Customer Reviews

Apple Aperture 3: A Workflow Guide for Digital Photographers

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Having gotten this book, from Vine, for my husband, here is his thoughts as detailed in an email to me. From this point on, the words are his.

First, I disagree with the authors who consider Aperture to primarily be a RAW processing program. Aperture is first and foremost a DAM, aka Digital Asset Management. This is readily visible when starting Aperture.

Next, there is the organization of the book. In chapter 2, page 66, is a section called "Using Aperture for the First Time". Really? Page 66? This needs to be more upfront. It does not get much better in regards to the organization.

On page 252, there are 2 paragraphs on trying to use Aperture with Adobe Lightroom. Come on! These are competing products. Why would someone want to go from Aperture to Lightroom? It makes no sense to me. iPhoto yes. I do that now so I can sync photos from Aperture to my iPhone via iPhoto.

Important things, like adjusting images is a single chapter called "Adjusting Images." Levels, while standard to most editing programs, can do so many things and yet in this book, it receives 2 paragraphs. Very light handling for something that can make such a difference to an image.

Plug-ins, the really neat stuff of Aperture, is barely covered. There are so many cool and wonderful plug-ins that the few mentioned might leave a reader wondering what all the fuss is about. All I can tell you is to do a web search on Aperture and plug-ins and open a whole new world to your workflow.

If it had been me, here is how the book would be organized. The numbers to the right of the chapter titles are the real chapter numbers.

Introduction
1) How Aperture Works (2)
2) Managing Your Images (3)
3) Working with Metadata (4)
4) Aperture Workflow (6)
5) Camera Raw (1)
6) Adjusting Images (5)
7) Working with Other Applications (7)
8) Output (8)

If you've made it this far, you would think I'm pretty down on this book. Pretty fair statement. Yet this book has some good points, especially for people new to Macs and Aperture. The chapter on managing your files is good as is the detailed discussion Apple's Camera RAW. And there are some good parts in Adjusting Images.

So if you are brand new to Aperture, this book could be helpful. Just remember, don't read it in the original chapter order. It will make more sense in the modified chapter arrangement shown above.

I was very fortunate to receive a copy of this book. I am a intermediate amateur photographer (ie, I use the histogram to check exposure, often consider aperture and shutterspeed, and understand there is something called digital image workflow,) but I am looking to take my photography to the next looking at upgrading to Aperture. So basically the author could have painted a target on my forehead.

But a big reason this book is perfect for me is that I am a beginner in many of the topics in the book. I think a more advanced photographer, especially someone who does a lot of post production already, may find large sections a little tedious. But it was spot on for me on.

Most of my shooting has been low res Jpeg's for web so I have never worried about shooting RAW before. After reading the first chapter on why you should shooting RAW images, I was sold, I immediately set both my Canon 10D and 40D to shoot RAW. I had known I was losing a little quality and functionality, but never realized how much I was losing by shooting jpegs. The author did a fantastic job of setting this foundation for working with Aperture.

After the first foundational chapter, the author does a great job of providing an overview of Aperture. I appreciated the time spent explaining how the editing tools worked. There were several things that seemed a little redundant, but the author made the subtleties clear. I appreciated the in depth look at how filters like sharpen worked. Also the sections on how to correct common issues was also very helpful. They did a nice job of walking through the processes to correct these and I loved how it demonstrated how the histograms could be used to verify what your eye is seeing.

Since I was unclear on what it entailed, I was looking forward to the chapter on workflow. I guess it proved to less intense than I was expecting, but I am impressed how Aperture works on each step of the process, and the retouching options sound great.

I guess the biggest praise I can give the book is that I just ordered my copy of Aperture 3.0. After reading this book, I feel fully confident that it will be worth the price and help me take my photography to the next level.

Photography texts are useful only to the extent that they address the needs of the given reader. As a photographer who still misses Tri-X and Kodachrome, and who thinks "ASA" each time he sees the "ISO" number, I've pegged myself as living in the 1970s. On the other hand, I'm using a Canon 50D with L-series lenses, shooting RAW format, and am easily able to modify and adjust my images using iPhoto. I've had Aperture for a while but haven't moved my library over nor have I started using the software beyond experimentation.

