Creating Book Albums


You can create high-quality printed and bound books using Aperture's built-in book-making feature. After designing the book using Aperture's special design tools, you can either save it as a PDF or upload it to Apple's book-printing service. Apple will print the book and mail it to you. These make excellent courtesy books for clients. Say, for example, that you photographed an event. In addition to providing the final images to the client, you might compile some of the best shots into a courtesy book for them to have on hand.

Creating the Book

Creating a book is easy, and as you'll probably discover, it's a lot of fun. You can choose from a number of prebuilt book themes or design one from scratch. Your first step when creating a book is to select the images you want to include. We've taken care of that step for you.

1.

Import the Lesson 10 Images.approject from the APTS_Aperture_book_files > Lessons > Lesson10 folder.

This project contains 23 images from a shoot of jazz great Don Byron and his band performing at Joe's Pub in Manhattan. We're going to turn these images into a book to give to the producer of the event as a thank you for his promotional efforts. We'll begin by setting up the book within our project.

2.

Select the project in the Projects panel, then click in the Browser and press Command-A to select all of the images in the project.

3.

Click the New Book From Selection button in the toolbar or choose File > New from Selection > Book.

Aperture will present a sheet that provides a number of thematic design choices for your book. Different themes simply provide different default layouts. You can always modify the layouts yourself, as you'll see in this exercise. All of the same editing features and layout tools are available no matter which theme you pick.

If you want to know how much the book costs, click the Options & Prices button to view the latest pricing from Apple.com.

4.

Choose the Picture Book theme and then click the Choose Theme button.

Aperture adds a book to your project with its name highlighted and ready to be edited.

5.

Change the name of the book to Courtesy Book.

Just like a webpage or an album, a book is simply another element in your project. At any time, you can open it for edits, just as you would any other type of element.

When you're editing a book, the Browser is visible for selecting images, while the Viewer shows the current page or page spread you're editing. The Pages panel shows thumbnails of all of the pages in your book for easy navigation.

Note the Theme button in the upper left corner of the Viewer. You can click this button to change the theme of your book at any time. However, if you have already edited the content or layout, you may lose some text and custom layouts.

Tip

To prevent losing text when you change your theme, first copy the text to another document as a backup.


By default, Aperture creates a hardback book project. You can change it to a softcover book by clicking the Large Softcover button at the bottom of the Viewer.

There is no difference in print quality or layout options between hardcover and softcover books. The only thing that changes is the binding and the price. For this exercise, you can select either.

Designing the Cover

Let's start laying out the book by designing its cover.

1.

In the Browser, find image _MG_8865.

2.

Drag the _MG_8865 image to the book cover displayed in the Viewer. Release the image over the gray box that contains a crosshair.

In a book layout, a gray box with a crosshair is a photo box into which you can drag an image. This is how you can manually place images into your book layouts. (Later, you'll see how you can automate the placement of images in the book.)

While the image looks OK, it's a little small. Let's scale the image to make it look better.

3.

Double-click the image in the Viewer. A selection highlight appears around it, and an Image Scale slider pops up.

4.

Drag the Image Scale slider to the right to zoom in on the image as shown in the following figure.

Now the image is larger than the frame it's sitting in, but that's OK. We can adjust the image's position within the photo box.

5.

Drag the image in the photo box to reframe it so that the band is centered.

6.

When you're finished, click anywhere in the gray area of the Viewer to deselect the image.

Now we're ready to give our book a title. The band was performing at Joe's Pub as a warm-up for the next day, when they went into the studio to record an album of Junior Walker songs. The album was ultimately titled Do the Boomerang.

7.

On the cover of the book, double-click the Title Here text to select it. Type Do the Boomerang.

8.

Click the gray area of the Viewer to deselect the text.

Notice image _MG_8865 in the Browser. After you place an image in a book layout, a small badge appears on its thumbnail in the Browser to indicate that it's used in the book. The number on the badge indicates how many times the image appears.

The cover looks pretty good. We're ready to move on to designing the interior pages.

Designing the Title Page

Designing the pages is similar to designing the cover.

1.

In the Pages panel, click the thumbnail for Page 1. The Viewer will show the first spread of the book: the inside of the front cover and page 1. You cannot place anything on the inside front cover. Page 1 is fully editable and customizable, but we're going to leave it as a title page.

