Advanced Tips

Want to get your hands on the new Photos.app for OS X? Now’s your chance—for free. Apple has release a public beta of OS X 10.10.3, and anyone can try it out. Just be sure not to do this on your primary/only system, m’kay?

I’m going to kick off the “non-Aperture, non-Photos” posts with something crazy advanced. Luminosity masks are not for the faint of heart, but once you get your head around them, WOW you can do amazing things. I’m not going to try to teach you this stuff — I barely get it myself! — but I am going to point you in the right direction.

There are of course times when we need to go outside of Aperture for our work. It might be to access a single plug-in, or to use a tool in Photoshop that Aperture lacks, but in some cases it’s bigger than that, such as creating a large composite file. In situations like that however, Aperture doesn’t cease to be part of the workflow. In fact, it can be a critical component, where each individual file is prepped and managed before being sent off to another land.