As other reviewers have noted, your experience may dictate that you start with Chapter 7, which includes moving your existing library over from iPhoto. Or you might find the basics unnecessary and start in with Chapter 5, which covers the logistics of adjusting your images using Aperture. Either way, the chapters stand alone sufficiently to allow you to find your way without much difficulty. One downside of the book production process is the lack of differentiation among the many color images that are incorporated. For example, page 16 shows three identical images, each with slight modifications to noise reduction and auto noise compensation. The three images should look different - that's the point of each of them being there. Yet in print the three images look essentially identical. Other than that rather minor issue, the text itself is quite explanatory and thorough.

This book, overall, is a reasonable user's guide for Aperture: an instruction manual that you can use to walk your way through understanding of each of Aperture's commands and capabilities while gaining an understanding as to how Aperture stores your photographic data. Pages are a matte gloss and there is extensive use of illustrations, both of photographs and of Aperture's interface. I found the book easy to maneuver and work with as I learned how to use Aperture.

If you've gotten to the point where you're looking at Aperture as a digital asset management program (DAM), then you're probably looking for a book to help walk you through Aperture itself, the benefits, and developing a workflow for your photos. Sadly, this isn't that book. What the book does have is some decent content, but whomever edited this book did a poor job at assembling the content in order.

I use Adobe Lightroom and have a familiarity with how DAM software works. What I'd like in a book covering Aperture or Lightroom is to walk me through the process, from the moment I sit down post-shoot and help me with importing, organizing, editing and then finally publishing them.

The first chapter strangely gets into camera RAW. RAW shooting itself is a choice, not a religion. Some people are happy with their JPGs, and that's fine. Instead, open the book and get innundated with Camera RAW. Not cool.

From there, the book walks you through Aperture and how to manage your photos, and walks you through the steps. But after 100+ pages, it's finally nice to get into something that should have been at the beginning of the book. The meat of the book makes this book actually worth buying, but it's surrounded by horribly disorganized content.

There should have been more done on image adjustment and working with other applications. Not to bring up their competitor Lightroom, but a vast majority of things that used to be done in Photoshop can be done in Aperture and Lightroom. This book skims over the image adjustment portion and is a little vague on working with other applications.

Programs like Aperture really make your life easier, provided that you have a good manual or set of training videos to help walk you through your workflow (if you have one - if not, you'll develop one.) Unfortunately this book does Aperture a disservice. The book is good enough to borrow, but I can't justify this book's purchase.

I am an award-winning, published professional photographer ([...]) that has been using Apple's Aperture since version 1.0; as there are over 200 new features in Aperture 3, I was excited to have the opportunity to review a copy of this guide that was seemingly focused on these new features. Unfortunately, this guide did not provide the anticipated Aperture 3 focus but rather contained a high level overview of the Aperture application in general, and how it can be used to manage and manipulate your digital image data. Following are a few observations from my read of the guide:

The guide provided a good overview of the RAW camera format and the benefits of shooting in RAW as opposed to other camera formats. I did not, however, agree with the guide's general recommendation to set your camera's white balance to AUTO; I agree that for most indoor lighting situations that is an appropriate white balance setting, but for 99.999% of outdoor photography the CLOUDY setting will provide the best, unadjusted results regardless of whether it is cloudy or bright.

In terms of explaining Aperture's image adjustment capabilities, the guide provided a very good explanation of sharpening. Unfortunately, this seemed to be the exception rather than the rule; in most cases I would describe the explanations as more detailed than what you find on Apple's Aperture product description web page but less detailed than needed to allow one to learn how to use the feature. Two of Aperture 3's new features are the Curves tool and the ability to GeoTag images; as far as Curves goes, I found the explanation to be way too superficial, and I was unsuccessful in GeoTagging an image with Aperture's Places tool using the explanations provided in this guide.

I was pleased to see that this guide also included 3rd party applications that can interface with Aperture either directly or indirectly. One of the great features introduced in a prior Aperture version was the ability to use 3rd party plug-ins to provide specialized capabilities. Again, though, I found this guide to be lacking in breadth. One very useful plug-in that it failed to mention was Nik Software's Viveza which shines in allowing you make an image pop. I also disagreed with the guide's endorsement of Noise Ninja as an image noise reduction tool; when I did a side-by side comparison of the various noise reduction plug-ins I found that Noise Ninja destroyed edge detail that was preserved in Dfine. The guide also mentions that Photoshop can be used to create watermarks that are in turn used by Aperture, but again there is no explanation of how to apply these watermarks when exporting an image from Aperture.

