Tips

Unexpected “Unsupported Image Format” error… uh-oh

Have you seen the “Unsupported Image Format” error pop up on images you *know* Aperture used to read? It could come down to permissions. We’re actively tracking these issues down and trying to sort out the problem(s), so if you’re facing this at all, check out these possible solutions, and let us know if any of them helped you, and of course share any other ideas we may have missed![more]

I just discovered a pile of user-submitted tips (that’s the ones by you guys) that were never published. I promise, this will ALL get better with the new site, where User Tips and ApertureExpert tips will be integrated together. At least that’s the idea.

In the meantime, I’ll be releasing these User Tips over the next few days, starting with…

TextExpander is a amazingly useful tool throughout your system. One of our readers posted a comment on a previous tip about using TextExpander for keywords. It turns out this is a fantastic way to not only save time and keep your keywording consistent, but to also apply multiple keywords at once, to entire collections of images! Click through to see how this technique can be put to real-world use, then share with us how you might use it in your workflow.

Create the TextExpander snippet, and fill in all the important bits

Be sure to check out the video version of this tip at the end!

Reader Dane [@danebert on twitter, manfesto on flickr] suggested writing a tip on teeth whitening in Aperture. I asked what technique he used, and he replied “I actually use a saturation brush - cover the teeth and drag saturation down”. I tried it, but found it to be a bit heavy-handed, so started experimenting with using Curves, which is what’s described below. In the meantime, he went back and tried it with the Color adjustment, and reported that this worked even better: “I’m testing the color brick and eye dropper, looks more natural since only yellows get desat’ed and I can brighten too!”. This is one of the great things about Aperture, isn’t it… there are so many ways to achieve a similar goal, and by knowing as many tricks as you can, when one doesn’t work as expected, you can try something else (or even a combo of the two).

Below I’ll outline a few simple steps to doing this using Curves, but try it yourself as Dane described, using the Color adjustment. Maybe that’ll work better for you!

Using Curves to remove color tint on teeth

I’m cropping this photo slightly tighter than you might normally, out of respect for the subject :-) You can clearly see that the subject’s teeth could use a little whitening. It didn’t help that this guy is normally pale as a sheet, but came to the shoot sunburned. By the time I “fixed” that, the teeth were even worse.

The starting point… notice that the teeth need a little help

The tool I want to use is Curves. Again this is just one way, but it worked out quite well.[more]