Setting essential preferences

Let's take a look at our Preferences in Aperture, and I just want to start out by saying you should set some preferences. It really makes the whole Aperture experience a lot better to spend just a few moments up front, to get some of the parameters customized to the way you like to work. So, we're going to go up here to Aperture, go to Preferences, and we have these tabs that go across to top. Each tab has its own little bunch of settings. We're not going to go into all of them here, we're going to go into the important ones, the ones that you need to know.

And I invite you to explore the other ones over time, or we may touch on some of them also in the upcoming movies. Your Library location, that's pretty important, where does your library live? You get that file path right here. You can reveal it in the finder by clicking on this button, and you can change it right here. Now, there are other ways to change your library to switch among them, but this will always let you know where your current library that's opened, where it lives. And then you have just some fine tuning for that right here.

I do want to point out that if you don't want to have Faces operating on the Aperture where the application goes through and tries to identify the faces of your subjects, you can turn that off right here. This is where you turn it off, so if you don't want it grinding away on faces in the background, that's here. And if you are working on a laptop, if you are lucky enough to have one of the new MacBook Pros, you can Enable gestures here. And we're going to talk about trackpad gestures. They are very handy, they can help speed things up.

Into Appearance, here's where you get to set how it's going to look. Do you want to Viewer bright? Do you want it dark? What you like the background to be? All that sort of stuff. Do you want the indicators showing while you're loading photos or not? Turn all that off and on here. Do leave Badges checked. I think that's very important. These Badges provide a lot of information in a very small space, and I think they are very handy. And if you have two Displays, and you want to run your Slideshows on the Secondary Display, you can set that right here. So, this is basically how things look.

Now, when we bring stuff in, you get to have some choice here. For example, when the camera is connected, do you want Aperture to automatically open? Do you want another application to open? You set that here, and by the way, this is computer-wide, this is system-wide, so you get to make that decision here, and then your computer should behave. Now, I like No application. I don't want anything to launch when I connect the camera. So, that's what I choose. And then another important area, and this is new to Aperture 3.3 that when the camera is sending the files to the computer or through the memory card, you want this top box right here checked, Camera Previews, because what Aperture will do, it will read the JPEGs that are embedded in the RAW files, this is for RAW shooters.

And will speed things up tremendously, and I'm really looking forward to showing you how that works. So, you don't need to know exactly how it works, but you need to make sure that this button is checked, because it will save you time, and we like things to move faster. Over here in the Export Tab, some basic choices. What do you want your External Photo Editor to be, Photoshop, or some other application? Go on down, all of these things here that have to do with sending things out of Aperture to other applications or other Locations.

Now, when you Export photos, you have some basic choices that you can make here. In terms of audio and video, if you're not messing around with audio and video, you don't have to worry about these at all. One important box is the location information. If you shoot a lot of photos with an iPhone, for example, that records where that photo was taken, and you don't want that information to travel out of Aperture, then uncheck this box.

Aperture will not send that data out with the photo. Labels are very straightforward. We have an option of these different color labels. You can name these anything you want. And they are very handy, so you could say client review, sent to mom, all that kind of stuff. You can customize these labels for your own use. I would say that Previews is probably one of the most important tabs in our Preferences because Previews are the hand-off file that Aperture uses to share images outside of the application.

So, if you're working in pages, for example, and you want to see your Aperture library, and you want to bring in a photo, from pages from your Aperture library, whatever size you set here, that's the size of photo that's going to come into that page's application or to any other application that taps your Aperture library--and that includes iOS devices, too, your iPhone and iPad. So, what size you set here determines what photo that gets sent out of the Aperture.

And pay close attention to that export movie, because it's very important to know when I'm sending the photo out of Aperture, what is that photo going to look like if that is set right here? And in terms of the quality of the photo, the higher the number, the higher the quality but also the larger the file size. So, usually you want to go for something like 8 or 9. And then in terms of this pop-up menu, in terms of Sharing previews, click Always because you always want your photos available to your other applications. This is the easiest way to go.

Photo Stream is relatively new. It's part of iCloud. It's a way for us to share photos among all of our devices, our iOS devices and our Macs. Now, we're going to have a dedicated movie to enabling Photo Stream and how to control it. What you need to know right now is that if you decide that you do want to use Photo stream, if you do want all the photos issued on your iPhone to show up in your Aperture library, for example, this is where you enable it, right here.

The Photo Stream tab in your preferences is where you turn this off and on. You're going to learn more about it, and when you do, then you can come back here and make your final decision. If you're sharing Aperture images with other accounts on the web, such as Facebook and Flickr, you set those accounts up here, and you hit the little plus sign. You enter your account information and then Aperture knows about your social network sites. So, that happens right here. And then finally, under the Advanced Tab, you have some very advanced sliders.

It's funny how that works out, isn't it? But mainly things like showing hot and cold areas. Areas where you lose highlight details a hot area. Areas where you lose shadow details a cold area. We're going to get into some of those advanced techniques later. And when I refer to going to the Advanced Tab in your preferences, this is what I'm talking about, to come here and make those changes. So here we are, these are the most important settings, in my view, in your preferences.

Make sure you take a walk through them. Customize things a bit so that Aperture behaves the way that you want it to.