Thanks to everyone for your support and patience… the new “In-Depth Getting Started with Aperture 3“ eBook is OUT! I’ll be sending out new download codes to everyone who pre-purchased right away.

Here’s a little gem hidden in Aperture 3 that’s quite handy… a keyboard shortcut that’s not listed in the keyboard shortcut list, for setting White Balance.

To set White Balance on a photo, normally you’d click on the eyedropper in the White Balance Adjustment tool, then click on a neutral gray area of the photo. But now, just tap Command-Shift-W and that will call up the same tool. (The Adjustments tab does have to be active, however.)

Nice, quick, easy.

Hi ApertureExpert readers! I’m going to be traveling to Singapore then to Hong Kong towards the end of March… specifically I’ll be in Singapore from March 20-25, and Hong Kong from 25-29. I’m pretty busy in Singapore with the conference I’m speaking at, but hope to announce an Aperture seminar there very soon. HK however is pretty free at the moment. I’d love to do some kind of workshop, Aperture seminar, or at minimum a photowalk while there!

The following is an excerpt from the updated “In-Depth Getting Started
 with 
Aperture 3” book I’m working on now. This is an entire new addition to the book and I’m excited to share it here just because of just how dramatically the import process is improved in Aperture 3.

They’re Importing… Right?

If you import a large quantity of photos, and/or are on a slower computer, you’ll notice that it takes some time to import the pictures. Which makes sense of course; Aperture is copying those pictures from the card or camera to your computer (which naturally takes time), but it’s doing a lot more than that. For the above import, here’s the process of what Aperture went through after clicking the Import button.

Lots to look at here (above), in two primary chunks. There’s the import, and then the processing. Notice that the initial “Processing Embedded JPEGs” is happening faster than the “Copying files to Aperture Library”.

As some of you may have seen on the twitters, I upgraded to a glorious 27” iMac i7 with 8GB RAM yesterday. Beyond the obviously ho-boy’ness of this beauty, and the screamin’ speed (other Mac is a 15” MacBook Pro 2.93Ghz Core2Duo w/ 4GB RAM, so no slouch by any stretch), combining this iMac with Aperture 3.0.1 has seen a phenomenally dramatic speed improvement.

I’ve had this large, languishing Aperture library that spanned from 1997 to 2009 (in 2009 I started a new general-purpose library), and have been dreading upgrading that to Aperture 3. My smaller client-specific 17k image library took the better part of a day to upgrade, so this wasn’t looking to be an enjoyable date with destiny with this beast. But with the powerhouse i7 and the purportedly faster Aperture 3.0.1, last night I decided to kick off the upgrade for that beast of a library. I had a backup version of the library (of course) in the event that I just had to pull the plug in the morning and get back to work.

I decided to go the plain ol’ traditional route of just (*gasp*) upgrading the library. No fancy importing-to-upgrade, no turning off Faces, no fancy malarky of any sort. I just pointed Aperture and the old library, and said “go”. The only option you have is to process all old images with the new 3.0 processing engine (or not). I turned that off, figuring that since these are such old photos, if and when I decided to re-tweek an image, I’ll just do the upgrade one-by-one. To be completely fair, I did have “Maintain Previews for Project” disabled in the previous library, and hardly any previews actually rendered in there, but still the library file was 83.42GB.

So I kicked it off last night, and stuck around to watch the progress bar for a few %. Here’s what I saw.

‘tis a week for updates. First Aperture 3.0.1 and now more RAW support… go get yours now! http://support.apple.com/kb/DL1007

Aperture 3 is a 64-bit app, but many of the plug-ins aren’t yet updated to run in 64-bit. However, lucky lucky me, the SmugMug plug-in by David Holmes is! In fact it appears it was done 10 days ago. Thanks David!

Why does this matter? (More on 64-bit itself towards the end.)

Apple just released an update for Aperture 3, version 3.0.1. Here’s the support article on it; go grab it and report back if it fixes any of your issues!

What’s included? Here’s the list…

Aperture 3 handles deleting files differently than Aperture 2, so here’s a little look at what’s happening.

When you first delete an image, project, or anything else from menu File > Delete or by tapping Command-Delete, it’s moved into the Aperture Trash. This is a fantastic new feature that makes it much, much harder to accidentally delete your photos. Believe me, I wish I’d had this feature a year ago. If I did, I’d still have that collection of photos of Barack Obama speaking in San Francisco in November 2007. As it is though, I didn’t, and so I don’t.

Folks,

I’ve been playing with Places a lot lately (one of my favorite new features; I can’t wait to get 13 years of digital photos onto my map!) and in doing so have been figuring out the fastest way to do that. Of course I don’t have geodata for all these old photos, so this means just using the Places feature to assign a general location (i.e. Santa Monica Pier) to groups of pictures.

If all the photos in a project are in one location, it’s really easy to do. But when you have a few different locations in one project, it can get a little trickier. I tried doing it in the metadata inspector (oops, you can’t do batch locations there), and dragging things on the map (but that can get tedious finding those spots), and finally realized that as you would expect, Apple’s made it really easy to do… you just have to click in the right place.

Yowzers I’m gonna be busy for a while! I’ve just finished outlining what’s going to be a ginormous video on Aperture 3, aptly titled “The Complete Guide to What’s New in Aperture 3”. It will be available exclusively through MacCreate, and is available for pre-order now. Why buy early?

That’s a shock… the 17,000+ image Aperture 2 Library I’ve imported into a clean Aperture 3 Library was 21.27 GB originally (without Previews). It’s now only 16.65 GB. That’s a nice surprise! I’ve already run Faces on it (big mistake… running Faces on a concert series; hellloooo audience!!! Talk about a chore rejecting all those unknown people! LOL), and have upgrade about 2/3 of the Library to the new processing engine.

I mentioned in the previous post that the updated Smart Album has a very cool and powerful new feature; you can now control what it’s searching inside of, whereas previously it simply searched based on where it was created—even after you moved it.

I’ve upgrade a client Library that was organized largely on Smart Albums, and have discovered that the vast majority of them are pointing at the wrong place. How did that happen? Because we didn’t have the “Duplicate Project Structure” feature that you have now. Let me explain.

One of the features I was hoping for the most in Aperture 3 was Faces. OK, I’ve probably said that already about most of the new features in Aperture 3, but come on… it’s a great upgrade!!

I’ve put the library update on hold so I could play with a few things in Aperture tonight. I created a new library and imported a few hundred iPhone photos. Perhaps not the easiest thing for Faces to deal with, since these are pretty low resolution and of dubious quality, but hey, it’s what was handy… and, they have GPS data for Places, too. Sweet.

A note: The following is a result of me writing this entry as I go. It’s NOT a cleaned-up, “how to use Faces” entry. So come along for the ride… maybe we’ll all learn a thing or two!