Preparing the Project | Apple Pro Training Series: Aperture

Three days of rehearsal shooting yielded around 1,200 images. These pictures were shot in RAW format using an 8-megapixel Canon EOS 20D. Due to storage limitations on this book's companion disc, we've pared the shoot down to a much smaller selection of 53 images, which we'll import in two batches, one now and one later in this lesson. In Lesson 2, you learned how to turn on auto-stacking when importing bracketed or burst images. You could do that with these images, but instead we'll create the stacks manually in Aperture so that we can explore a few other organizational features first.

Importing a Project

So far in this book, you've imported images into Aperture as projects and albums. You can also import a project that has been created by another photographer, or in this case, by this book's authors. The first batch of images we'll use in this lesson has been saved as Pickle Circus Rehearsal.approject, an Aperture project that contains 49 images.

1.	Open Aperture.
2.	Click the Project Management Layout button on the toolbar or press Command-Option-M. This provides a large Browser to display the images in the imported project.
3.	Choose File > Import > Projects.
4.	Navigate to the APTS_Aperture_book_files > Lessons > Lesson08 folder on your hard disk, select the Pickle Circus Rehearsal.approject file, and then click Open. Aperture imports the images into a new project called Pickle Circus Rehearsal. Tip You can also import a project by dragging it from the Finder into Aperture's Projects panel, and you can export a project by dragging it from the Projects panel to the Finder.

5.	Select the Pickle Circus Rehearsal project in the Projects panel. Aperture displays thumbnails of the images in the project in the Browser.

Configuring the Browser

By now, you're familiar with Aperture's Browser and Viewer, and the application's different layout configurations. As you know, thumbnails of your images are displayed in a grid or list view in the Browser. By default, however, Aperture spaces all thumbnails evenly whether they're in portrait or landscape orientation. This can result in gaps between images that reduce the total number of thumbnails you can see at once. With a large collectionsuch as our 53 Pickle Family Circus shotsit helps to turn on proportional spacing for the Browser display. This is an option in Aperture's Preferences.

Choose Aperture > Preferences.

Check the box "Use proportional spacing for images in Grid View."

Aperture packs the images more closely together, rather than aligning them all to a fixed grid.

Now, you can see more thumbnail images onscreen in the Browser.

Arranging Images in the Browser

In addition to using stacks and ratings to organize images in Aperture, there are a few convenient ways to organize images directly in the Browser: You can use the Sort pop-up menu, and you can freely drag to reposition images in any order. The Sort pop-up menu, by default, organizes images in the Browser by Image Date, but you can change that.

1.	Click the Sort pop-up menu at the top of the Browser and choose Orientation. Aperture rearranges the images in the Browser so that all of the portrait images are together and all of the landscape images are together.
2.	Change the Sort pop-up menu back to Image Date. Dragging images in the Browser is a good way to group images by subject or content, or string them together into a narrative.

3.	Select this group of images:
4.	Drag the selected images next to the other images of the ballet acrobats. Notice that after you drag the images in the Browser, the Sort pop-up menu at the top of the Browser changes to Custom.
5.	Choose Image Date from the Sort pop-up menu. Aperture rearranges the images by the date and time they were captured.
6.	Choose Custom from the Sort pop-up menu. Aperture remembers your custom arrangement, and you can switch back to it at any time by choosing Custom from this menu. Note Custom arrangements are lost when projects are exported, but you can preserve a custom arrangement by placing the images in an album. Album order is remembered when a project is exported. Now that you've imported the project and have learned some tricks about arranging images in the Browser, let's get to work stacking our Pickle Family Circus images.