This is a question we hear a lot on ApertureExpert (especially when really hot cameras like the Canon EOS 5D Mk III are released—support added yesterday, by the way), so I put together a FAQ to answer the question as clearly as possible, and to offer some alternatives while you’re waiting.

Apple is getting into the habit of releasing Camera RAW updates for one camera at a time it seems… before this was the Nikon D800, and now with version 3.12, a single new camera is supported — The Canon EOS 5D Mark III.

Michael Ball has posted a great and detailed tip in the User Tips section on understanding the metadata autofill lists. Be sure to check that out: Some Tips for the Metadata Autofill List.

There’s an outstanding issue with Aperture that seems to come and go, but I’ve seen multiple reports on it since the 3.2.3 update so it appears to be back with a vengeance. The problem is when you use an external editor (i.e. Photoshop) or even a plug-in (i.e. Nik’s plugins) and round-trip back to Aperture, the thumbnail itself updates to reflect the changes you’ve made, but the image in the Viewer does not (that’s the big version of the photo you’re looking at).

Did you know that you can move and even rename your Photo Stream projects, and Aperture will still find them and continue to automatically import the photos?

Set the Preferences

If you have your Preferences set to automatically import your Photo Stream photos…

Aperture 3 Photo Stream Preferences set to automatically import photos

Then the photos are automatically imported into a project named “Month year Photo Stream”, like this:

Sounds like a small thing, but this is a big deal for Aperture users wanting to use Nik Software’s Snapseed in their workflow. Now that it has a proper Save command, and not just Save As…, this means that you can use Snapseed as an external editor in Aperture, just like you can use Photoshop.

If you want to lift and stamp the camera-determined white balance from one photo to another, you may have noticed that simply turning white balance ON on the good photo, lifting, then stamping to the target photo doesn’t work. Or even more confusing/frustrating, it may appear to work (the thumbnail and even the image in the viewer may update) but then you look at it later and it’s back the way it was, leaving you all sorts of confused.

In short, you need to “tickle” the White Balance on the source image. Just nudge it up then back again (click the temp arrow one way then back the other, for example), then lift and stamp it. For more understanding, keep reading…

The Problem

The problem is that since all you’ve done is enable White Balance, Aperture is considering this a “default” setting. So when you lift it, even though the correct values show up in the Lift & Stamp window, those actual values aren’t applied to the target image. All that gets applied is “default” white balance, which means essentially that the WB isn’t going to change.

Here’s a step-by-step of what’s happening.

In the first screenshot, you can see two photos side-by-side. The one on the left is an auto-white balance shot, and as you can see it’s very yellow. The one on the right was balanced off a white card on location and set as a custom white balance in-camera, and is the white balance I want to apply to the other image.

The custom white balance set in-camera is Temp: 2670˚K and Tint: 28

If you take a close look at the White Balance settings, you can see that the camera has set it to Temp: 2670˚K, Tint: 28. And if I enable the White Balance (just turn it on) then Lift the settings, those values are in fact showing up in the Lift & Stamp dialog.

Now that I’m using a new iPad I’m diving into iPhoto for iOS, and it’s pretty sweet (although a bit complicated for an iApp, I think).

UPDATE 2012-03-24 18:00 — I can hear my Apple friends shaking their heads in unison, “oh Joseph, why are you trying to figure this out… just let iTunes scale the images for you and it’ll all be fine!”. You know what… they’d be right. Read on; updates today are in red.

There has been quite a bit of discussion in the last week on how to best scale your photographs to sync to the new iPad to take advantage of the retina display.

(If you’re looking for the article on displaying images on a web page for viewing on the iPad, go here: How Do You Make Web Graphics & Photos Look Great On The New iPad?)

I’ve been doing a ton of research and testing, and here are my findings. If you just want the “what to do”, skip to the end. To understand why, start reading here.

Facts and figures

1. The native resolution of the new iPad is 2,048 x 1,526, so you can export a photo to have a max dimension of 2,048 by making a preset “fit within: 2048 x 2048” and that will display at 1:1 and look amazing—but if you pinch in you’ll be past 100% view (obviously) so if you want to zoom in, you need more pixels. If you don’t care about that, then just make a preset to fit within 2,048 wide and be done with it.
2. If you copy any photo to your iPad using iTunes that is over 3,072 pixels on the short side it will be scaled down to 3,072. For a normal aspect-ratio photo (2:3, 5:4, etc.) that equates to roughly 14 Megapixels (MP).
3. Even though the photo will be 14 MP in size, the Photos app on the iPad will not display that image at full size; i.e. at 1:1. I have not been able to determine what it does show, but it’s not the full size. [UPDATE: Photos app appears to zoom in to 3x the photo size when you double-tap on it, regardless of the original size. It will not go farther, however iPhoto will. But I no longer am confident that even iPhoto is showing images at 1:1 pixels, because I can zoom in more than 3x (by measuring with a ruler on the screen) in iPhoto, yet if I zoomed into a 2048 image 3x that’d be 6,144 wide, which is beyond even a 21MP image. Maybe we are seeing 1 photo pixel per four retina pixels? I really don’t know…] This is easy to test; just copy over a 14 MP image and open it in Photos, then open it in iPhoto for iOS ($4.99), and zoom in as far as you can. You will see that you can zoom in farther in iPhoto.

It’s alive…

Live Training Session 017 on Aperture’s Places is ready for your viewing pleasure!

This session was a little… nuts. LOTS to do in a short amount of time, and as well prepared as I was, a few things still went topsy-turvy. BUT that seemed to add to the fun (hey, it did for me!) and no one threw things at me, so it must have gone well ;-)

It’s time for another Live Training!

This Tuesday, March 20th at 4:00pm Pacific time we’ll be looking at Places. We’ll check out a variety of ways to add your photos to the map from simple drag-and-drop to external GPS or even iPhone integration.

As always attending live is free, or you’ll be able to download the full session afterwards for just $2.00