2.

Double-click the text on the first page and change it to Joe's Pub.

Book layouts do not allow you to change font, nor can you combine different text sizes in one block of text. You can, however, create multiple text blocks on a page.

3.

Click the Set Master Page button to open the pop-up menu. The button is located directly beneath the Pages panel.

The Set Master Page pop-up menu provides a selection of prebuilt page layouts. You can apply any of these master page selections to the current page. Each theme has a different selection of layouts. It's good for you to know they're there, but unfortunately, none of these layouts provide what we're looking for, for page 1. Leave the Set Master Page menu as-is.

4.

Click the Edit Layout button above the Pages panel.

When in Edit Layout mode, you are free to change the layout of any page. Note that after clicking Edit Layout, more buttons become active above the Viewer. These buttons let you add new elements to a page and to change the characteristics of those elements.

5.

Click the Add Text Box button to add a text box.

A new text box will appear in the middle of your layout.

6.

Drag the text box so that it sits just below the Joe's Pub text that you entered earlier. As you drag, Aperture will automatically display guides to help you align the text box with the other text box on the page.

By default, the text box is set to use the smallest text size that Aperture supports. Let's make it a little larger.

7.

Click the Text Style pop-up menu button and choose Cover Title.

As you can see, Aperture provides three text sizes. When we changed the text size, we obscured some of the text. Let's increase the size of the text box to accommodate the new text size.

8.

Drag the lower right handle of the new text box to the right to make it larger.

9.

Edit the text so that it says Manhattan • December 2, 2005. Press Option-8 to create the bullet.

10.

Adjust the size of the text box again so that all of the text is visible and nicely positioned below the Joe's Pub text.

You can use this same technique to add a text box to any page, even one with images on it.

Adding Images to Pages

Now let's add some images to the inside pages of the book.

1.

In the Pages panel, click page 2 to select it and view its spread.

Since Don is the leader of the band, let's start with a picture of him.

2.

From the Browser select the image _MG_8557 and drag it to the photo box on page 2.

By default Aperture always fits your images to a photo box, no matter what the size of the box or image. In this case, the photo box aspect ratio needs to be tweaked to fit our image.

3.

Make sure _MG_8557 is selected. Then, click to open the Book Action pop-up menu beneath the Pages panel, and choose Photo Box Aspect Ratio > Photo Aspect Ratio.

The photo box assumes the same aspect ratio as the photo itself and scales to fit the page. Now our entire image is visible.

4.

Drag image _MG_8681 into the photo box on page 3. If you want, you can scale and position it, just as we did with the cover image. Any picture can be scaled and positioned within its box.

5.

In the Pages panel, click page 4 to view the next spread. This spread shows a single gray photo box that spans both pages.

6.

Drag image _MG_8745 into the photo box on page 4. The image will appear across the full spread.

7.

Double-click the image to position it. Leave the scale alone, but drag the image down until the performers' heads are completely visible.

Note that the image has a small exclamation mark in the upper right corner. This is Aperture's way of warning you that the image does not have enough resolution to print at the size you have specified. Due to space limitations on the DVD that accompanies this book, we have had to supply low-resolution JPEG files for these book samples; hence, the warning for this image. If you receive this warning in a real production workflow, you should use a higher-resolution file to ensure that the image will print correctly.

Next, let's customize some page layouts.

Customizing Pages

Aperture's preset layouts work fine, but we can do more. Let's design the next spread with a little more customization.

1.

In the Pages panel, click page 6 to change to the next spread. Page 6 defaults to a full-page photo box. However, we want something a little smaller.

2.

Choose Set Master Page > Blank. An empty white page will be revealed.

3.

Click the Add Photo Box button above the Viewer to add a new photo box to the page.

4.

Drag image _MG_8820 to the new photo box.

5.

Control-click the image in the new box (or right-click if you have a multibutton mouse). Choose Photo Box Aspect Ratio > Photo Aspect Ratio from the contextual menu.

The photo box changes size to fit the photo. This is a simpler way of accessing the same command you used earlier.

6.

Press the Shift key and drag the corner of the image to resize it. Pressing Shift while resizing constrains the aspect ratio of the box. Resize and reposition the image so that it is the same height as the page.

