Chapter Two. Aperture Philosophy and Interface

The idea of a philosophy chapter in a computer book may seem a little pretentious or contrived, but if you want to use Aperture to its fullest potential, then you need to understandor at least acknowledge some of the fundamental philosophical ideas that underlie its design.

To get the most out of Aperture, you'll need to give up some habits and practices that you've learned from other programsand not just other graphics programs. The payoff for your philosophical journey will be a photo editing and post-production workflow that is much simpler and more flexible than what you're probably used to now.

Aperture was designed specifically to serve the needs of photographers. Most popular graphics programs were designed to process image documents stored on your computer. Those two goals are not necessarily the same. Whereas most graphics programs provide general-purpose image editing tools, Aperture's designers understand that photographers have additional needs besides image adjustments and corrections. What's more, the Aperture engineers recognize that photographers don't just think in terms of individual images, but often visualize larger narratives and collections of images. Finally, they understand that photographers don't want to have to perform particular edits and corrections in a specific order just because the image editor needs them performed that way. Different images can suggest different workflows, and so Aperture allows you to perform any type of edit at any time.

These features together mean that your relationship with Aperture may not be quite like your relationship with other applications.