While the textual descriptions in the guide include the accompanying keyboard shortcut, one major shortcoming of the book is that all of Aperture's shortcuts are not included in an organized, single table in an Appendix. Other books in my library on earlier Aperture versions have contained an organized listing of all of the keyboard shortcuts in a central location or in a pull-out card; these listings are both a great reference and an easy way to discover features with which you are unfamiliar. The lack of a central, organized listing of Aperture's keyboard shortcuts will hinder the user's ability to take advantage of this great time-saving tool.

BOTTOM LINE: This guide could be a good choice if you are looking for a reference to provide an introduction to Aperture, advice on how to set-up a workflow, and basic explanations on the tools available to process your images. I cannot, however, recommend this guide to someone looking to become expert in Aperture's new or previously-existing features.

Apple Aperture 3: A Workflow Guide for Digital Photographers is strange on many levels.

First, let's start with the subtitle of the book: "A Workflow Guide for Digital Photographers". Is this what the book delivers?

Programs like Aperture (Adobe Photoshop Lightroom, among others) are all about the workflow. They exist to help you manage your digital photo library. While these programs may offer editing tools (BTW: Both Lightroom and Aperture are fantastic editors - most photographers will only need to use a more advanced program, like Photoshop, for particularly difficult images, or ones they want to get very artistic with) their main job is to make it easy for you to import your photographs, apply metadata and tags, and sort and arrange them as you'd like. A major part of their value is the degree to which they make it easier for you to compare your images and streamline the process of separating the duds from the standouts.

So, seeing as how Aperture is primarily a workflow tool, and this book is subtitled "A Workflow Guide for Digital Photographers," it'd be reasonable to assume the book focuses on...wait for it...using Aperture to enhance your workflow. Well, not so much. There is just one chapter devoted to the topic, and it run for only 37 of the book's 318 pages of content. So, right away, you have to wonder "what were they thinking?"

The rest of the book covers pretty much what you'd expect, assuming you'd expect a fairly in-depth, but poorly-organized resource. There's a lot of technical information that is of almost no interest to any end user. The first 72 pages cover details about the nature of RAW files and how Aperture works in a manner that could appeal only to insomniacs in search of a cure. Hence, discussion like this on page nine: "As we've seen, Camera (sic; why is camera capitalized?) sensors produce only luminance information, which is initially recorded by greyscale values. By making use of a colored grid, or color filter array, placed over the sensor, the correct color value for each image pixel can be determined by a process called demosaicing." That description goes on for a few more paragraphs, none of which you need to know.

Much of the information you will want to learn is buried in similarly dense paragraphs. It's a shame. It's much harder to find out how to get something done than it should be. Where was the editor in all of this?

Aperture's a lot of fun to use and appeals to creative types. By contrast, this book is pretty dreary, visually unexciting, and written in the driest possible manner. If you're the kind of person who wants to sit and read every page of this kind of thing, you'll find some useful information here. However, if you're looking for a book to inspire and excite you, while making it easy to find the fix you're in search of, this isn't for you. I'm giving the book three stars, but just barely. You'd have to be a very motivated reader to get much out this.

One more aside: I'm usually fond of the publisher of this book, Focal Press. They publish some beautiful and useful guides. But someone was asleep at the wheel on this one. For a book about photography, it's as plain as could be. Worse, the writing is often so tangled that it makes me wonder if the book was translated from another language. The only time its entertaining is when it's bad enough to elicit a chuckle, as in this gem: "To sort your images simply do what you would in the physical world: grab hold of them and drag them around using the mouse." While I was entertained by the idea of old school photographers using wiggling rodents to move prints around on their light tables, someone really should have caught this, along with a lot of other bad prose.

As a new Aperture user, I have to admit I'm torn on this book. There is some really good information throughout, but the workflow chapter is sadly lacking and from the title you'd think that is one of the primary goals.