Adjusting Images in a Book

Remember, though we're making a book, all of the normal Aperture functionality and features are still available. If we wanted, we could edit any of these images by simply selecting it in the book layout and making changes using the Adjustments HUD. As we've stated before, one of Aperture's biggest strengths is that all editing tools are available at any time. Let's first delete a photo box and then look at an image in Full Screen mode.

1.

Select the photo box on page 7 and press Delete to delete it.

2.

In the Browser, select image _MG_8755, then press F to view it in Full Screen mode.

Because of the low-light conditions in the club, this image is extremely noisy. Noise that's visible onscreen doesn't always show up in print, but this image is noisy enough that we'd rather not take the chance. So we'll use it in a different way.

3.

Press F again to exit Full Screen mode.

4.

Drag the image to page 7. Though there is no photo box there, the image still appears and fills the entire page. You can drag an image directly to a page even if there's no photo box. However, because you can't resize the page, there's no way of adjusting the size of the image. In this case, that's OK.

5.

Click the image in the book layout to select it.

6.

Click the Photo Filter button above the Viewer and choose Wash Light.

The image is screened back to a much fainter, washed-out look. With the image filtered this way, the image now becomes a good background element, and its noise problems become invisible.

The Photo Filter menu allows you to apply these types of wash effects as well as sepia toning and black-and-white conversions. These effects are not applied to your original image. If you look at the original picture in the Browser, you'll see that it still appears normal.

Adjusting the Stacking Order of Page Elements

When designing a book, you can freely layer graphic elements on top of each other to create more sophisticated layouts. Let's try to do something along those lines now.

1.

Click page 7 to select it, then click the Add Photo Box button to add a new photo box to the page.

2.

Drag image _MG_8725 to the new photo box, then set the box's aspect ratio to match the picture.

3.

Scale and position the new image as shown.

You can stack as many images as you want and use the layering buttons above the Viewer to move each image forward or back in the stacking order.

Note that an image placed directly on the pageas opposed to being placed in a photo boxcannot be moved forward in the stacking order. It can only sit behind other images.

Automating Page Flow

As you can see, Aperture provides excellent manual layout controls for designing your book, and this is the best way to get exactly the results you want. However, there will be times when you need to produce a book very quickly. When that's the case, you can automate the process of adding images to the book. Before we can automate the process, however, we have to quickly adjust the layout of a couple of pages in our book.

1.

Click page 8 to view the next spread. By default, this book has three title pages: the first one you previously edited, one on page 8, and one on page 16. We don't need the second two.

2.

Click the button for the Master Page pop-up menu and choose 1-up. This will change the page to a picture page.

3.

Navigate to page 16 and again choose Master Page > 1-up.

4.

Select page 8 again.

Now we're ready to use Aperture's auto-flowing feature.

5.

From the Book Action pop-up menu, choose Autoflow Unplaced Images.

Aperture processes the rest of your images, placing one image per page. The images may not be positioned or scaled properly in their photo boxes, but they will provide a good starting point for other layout ideas.

6.

After the images are placed, navigate through the pages and rearrange and fix any pages that have problems.

Finishing the Design

Finally, let's add a credits page to the end of the book. This will appear on the last right-hand page of the book (not the inside of the back coverno content is allowed on the inside back cover or the left-hand page that faces it).

1.

Click page 27 to select it. Select and delete the photo box that's currently on the page, and then add a new text box.

2.

Control-click the text box and choose Text Box Alignment > Right.

3.

Create another text box and change the text box alignment to the left.

4.

Position the text boxes as shown, and enter the following text.

5.

Finally, create one more text box, as shown, and enter the suggested text.

Outputting the Book

Once you've finished laying out your book, you have several options for turning it into an actual printed piece. If you click the Buy Book button beneath the Viewer, Aperture will open a dialog that lets you order a bound, printed book directly from Apple.com.

You need to have an account with Apple in order to use the Buy Book feature; if you don't have an account, you can create one from this dialog.

Aperture provides other output options, as well. With the Print command you can print your books direct to your own printer, or output them to a PDF for electronic distribution or delivery to a non-Apple book-printing service.

Note

For information on how to customize Aperture's book layouts and web templates, see the author's website, www.completedigitalphotography.com.





Apple Pro Training Series(c) Aperture 1.5
Apple Pro Training Series: Aperture 1.5
ISBN: 0321496620
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2007
Pages: 190

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