The next one is scheduled! This one covers the lesser-used adjustments tools, including Color, Black & White, and probably more (time permitting). It’ll be on Tuesday, Nov 29th at 5:30pm PST. Read all the details here, or just click to register below!

A quick google search for “Aperture X” will reveal rumors dating back to 2009, so that’s nothing new. But the appearance of a pending book titled Aperture X Portable Genius on Amazon (thanks Peter for the tip), set for release in April 2012, is the sort of thing that really gets the rumor mill going.

This question came up in the forum today, and I think it’s a great question that can cause a lot of confusion for people. So, I’m addressing it here as a “Tips” post.

“Why do my photos look different in Aperture than they did on the camera LCD?”, and the equally pertinent and confusing “Why do my photos look like they did in the camera for just a few seconds, then change before my eyes in Aperture?”

What you see on the back of the camera is not the RAW file, but is in fact a small JPG file that the camera produces and embeds into the RAW file for this precise viewing purpose. The camera isn’t capable of decoding the RAW file to preview on the back of the LCD (if you think about how quickly you can scroll through hundreds of photos on the LCD, versus how long it takes to do the same thing in Aperture or in the Finder, that will make sense), so instead it shows you the small JPEG photo.

Time to run Software Update again, if this hasn’t shown up for you already.

The latest Camera Raw update, clocking in at version 3.9, adds RAW compatibility for a series of new cameras:

Many users have noticed that Aperture 3.2 added a new behavior to Auto Curves [Luma], especially since I’d just done a Live Training video on Curves (#011) and what they were seeing on their systems was a little different than what’s on the video.

Auto S-Curves

The engineers did a lovely thing in Aperture 3.2 — now when you hit the Auto Curves [Luma] button (this doesn’t apply to Auto Curves [RGB]), instead of just resetting the black and white points, it now adds an S-curve to the curve. Which is great, since that’s probably what you were going to do with Curves, anyway. The shape of the S is not a constant, either. It’s calculated by some mathemagical formula and applied just-so.

Auto-Curves applied. Notice the points automatically added to make an S-curve.

But I don’t want that!

Of course, progress is sometimes just “progress”, and if all you really wanted was to have a basic black- and white-point set, then you might be pretty upset by this change. I had a user ask in the forum if there was any way to remove this functionality, and I replied that there wasn’t one that I knew of, however, I hadn’t tried any key combinations yet. Some functions in Aperture behave differently if you hold down a key while pressing the button — for example, the Option key.

Hi Aperture users,

For those of you who also delve into the world of video editing, check out my latest training product; Introducing Final Cut Pro X: Learn by Video! For a limited time, you can get 20% off using the code FCPROX at checkout.

Hi all,

A reader started a conversation on the use and features of Photo Stream in the Forum, and it contains a lot of great questions and answers on the subject. I could put a big post on it here, but I think this topic is best left in the forum. Check it out if you have any outstanding questions about Photo Stream, and feel free to add your voice to the discussion.

Read the thread here.

Aperture 3.2.1 was released this morning to address the launch crash on Single Core Duo Macs as well as the two awful cropping bugs discussed here at length. The release notes say:

Reader Mr. Kgoo figured out the fix for the other cropping bug, where the top 1/4 of the screen goes blank while cropping, like this:

There are some well publicized bugs showing up in Aperture 3.2 in regards to cropping, one of which I’ve been trying to come up with a reasonable work-around to. I have something for you; it’s not ideal, but it’s better than nothing.

This is just wicked cool, and precisely the kind of reason that using Apple’s entire ecosystem works so well.

By now we all know that you can shoot a photo on your iPhone and, with iOS 5 and iCloud, have that photo show up in your Photo Stream in Aperture or iPhoto.

We know that you can edit your photos in the new (minimal) photo editing feature in the iPhone’s built-in Photos app.

But did you know that the edits you make aren’t only not-permanent, but are actually translated to Aperture (and presumably iPhoto) as actual Adjustments?? (obviously I didn’t either until just a few minutes ago, or I wouldn’t be so excited!)

By now you’ve all seen that there was an update to Aperture to v.3.2 (what, you missed it? Check Software Update, after you’ve upgraded to Lion 10.7.2).

Reader Chris Hoch got an announcement up right away, and other readers have been commenting there—no point in me starting my own discussion! Check it out.

Once you’ve updated all your Macs to 10.7.2… upgraded all your iDevices to iOS 5… migrated to iCloud… updated to Aperture 3.2… you can finally do this:

I just thought of this…

Click!
“hey, no pictures! Delete that!”
“sure thing”
(…already synced)

Can I plug my iPhone into my Canon yet?!

The latest Live Training Session on Curves is now available for download!

Read up on it here, and as always, just $2. Oh and this one ran long, so it’s just over an hour total!