First - the good:
- GREAT discussion (for non-photographers) on how digital camera sensors work, and why correct exposure is critical to capture detail
- good introduction to RAW photography and why it's best to shoot in RAW format for later editing
- reference material for specific Aperture features (the "missing manual" so to speak)

The challenges:
- for a "workflow" guide, the content is very Aperture-focussed. In my experience, there is most often a need for true end-to-end workflow with external programs
- there is little discussion on actual workflow in the field (how do you manage images? multiple cards? file naming? backup to laptop, synch with master Aperture library when you get back? computer-assisted capture?)
- no discussion (for Nikon owners) of integration with Capture NX2, which provides much more accurate RAW processing (Nikon really knows its internal RAW format)
- sadly the chapter devoted to "working with other applications" is more of an intro into their capabilities instead of detailed workflow best practices
- the discussion on managing multiple libraries doesn't really cover a true laptop/master scenario; there are much better workflows available online

The cover of this book promises that it's a "workflow guide for digital photographers", but that's not really what it is. The book is a general introduction to Aperture for people who haven't used it before. There is a short chapter on workflow, but it's not very helpful or interesting.

The lack of organization in this book is odd. The first chapter delves into RAW, which is really besides the point. That might be a good appendix, but if you're trying to learn Aperture workflow or even just Aperture, this isn't the material you want to read at the beginning of the book. Furthermore, since the unintended audience is people who already know quite a bit about the basics of digital photography so the book does not explain those concepts, the connection between the camera settings, the captured information, and the final display of the image. If you don't understand that already, the book probably isn't going to help you that much. You might want to check David Pogue's Digital Photography: The Missing Manual instead.

The rest of the information in the book is generally good even if it has nothing to do with workflow. Since Aperture is one of Apple's professional-level tools, it uses the keyboard for much of its work. Apple Pro Training Series: Aperture 3 comes with a nice cheat sheet with the keyboard shortcuts. This book could use one of those, but it doesn't even have an appendix for it.

Instead of this book, check out the Inside Aperture video podcasts on iTunes. Those demonstration videos go through much of the same material but are much more useful because you can see the real time effects as the host uses the image adjustment tools.

Overall this is a good book on working with Aperture, at least for a intermediate user. The problem is in the chapter order and overall structure. I felt the topics that got extended coverage such as Camera Raw and integration left other more important topics, such as workflow and interface specifics lacking. My rating of 3 stars is because the material is helpful, it just will be very frustrating for a beginner.

I normally don't recommend additional reviews on a product but i'll make an exception this time. The Amazon member "R. Kyle" proposes a much better chapter order and after reading through the book I can easily see how the new chapter order will be extremely helpful to beginners.

Now on to the good parts of the book, it is certainly written by a photographer, which is nice to see. The coverage of "competing" products integration (ex: Lightroom) is actually important, despite what others think. Sometimes you need to prepare your work for consumption of another tool, especially for a fellow photographer.

Personally I would look at a few other books on the basics, then pick up this one.

I am a cross platform pc user and have both Adobe Lightroom on my PC and Aperture on my Mac. I am no professional photographer..a novice at best and I consider myself somewhat tech savvy. However, when it comes to software for photo processing..I am about 2 years old and know nothing. I saw this book become available for Aperture 3 and gave it a shot. My experiences are quite simplistic: This book is for the individual, like me, that is starting out with Aperture and wants to get a handle on how to improve their photography by way of 'post processing'. It is not intended for the very advanced photographer...but it is intended for anyone in to digital photography and some post processing. The book covers a lot of novice/advanced features in Aperture. Some of the more notable chapters:

Raw Images
Managing your Images
Working with Metadata
Aperture Workflow
Output

With DSLR's becoming more and more affordable you will probably want to venture out in to Raw images (they allow for more post processing). The RAW image tutorial in this book explains what RAW is and how you can adjust some if not most of the characteristics of the image you have imported. Very good chapter.

Management of images is always important - the MAC already makes it easy via iPhoto but if you import your libraries in to Aperture you definitely need to know how to use it to manage the ever growing libraries.

Metadata - another emerging trend - every digital image has a bunch of data wrapped around it and in time, if you know how to read it, you can become a better photographer. This chapter details the use of Metadata in Aperture and is a great starting point for us novices.

The rest of my highlighted chapters explain themselves...

I give the book 5/5 for the novice and don't really recommend it for the advanced user...this is Aperture and photography kind of wrapped in a bundle.