Apple’s Aperture for Digital Photo Workflow

Posted May. 2nd, 2011 by Daniel J. Cox

Many of you know that I’ve been using Adobe’s Lightroom as the main photo editing software for my digital photography workflow and it’s been a great tool. However, for our latest photography workshop in Costa Rica I decided to move over to Apple’s Aperture due to it’s better ability to handle video files. Interestingly, Aperture was the main reason I switched from Microsoft Windows machines to Apple’s Mac computers back when Aperture 1.0 was first released. Unfortunately, Aperture 1.0 was not ready for prime-time and though I fell in love with Mac’s, I found myself relying on Adobe’s Lightroom for my digital workflow. Aperture 1.0 was several years ago and now we have Aperture 3.0. Lots of changes have taken place and I’m now back to using the Apple’s Aperture to get things done.

Aperture 3 part of the Appe's Pro Training Series

In my quest to be more proficient with Aperture I’m regularly searching for good learning tutorials. In this posting I want to introduce a few of the things I’ve found helpful for those of you who follow this blog. I figured if they are helpful to me they may be helpful to you as well.

The best book I’ve found is the one sanctioned by Apple in their Apple Pro Training Series titled Aperture 3. It’s very well written, has great examples and comes with a CD that you can use to follow specific lessons throughout the book. The other source I just came across is an online video tutorial by Scott Bourne titled Aperture 3 with Scott Bourne. The Scott Bourne video tutorials require a fee but they give you one free video sample that introduces you to the Preferences setup menu in Aperture. It’s extremely good and makes me think I may sign up for the others. Another video series I’m finding very helpful and well executed are the video tutorials from Lynda.com. This series of tutorials are listed as Aperture 3 Essential Training and they also require payment but have lots of good information and are easy to follow. You can see a sample of Aperture 3 with Scott Bourne just below the fold.