Hi folks,

Not much to report lately in the realm of Aperture but there is a new RAW update today, coming in at 4.04 and covering a handful of new cameras, including:

Hi ApertureExperters!

There’s a video version of this tip! I know you guys love those, so I’ll try to do more of them. It’s at the very end of this post.

For better or for worse, I’ve been using Facebook to share photos more lately. However not necessarily publicly, but privately. Really it was a rash of holiday parties that got me looking for a good solution to publishing photos privately on Facebook directly from Aperture.

The challenge is, when you create a new Facebook album in Aperture, you don’t have the option to make it private.

Facebook albums created in Aperture can’t be made private

So the solution is quite simple, if not a little tedious. Basically, you create the private album on facebook.com first, then add your photos to that album from Aperture. Of course there are a few steps along the way, and that’s what this post is all about.[more]

Hey folks! It’s time for another new training workshop. This one is an addendum to the very popular 4+ hour “Work Like a Pro Photographer in Aperture 3” workshop. It’s all about the big changes in Aperture 3.3 and 3.4, including explanations of the Unified Library, the enhanced White Balance tool, Auto Enhance, Photo Stream and Shared Photo Stream, and more.

Those of us that have iPads know that they are a fantastic way to show off your favorite photos, wether it’s to a potential client or to grandma over the holidays. The problem is, syncing your photos to your iPad can be a bit of a chore. We’ve gone through loads of different options and ways to do this, which gets especially complicated when managing multiple libraries, but I recently realized that there’s a much better solution to this.

Hi all,

For those of you on G+ (and I’m sure that’s a lot of you!) I’ve opened an ApertureExpert community there. I’m honestly not sure what to do with it, as I do like keeping the support forum here on ApertureExpert, but part of me thinks it’s a good idea to have that one running, too. Maybe it’s a bad idea though, and I’m open to suggestions!

I was looking to trash my Mail.app preferences this morning and I know I’d looked before, and hadn’t found them. The file used to be com.apple.mail.plist and located in ~/Library/Preferences/ however that file no longer exists (and if it does, it’s just a holdover from a previous OS). Finally today I found a discussion online that explained because Mail.app is a “sandboxed” app, that the preferences have moved to a new location. And what else did I find in this new location?

I realize this is a tip that will be useful to very few of you, but I came across it today and thought I’d share. And even if you don’t have a camera that holds multiples cards, you may find some of the thinking here interesting.

Apple has just released another Camera RAW update, adding support for a handful of cameras including:

I’ve had at least two readers reporting a problem a thumbnail rebuild issue. If this sounds like something you’re running into, please try the solution below and let us know in the comments if it did or didn’t help — or if you have any kind of related problem.

Symptom

On every launch, Aperture starts rebuilding thumbnails (even though it doesn’t appear to need to). If you stop the rebuild, all is fine, but it will start up again on next launch. Odds are it’s always starting with the same number of images to rebuild; i.e. you see 78,415 thumbnails rebuilding, and you have 120,000 image in your library. So it’s likely not all of them, but most of them. Or more accurately, a single bad apple that’s ruining the batch.

Treatment

You may have tried repairing permissions, repairing and rebuilding the database… trashing preferences… repairing hard drive… reinstalling Aperture… and more, all to no avail. You’ve tried manually rebuilding the thumbs, letting it complete, but it still starts over on next launch. Ugh!

Cure

Well, this worked for one customer — hopefully it will work for you, too.[more]

UPDATE: There’s actually a discount code on top of this; use CYBERMONDAY on checkout for $20 off, making it just $27 for the series! (If you already bought today at $47 from my link below, just let Frederick know and he’ll take care of you — my mistake for missing the code earlier!)

Hi folks,

Hello readers!

In case you missed the news on the twittters, the facebook, the Google+, or the Newsletter, here it is again… 

Part 3 of 3 [part 1] [part 2]
A joint first-hand, hands-on review of the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina Display
by photographers and ApertureExperts Thomas Boyd & Joseph Linaschke

Aperture plug-ins and other non-Retina apps

There’s something else to mention, and that’s the problem with non-Retina photography-centric applications. I knew that my favorite plugins from Nik Software were not yet Retina. Which is a bummer, but hey, it’s just the interface, so it’s not a big deal, right? Wrong. It is a big deal, because it’s not just the interface. As far as I can tell, this goes for any non-Retina photo-centric app. Even Photoshop is rubbish on the Retina Mac. Here’s why.

It’s not just that your sliders and buttons are pixel-doubled. Your photos are pixel-doubled. I found it virtually impossible to do any accurate pixel-peeping adjustments in Nik plugins, and everything looked so awful in Photoshop that I just stopped using it entirely. I had to do some text layout in Illustrator on the road, and my eyes bled. But back to my favorite plug-in, I didn’t do any B&W conversions on the road because it just wasn’t enjoyable making adjustments to a blocky image, then having to render that back to Aperture to see what it really looked like. Remember non-Retina iPhone apps on your new iPhone 4? Yeah, it’s that problem all over again.

Here’s a few screenshots to illustrate the problem. These screenshots and photos were gracefully provided by Paul Fletcher paulfeltcher.me and are of the Lou Ruvo Center for Brain Health in Las Vegas, NV. Thanks Paul![more]

Close-up of Photoshop UI (non-Retina) on Retina display — notice all elements are pixel-doubled