Aperture 1.5 for business; Using Aperture with iWork 07

Apple’s made it drop-dead simple for you to share your Aperture photos with projects you’re working on in other Apple applications. In fact, it’s only a single preference click away from working. But that’s not the end of the story.

From Aperture’s Preferences window, all you need to do is click on the “Share previews with iLife and iWork” checkbox. That will share the JPEG previews that Aperture creates with all of the iLife applications Apple bundles on Macs, and Keynote and Pages, the two components of Apple’s iWork ‘06 suite.

This is a feature of Aperture 1.5 and later, by the way — so if you’re still working with an older version of Aperture, it’s more of a reason than ever to upgrade. You’re also going to want to have the latest version of iWork ‘06 applications installed — as of this writing, that’s Keynote 3.0.2 and Pages 2.0.2. (To download and install the most recent versions, just go to the Software Update system preference and click the Check Now button.)

The other options in that section of the Preferences window will also affect how your images look and whether they’re available at all to those other applications. “New projects automatically generate previews” is generally good to keep on, although it will slow you down a bit when you’re first importing pictures (Aperture needs to generate JPEG previews for each file it imports, and that can take some time, especially on Macs constrained by memory or processing speed).

The slider you find underneath those two checkboxes will affect the overall quality of the previews that Aperture creates. These previews are created using JPEG, a “lossy” image format, so you can make them look pretty scrungy if you get skimpy with your settings. You can also limit the actual size (in pixels) of the images you create. This can come in handy if you know, for example, that you’re not going to be using anything higher than screen resolution for your JPEG previews — maybe you’ll want to shrink them down to 1280 x 1280.

Once that’s done, it doesn’t matter if you keep Aperture open or closed — your preview library will remain accessible to other applications that utilize the standard Media pane features in iWork and iLife applications.

Working with the photos themselves is remarkably similar regardless of whether you’re using Keynote, Apple’s spectacular presentation software, or Pages, the powerful word processing and page layout software that’s included with iWork. It’s all handled through the Media pane, and you’ll find a few surprises in there.

The Media pane will let you view images in your Aperture library, of course. But that’s not all. It also gives you access to any Smart Albums you’ve created at the library level, including the built-in Smart Albums that Aperture comes with. You can use images from specific projects simply by clicking on the project’s disclosure triangle. Here, I’ve created a project for some Fourth of July pictures I took.

If you work with Stacked images, you’re going to discover that the Media pane will only show you the pick or the album pick from each stack in Aperture. The assumption here is that you’ve used Aperture to prioritize and categorize your shots, and by the time you’re actually working in another application like Pages or Keynote, you’ve already decided which image you want to use. So don’t panic if you see fewer images than you might have expected to be there.

Captions created using Aperture also carry over to iWork (and to iLife, as well). If you’ve left the Caption field for an image empty, the Media pane will simply display whatever is in the Version Name field in Aperture. If you’ve filled in the Caption filed, however, that’s what the Media pane will display. See? All that hard work you did filling in metadata with your pictures finally has paid off.

You’ve probably spent hours getting the color, balance and tone of your pictures looking just right in Aperture and whatever external image editor you’re working with, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for further improvement for each project you’re working on. That’s why Pages and Keynote both have an Adjust Image tool that you can access straight from the toolbar.

The Adjust Image tool should look pretty familiar to Aperture users. Unlike a lot of tools you’ll find in Mac applications, it features white text on a translucent black window and has a rather “Pro” look about it. It certainly doesn’t give you the same level of fine control that you have in Aperture, but it will do a lot, such as letting you adjust Brightness, Contrast, Saturation, Temperature, Tint, Sharpness and Exposure.

The Adjust Image tool even features its own histogram, so you can see how shadows and highlights look, and a Levels slider that lets you change the levels of light and dark tones. An Auto Levels button and a Reset Image button are there so you can get yourself out of a tight spot if you’ve created something that looks really awful.

Just like tools in Aperture, the Adjust Image tool itself is totally nondestructive: It’s not making any changes to your image at all, even the JPEG preview that you’re working with — it’s simply adding some effects to how that image looks in this particular project you’re working on.

The beauty of all this interoperability is that you’re able to create compelling, image-rich presentations and page layouts without producing or having to track an excessive number of additional media files. Aperture and iWork help keep the muss and fuss down to a minimum, so you can spend more time creating and less time cataloging and inventorying every single digital file you need to produce great-looking content.

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Author: David Schloss

David Schloss is the director of the Mac Create Network and the Aperture Users Network, a professional photographer, writer, editor and photographic educator who specializes adventure sports, travel and lifestyle photography. Schloss is the author of the books Blue Pixel Personal Photo Coach: Digital Photography Tips from the Trenches and Blue Pixel Guide to Travel Photography: Perfect Photos Every Time. Schloss is the former Technical Editor for Photo District News, a position he held for six years.