Aperture Exposed: The Mac Photographer's Guide to Taming the Workflow

The basic principle behind this book is obviously to dissect Apple's Aperture image-editing...no no, workflow program. I was standoffish on buying Aperture as I am very married to Photoshop, however, as I began to shoot more digital photos I found myself with photos on various hard drives, backed up two or three times because I couldn't remember what I did or when I did it, and then there is Aperture and this book. The book only received 4 of 5 stars from me because I think they should have covered the monitor calibration or color correcting information in the beginning, but this isn't a book about color correction for your monitor, it is about Aperture. I found the book easy and enjoyable to read. It was technical, but not so technical that you find yourself confused or frustrated. While you do not need a book to get started in Aperture, this book will certainly walk you through all of the features in v1.1 so that you do not under use the application. I would recommend this book even though Aperture is now running at v1.5.

What is Aperture? The program is Apple Computer Company's answer to a digital workflow for digital images. The program tries to recreate the days of editing slides on a light table. The program is like the professional version of iPhoto with more power. It is also designed to handle RAW images which most professional Single-Reflex-Lens (SLR) cameras can shoot. The program is a digital workflow program and has many nondestructive editing fea-tures built into it. The program is not a substitute an external image editor such as Photoshop, Photoshop Elements or other photo editing programs if you are interested in more creative editing. Aperture works in conjunction with these programs. Apple updated Aperture from version 1.1 to version 1.5 while I was working on the re-view. Apple has added 20 new features to the program so the book is somewhat out of date but the basic functions of the software have not changed much. I wrote the review based on version 1.1. Reading Apple's website, version 1.5 will make the program eas-ier to use with other Apple programs such as the Apple's iLife Suite and the iWorks and a more flexible library management for example. The authors Ellen Anon and Josh Anon fit a lot of information in 297 pages. The di-mensions of the book are 10.0 x 8.0 x 0.7 inches so the book is easy to take along with you if you use Aperture on a laptop. The book has plenty of white space and color pho-tos so it's easy on the eyes. The chapters covered by the book are Welcome to Aper-ture, Importing and Organizing Your Images, Viewing Images, Finding the Keepers, Nondestructive Image Processing, Exporting Images, Printing, Creating Web Content, Creating a Book, and Advanced Aperture. The book is easily to understand and the authors tried to make it as non-technical has possible. If you are new to Aperture you might want to read the entire book but if you have used the software for a while you might be interested in the second half of the book. The authors are very clear about this in the introduction of the book stating you can read the entire book, chapters or just sections. The authors give you examples of various nondestructive editing techniques you can use in Aperture on your digital images. They also give you the published website so you can download the examples files and work with the examples yourself so you can better understand what authors are trying to explain. I found working with examples helpful because you can only go so far with trying to understand text and the screen shots. As you read through the book the authors discussed how to adjust digital images. They will not give you a lot of theory as to why you would do certain things. This would be beyond the scope of the book but you should be aware if this limitation of you purchase the book. As I read through the book and the authors discussed various features of the Aperture and then under printing the authors discussed color correcting your computer scre

This is one of the most easy-to-read technical manuals that I have come across. The style is engaging and light, while the content is comprehensive, up to date and surprisingly detailed. Recommended for those just starting with Aperture or those after a very good companion manual.