Working with Stacked Images

In Lesson 2, you auto-stacked the images of South Beach as you imported them. Aperture gives you many more ways to use stacks after your images are imported.

1.	Double-click the Aperture icon in the Applications folder to open Aperture. The Jackson Hole, Colonia, and South Beach images are part of your Library and appear in the Projects panel.
2.	Select the South Beach project.
3.	Choose the Maximize Viewer layout (Command-Option-V), then press Shift-W to rotate the Browser to the left. Press D to display the control bar. This offers a terrific view for working with stacks in the Browser while still keeping the Viewer open. The stacked images appear in the Browser, and the pick image of the first stack is displayed in the Viewer. Currently, the stacks are closed, because we closed them in the Import dialog. You can open and close stacks in the Aperture main window just as you can in the Import dialog.
4.	Choose Stacks > Open All Stacks (Option-') to open the stacks in the Browser. Drag in between the Browser and Viewer and adjust the panels until each stack occupies a row. Tip Press Option-; to close all stacks, and press Shift-K to open or close selected stacks. In addition to opening or closing all the stacks at once, you can open and close stacks individually by clicking the appropriate Stack button. Let's try that now.
5.	Click the Stack button on the stack of SoBe_2005 15 of 50 in the Browser. Another useful stacking feature is choosing the pick of the stack. When you auto-stack images during the import process, Aperture by default sets the first image of the sequence as the pick. Quite often, of course, this won't be the best image in the stack. Let's choose different picks for some of the South Beach stacks.
6.	Select the SoBe_2005 8 of 50 imagethe last of the first set of three sunset imagesin the Browser. It offers a little bit more detail in the shadow areas over the water than the other two images in the stack.
7.	Choose Stacks > Pick, or press Command-backslash (\) to make it the pick of the stack. Aperture updates the stack with the new pick at left. You can also define a pick by dragging an image to this location.
8.	Drag the image SoBe_2005 40 of 50 from the center to the left of the stack. When you see a green bar appear, release the mouse button. This image is the new pick. Now that you have a better understanding of how to control stacks and choose picks, let's organize the three collections of images we imported in Lesson 2. Note You'll learn more about stacking in Lesson 8, "Advanced Organization and Rating."