Platform: macOS

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.

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.

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.