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.

Yeah, I can hear it now… “Customize the shortcuts? But I barely use them as it is!”

And that’s the point! Keyboard shortcuts in any application are the key (pun intended) to navigating quickly. You ever watched someone work on a computer and thought “damn they’re fast!”? You can be that fast too; all it takes is keyboard shortcuts.

In one of my eBooks, I gave the following tip on just how to remember those keyboard shortcuts:

There are a lot of Olympus PEN E-P1 and E-P2 photographers who user Aperture, and many have been frustrated by the lack of RAW support from Apple. I actually bailed on RAW shooting on mine and decided that as a point-and-shoot, JPEG was just fine for me, but hey that’s me. There’s obviously a lot of folks who want RAW support.

A buddy of mine in Paris emailed me this morning asking if I’d test out an Applescript he wrote that changes a header in the ORF file to trick Aperture into thinking the E-P1 ORF file is actually from an E-30. This mens that Aperture treats the file as an E-30 file, so the RAW conversion hasn’t been tweaked specifically for the E-P1, but the end result is it DOES allow you to read the native RAW file.

His script went up for sale for just €5 today. Here’s a quick look at it, and a link to his store is at the end.

So, no new version of Aperture to jump into today. Guess we’re back to Aperture 2 tips for now!

I’m working on a project for a client now that requires something very specific, but probably not terribly unique. I came up with a workflow to make this move really quickly, and thought I’d share it here.

I shot 128 photos of 128 products for an online catalog, and the client needs each photo delivered in three versions; a tightly-cropped square thumbnail at 220 pixels, a more loosely-cropped square image at 300 pixels, and then a cropped-to-product (showing the entire product at its best) at 800 pixels. Three versions of 128 files each, and a lot of repetition in doing it. So how best to approach?

Here’s what I came up with.

The rumor mill is in full force, and other than the infamous rumored tablet (iTablet, iSlate, iWantOne), the other hot rumor for Apple’s Wednesday event is Aperture 3. Don’t ask me if it’s true, I honestly haven’t got a clue (and believe you me, I’ve tried to get one!!). So let’s assume that it does come… what do we want to see?

Hello fellow ApertureExperts!

I’m very, very happy to say that in just two short weeks since it’s launch, ApertureExpert.com has become a fantastic success. It went from zero to 225 members in 14 days, has been tweeted and retweeted like mad, and even made an appearance on BoingBoing. eBook sales have been on the rise, and suggestions for future eBooks keep coming in (post yours over in the forums!).

One of the reasons we shoot pictures is to share our memories. And in Aperture, it’s incredibly easy to share your photos in a variety of ways; one of the simplest is through email.

The most obvious way to email a picture is by selecting one or many photos, and clicking on the Email icon. That’s fine if you know exactly what you want to send before you click the button. But sometimes you want to add a few photos, then add a few more, then add a few more, then realize that you’ve added so many that the email has gotten huge and you really should send these smaller. Dang.

There is a way to handle this that’s very, very flexible.

I recently picked up on a thread on twitter from user @benjjamieson where he was seeing a serious magenta cast applied to his 7D RAW files in Aperture. The same problem was happening in Preview, which definitely pointed to an OS-level problem. The issue has also been discussed at some length in the Apple forums.

I contacted him and asked him to send me a sample file (I don’t have a 7D myself) and he did. I saw the same problem on my system, both in Preview and in Aperture, but not in Photoshop. Fortunately that led me to discover an easy solution.

Once your Aperture library crosses the 10,000 image mark, you will likely pause to wonder if you’re going to run out of space any time soon. You may have already looked at the size of the Aperture Library file in the Pictures folder, and thought “whoah… 150GB… so that’s why I’m outta space”. But wait, you’re working referenced; all those massive RAW files are on an external drive, how is this even possible?!

Previews. Aperture 1.5 introduced a series of amazing features that allowed you to carry around an enormous number of photos on a single computer, while at the same time leaving your RAW files on other drives, and still letting you share those photos throughout the OS. They way it handles this magic is through JPEG Previews and XML.

