Anybody who knows me or reads this blog knows I’m not really a geek.

A goof, but not a geek.

Sure, I appreciate a beautiful tool (Hasselblad) as much as the next guy.
Photoshop is swell but I’m not too interested in learning all it’s bells and
whistles. Mostly I like taking and editing photographs.

A few months ago I bought the Apple program APERTURE. It’s a photo editing
program that (if you ask me) is amazing. Since I’ve been loading my images into
it at shoots and using it for editing and post-production back at the studio I’ve saved
hours of time. APERTURE’s just that well thought out.

Here are some screen captures outlining the edit of a job I shot last week for Westjet.
The person is Veronique Rivest, she just won “Best Sommelier in Canada” and is about
to go and represent us in the big international sommelier taste-off in Spain.

Here are the images that I’m going to edit. In Aperture you can toggle
thru the images, assign ratings and sort by those ratings.

This task is easy because you can compare images side by side. There’s
a loup tool that allows you to see images at 100% to check details.

Here is a rough edit. 124 images down to 31.

Now come the hard dicisions. It’s possible to compare up to 8 images
at once.

Here are the selects. Nine images. I’ll fix these up a little bit and send
them to the client.

Aperture works with RAW files. There’s a toolbar that allows you to
adjust all the things you can adjust in Photoshop CameraRAW but,
since this is an Apple program the desktop looks way kooler. Plus,
after a whole bunch of testing I’ve discovered that I prefer the way
Aperture adjusts the files.

A crop is put on the select and there you go……..

In Aperture you can export the images in a whole bunch of different
resolutions. You just choose and push a button. I’ll export the nine
selects as medium-sized JPEGs and send them to my client. They’ll have
a look and tell me which one(s) they’d like sent full size. Then I’ll go back
to this project, finesse the post production of their choice a bit more and
export the file as a full-sized, FINAL, tiff and send it along………..

There are a bunch of other things Aperture does really well, too. But I’m
not a geek so I won’t bore you with all those details.