For those who follow me on twitter, you’ll know I was very excited about the addition of curves to Aperture 3. I suspect there’s a lot to the Adjustment here, perhaps more than I’m familiar with, but I just had a moment to look at them and yep… them be curves!!

Why do I care? I’m used to working with curves from a lot of different applications, and it’s a familiar way for me to get the look I want. Quarter-tones in Levels are great and can do pretty much the same thing, but frankly I just like using Curves.

Ok this is just funny… Faces grabbed these today.

A very quick note here as I’m about to start shooting a series of Aperture training videos with Sara France, but I wanted to share my experience with integrating the iPhone’s GPS capability and photos off my Canon (with no GPS capability) in Aperture 3’s awesome new Places feature.

Minimal screenshots for now, sorry… I just don’t have time.

Hi all,

I was up at 6am to check out Aperture 3 but then have been speaking at my alma mater at Cal Poly, San Luis Obispo since noon. Now I’m about to drive home, so won’t be pushing Aperture until tonight. But ooh boy it’s gonna be fun! On the way home I’ll shoot with my Canon and my iPhone to test out the hybrid GPS places system in Aperture. Can’t wait to post all about that… and more!

Don’t miss this one… you can pre-order and lock-in the introductory prices for the Aperture 3 “Getting Started” eBook at $19.97, and a new Adjustments Preset Pack for just $9.97. These prices will go up once the final products are released, in one to two weeks.

Jump over to the store and check ‘em out!

Like the rest of us I’m downloading the trial now… I will be reporting back throughout the day!

In Aperture, there are loads of little icons and badge that can be confusing if you’re not used to them. Here’s a breakdown of them all, going clockwise.

This question came up on a discussion on the Yahoo Group ASMPproAdvice (if you’re not a member, and are serious about the business of photography, I highly recommend it). When opening a picture in Photoshop from Aperture (using the “Open in Editor” command), what IPTC and EXIF data is retained, and what is lost? So I decided to do a little test.

A commenter on MacCreate asked about backing up and moving those precious Aperture presets between systems, so I wanted to post a quick tip on here about that.

There’s some inconsistencies in how presets are handled in Aperture, so there are two different ways to do this. Keyboard shortcut sets, for example, can be exported by using the export menu. But for naming presets, or export presets, you have to dig into the Finder to find those files.

Here’s how you save your keyboard shortcuts.

I saw this great tip on Twitter last night, and wanted to share it with my readers. Basically, Metadata presets are not editable within Aperture 2, but if you’re clever like Simon Abrams, you can open the XML file and edit the data directly. Very handy for updating your © 2009 presets to © 2010.

In part 1 of this post I gave some good reasons why you’d customize your keyboard. Today’s post is all about how.

One of the really cool, and somewhat underrated features in Aperture is the Command Editor. This is where you can customize your shortcuts and also see what existing shortcuts do in some really clever ways. If you’ve ever used Final Cut Pro, you’ll recognize the roots of this tool. But not only can you create your own shortcuts, you can actually create entire sets of shortcuts. Why would you do that? Maybe for a particular task you want a series of shortcuts to be quickly accessible using the 12345 keys or the qwerty keys or the asdf keys. But when you’re done with that task, you just want to go back to your “normal” way of working. So before we modify the shortcuts that are there, we’ll create a new custom set just for you, which protects the original keyboard shortcuts.

First, open up the Command Editor from the Aperture > Commands > Customize menu.

Yeah, I can hear it now… “Customize the shortcuts? But I barely use them as it is!”

And that’s the point! Keyboard shortcuts in any application are the key (pun intended) to navigating quickly. You ever watched someone work on a computer and thought “damn they’re fast!”? You can be that fast too; all it takes is keyboard shortcuts.

In one of my eBooks, I gave the following tip on just how to remember those keyboard shortcuts:

There are a lot of Olympus PEN E-P1 and E-P2 photographers who user Aperture, and many have been frustrated by the lack of RAW support from Apple. I actually bailed on RAW shooting on mine and decided that as a point-and-shoot, JPEG was just fine for me, but hey that’s me. There’s obviously a lot of folks who want RAW support.

A buddy of mine in Paris emailed me this morning asking if I’d test out an Applescript he wrote that changes a header in the ORF file to trick Aperture into thinking the E-P1 ORF file is actually from an E-30. This mens that Aperture treats the file as an E-30 file, so the RAW conversion hasn’t been tweaked specifically for the E-P1, but the end result is it DOES allow you to read the native RAW file.

His script went up for sale for just €5 today. Here’s a quick look at it, and a link to his store is at the end.

So, no new version of Aperture to jump into today. Guess we’re back to Aperture 2 tips for now!

I’m working on a project for a client now that requires something very specific, but probably not terribly unique. I came up with a workflow to make this move really quickly, and thought I’d share it here.

I shot 128 photos of 128 products for an online catalog, and the client needs each photo delivered in three versions; a tightly-cropped square thumbnail at 220 pixels, a more loosely-cropped square image at 300 pixels, and then a cropped-to-product (showing the entire product at its best) at 800 pixels. Three versions of 128 files each, and a lot of repetition in doing it. So how best to approach?

Here’s what I came up with.

The rumor mill is in full force, and other than the infamous rumored tablet (iTablet, iSlate, iWantOne), the other hot rumor for Apple’s Wednesday event is Aperture 3. Don’t ask me if it’s true, I honestly haven’t got a clue (and believe you me, I’ve tried to get one!!). So let’s assume that it does come… what do we want to see?