Understanding how this works will allow you to control the size of your library and relcaim 10’s – or even 100’s! – of GB’s back.

The newest eBook from ApertureExpert.com, titled “In-Depth Getting Started with Aperture 2” is complete! If you’re new to Aperture and serious about getting started, or even an experienced user who’s not sure if you got off on the best foot, this eBook is for you. 54 pages of detailed step-by-step guides on importing, rating, adding keywords, editing and sharing your photos is waiting for you here. The price is $19.97.

I’m very excited to announce that along with Frederick Van Johnson, host of TWiP (This Week in Photography podcast), we’ll be hosting the first TWiP Weekend Workshop to be held in Joshua Tree, CA!

Hi folks,

For those 1Password users out there, you may have noticed that my site doesn’t properly support automatically logging in with your account saved in 1Password. Twitter follower @robdeloach pointed this out in a tweet this morning, and I responded that it simply wasn’t properly supported.

Fortunately a little digging (ok, one quick google search) turned up a solution.

I’m about to start on the last chapter in my new eBook, entirely titled “The ApertureExpert’s In-Depth Getting Started with Aperture 2 – a beginner’s guide”. Here’s the introduction…

Over many years of working with Aperture, and helping other people with Aperture, I’ve noticed one very common trend—no matter how much they love Aperture now, most people had a hard time getting started. This guide is designed to get you on your way. It doesn’t really matter too much where you’re coming from to use this guide; be it any other photo management application or none at all. This guide aims to get you moving efficiently, and possibly more importantly, to set the stage for a lot more learning. There are loads of free videos on apple.com that show you the basic of basics—I’m more interested in getting you started with a very solid understanding of what your choices are. So while some of the basic instructions like “Importing Your First Photos” takes up a seemingly bizarre six pages, after reading it you’ll truly understand what’s happening to your photos and what options you have.

I wrote a section in the eBook “10 Tips on File Management in Aperture” about reconnecting missing files, and in there I discussed techniques to force stubborn reconnects. I just discovered something new… sometimes if the “reconnect” button isn’t available, and you know it’s the right file, all you need to do is wait.

Apple released a new iPhone/iPod Touch app this morning called “MobileMe Gallery” [iTunes link], which allows you to view not only your own MobileMe Gallery on your iPhone, but also those of friends and family by simply adding them as contacts. I’d say Apple’s a little late to the game with image sharing using iPhone app’s, but as is expected from Apple it’s a really nice implementation. It might even get me to start using my MobileMe account for photos again!

So why is this of interest to Aperture users? One of the great things about carrying an iPhone or iPod Touch as a photographer is it’s an easy way to show off your photos to others—friends and family, or more importantly, to potential clients. I’ve always advised keeping a reasonably sized collection of images in a “portfolio” album in Aperture, and syncing that to your iPhone so you can always have an up-to-date portfolio in your pocket. But the fact remains that to update your portfolio on your iPhone, you have to physically sync your iPhone to your computer to do it. Since the introduction of over-the-air syncing for contacts and calendars quite some time ago, I’d wager that most people don’t physically connect their iPhone to their computer all that often anymore—leaving that portfolio potentially woefully out of date. Further, for a lot of pro’s (myself included), the “iTunes computer” my not be the same system that Aperture is on. Which means not only do you have to physically connect your iPhone to your iTunes computer to sync, but you also have to manually copy files from your Aperture system to your iTunes system. Way too many steps, which leaves yourself open to having an out-of-date portfolio in your pocket.

Aperture provides a 5-star rating system, which is pretty much universally standard (I think every app does a 5-star system). Which is of course actually 7 “ratings”, including –1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, and 5.

Ratings in Aperture

So what qualifies as a 1-star, or 3-star, or 5-star picture? How do you decide if it’s worth, say, two or three? Is it because you really like it, or you really really like it, or really really really like it? Probably not the best criteria to go on, especially as you want to search your entire library years down the road, and you won’t want to search for 3-stars and be thinking “why on earth did I give that a 3-star rating”!

As with anything in this business, there are no right answers. But here are some guidelines to go by that I think work quite well.