Apple Aperture Review: Organize & Adjust

I like to shoot photos but I wont consider myself a professional. This Apple Aperture Review is an amateur photographers look into the application and what it can do for you. If you want detailed graphs and the most in depth technical review maybe you should wander away on the net and find another one.

I will be the first one to admit that I probably don't use many of the features Aperture have but, I still like to use the application for simple edits and cataloging our photos. So why not begin with the part on how I catalog my photos.

How I Store And Organize My Photos

We have three kids and a DSLR camera we try to use as often as we can, capturing moments with the kids etc. When I import those photos to Aperture I start off by creating a new project. This is how you should store the master images in your library. The little image below is a clip from how my library looks like. The icons you see are project icons.

As you probably can see I have named my imports by date. Some of them are named by event like: Summer Vacation 2008 or something along those lines. I recommend to use some time and give your projects meaningful names. When you used your camera a few years and end up with a few thousand photos, you will appreciate some kind of control over your library. Use good names now, you will thank me later.

So that is the Project folder, where you store your master files. If you delete a file from your master project folder it is gone.

Now we are moving towards Folders and Albums. Using folders is a way to organize your library even more. You can have one folder called 2011 and throw all of your projects from that time into the 2011 folder. If you have a big library as I have it is a nice way to getting even more control when you can group your projects.

Albums is just what it sounds like, it is a folder where you want to have your best photos. A album can contain images from different projects / folders. Also the images in the album are so called "versions" of your photos. This means that if you delete your album or the images inside you will not delete your master files. They will still be in the project folder intact.

Adjustments and Editing Photos

When I shoot photos they are stored on my camera in RAW format. This takes up more space compared to other formats like JPEG but RAW have its advantages. If you shoot in RAW it is possible to do more adjustments to the photo afterwards. Things like white balance for example. I don't often adjust my photos but when I do, it is easy to do this with Aperture. I wont go into details in this apple aperture review but I have some presets I like to use!

If you select a photo you want to adjust and then select the Adjustments tab you have a plethora of settings at your disposal. You could just play around here and see what you get. Your original file is always protected so if you screw up you can always revert to the original file. There are also presets you can use. I often use the one you see in the screenshot above. It automatically enhances the photo and get it right most of the time! If it is underexposed it will fix that and also other things like color balance etc.

I could write more about the different settings in this apple aperture review but I recommend to just play around a bit and see what you get.

Backup Your Photos, NOW!

What if your house burns down? It didn't matter if you had backups of your photos. They got lost in the fire. This is why you should have your most important backups at different places. Go out and buy yourself an external hard drive right now. Then use the Vault feature in Aperture to backup your entire library to that drive. Then take that USB drive to a friends house or store it at work.

Trust me, you do NOT want to lose your photos.

Summary: Apple Aperture Review

First, you can download the trial version here and try for yourself 30 days before buying this software. For me, Aperture is perfect and gets the job done. I believe I am over average interested in photography and Aperture gives me the control and adjustments I need. If you have no need for doing complex adjustments to your photos iPhoto should get the job done too. iPhoto also have nicer books and other stuff you can make from your images. Even though my skills are not comparable to pro photographers I hope this apple aperture review gave you some useful information.

It is up to you, you can try it out 30 days for free as you see above. It also got a price cut in the App Store so it wont drain your wallet of money if you decide to get it.