Catalog/Library — the basic orga­ni­za­tional struc­ture that stores pref­er­ences, the image data­base, and so on

That’s a pretty good start. You can already see that a lot of the infor­ma­tion, tips and tech­niques you read about for Lightroom have direct (or very close) equivalents in Aperture. Future posts will begin to focus more on dif­fer­ences and trans­lating steps one might take in Lightroom to achieve a cer­tain results that can be do in Aperture also, just using dif­ferent steps or tools.

I’m expecting (hoping?) to see Aperture ver­sion 3 “soon.” The Lightroom Public Beta is already avail­able for their ver­sion 3. So there should be a lot of dis­cus­sion, infor­ma­tion and training coming online for both pro­grams. Typically Lightroom enjoys a much greater share of online resources than does Aperture, but Aperture 2 can do much of what Lightroom 2 can do. I expect it to be no dif­ferent with ver­sions 3. My intent is to begin pub­lishing indi­vidual posts here to trans­late tech­niques from Lightroom to Aperture; to offer a way to take online resources for Lightroom and make them useful to Aperture users.

Storage Options

To start, I picked Aperture’s con­cept of ref­er­enced files. That’s the only way Lightroom can store files on the hard drive and Aperture is often crit­i­cized for its other, default, approach — man­aged files. For Lightroom, you import images into the Lightroom data­base and store the files them­selves in a Finder folder struc­ture of your choosing. This works just fine and some feel is the way to go because you can see you files out there in the Finder just like all your other files. You can also easily make use of these files in other pro­grams because its simple to point other pro­grams to them.

Aperture’s default method is to store your image files inside the Mac OS X package “Aperture Library.aplibrary” which can be nav­i­gated by right clicking on its icon and choosing Show Package Contents. There are some advan­tages to this including Aperture’s imple­men­ta­tion of vaults which allow an easy way to backup files stored in the Aperture library. No matter, if you want to use a file system struc­ture like Lightroom’s you can, and you can do so easily.

When you import your images into Aperture, you use the import dialog. One of the options there is to Store Files “In the Aperture Library” (which would be the default man­aged files approach); but you can also leave the files “in their cur­rent loca­tion”  (which allows you set up a Finder folder struc­ture to your tastes and let Aperture work with the files there). The other menu options lets you use favorite loca­tions or to choose new loca­tions. In this way Aperture “ref­er­ences” your files (points to them) in the location(s) you pick.

That’s not so hard.

If you already have your files stored in Aperture’s library, its also pretty easy to make them ref­er­enced files instead. The Relocate Masters com­mand in the File menu will move the selected images out of the Aperture Library and into the folders you choose.

The next time you read about how Aperture “locks your files into its own hidden file struc­ture,” remember two things:

1. Aperture’s Library is just a Mac OS X package that you can easily browse through.
2. If you want to ref­er­ence files instead, its no problem to do.