The Methodology

This book takes a hands-on approach to learning Aperture. The lessons are designed to let you be a "fly on the wall" at several real-world photo assignments, performing importing, organizing, image-editing, and all the other tasks associated with a photo shoot in the context of a professional workflow. The projects represent a cross-section of specialty photography genres and types of shoots. Whether or not your type of photography is specifically featured, you will find that the depicted assignments and shoots can be applied to other types of photography, including your own.

Aperture has an extensive list of keyboard shortcuts and varied ways of navigating through its menus and interface. We will focus on many of the keyboard shortcuts you can use to increase your efficiency. Aperture's Getting Started guide (available from the Help menu) includes a comprehensive list of keyboard shortcuts.

Course Structure

This book is divided into two sections. The first section, Lessons 17, is a single photo assignment of a typical catalog shoot and provides a comprehensive introduction to the Aperture interface, its features and capabilities, and the most common ways to use the tool in a professional workflow.

The second section, Lessons 812, use several different photo assignments to explore Aperture's more advanced capabilities. In particular, this section focuses on more advanced techniques for organizing images, using metadata, image editing, web output, and archiving.