posted by flosse_r on Apple Aperture, Post Processing Tutorials

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The thing about Aperture that got me hooked in the first place was its intuitive work-flow and logical layout. Something that was widely overlooked though ar the keyboard shortcuts that make working with Aperture a REAL treat. Consider this: you go on vacation and come back with a few gigabytes worth of photos that you need to sort through. If you are like me, a lot of them are snapshots that looked good on the camera’s LCD but when imported have camera shake or are just bad photos. Well if you have several hundred photos the task of organizing them and going through them is daunting. So, most likely you will do what I used to do… leave it for later…and later…and never. And then we just archive them.

Now let’s say you could edit and organize your photos much faster by using the keyboard shortcuts  instead of several clicks with the mouse? I am going to list the shortcuts for you that are the most important. There are TONS of them and Aperture comes with a nice cheat sheet but it is not the same and you will never read it because you are too excited in using it.

So, welcome to the absolute beginner version of Aperture keyboard shortcuts. Oh and by the way, I created my own cheat sheet which you can download  from here soon, as soon as I have it exported to PDF and is much more easy to read/use than the Apple version.

As you already know and can read from the Apple Cheat Sheet, the Aperture 3 user interface is divided into 4 sections:

1. the Toolbar, which houses the most important sections and modules of Aperture like Faces, Keywords, Browser etc.
2. the Viewer, which shows you your Photo
3. the Inspector pane, which lists all your projects and folders
4. the Tool Strip , which allows you to do small adjustments like alignment and rotating to the selected image
5. the Browser, which lets you select, browse and stack/unstack photos

Now that you know where what is and what which part does, lets get started. We will go through this in workflow mode and NOT by user interface sections because I think this is more intuitive. My workflow has usually 3 rounds , at least mine does. Round one is the rough cut, like the first round in American Idol where all the crap gets weeded out. The second round is a bit more fine-grained where I assign star levels to photos, from one to five. Those photos that do not get a star, get deleted then. Round three is when I go through the star levels and either delete more images or create smart albums and keyword the photo star groups. This workflow will most likely differ from yours but you will be able to use the shortcuts and enable smoother and quicker working in yours.

Round one: Fast remove bad photos

Remove quickly all the photos which are bad and which you will not use (Be very hard on this because if you don’t delete them now, you never will and you will never use them. They are bad, get over it )

Select your Import Project on the Inspector Pane and use the browser to scroll through the filmstrip. You want to use the film strip and viewer combination because it allows you to see the photo in larger than just a thumbnail (To get the film strip view, push CTRL+F on your keyboard). use your keyboard ARROW KEYS to navigate the film strip. Once you get a photo you don’t like, push the number 9 key on your keyboard. A little X shows up on the photo corner. This means you rejected the photo. Go through your project and when you are done rejecting the photos that really were not usable or useless, push the keys CONTROL and the number 8, so CTRL + 8 . This will show only the rejected photos. at this point push the keys COMMAND(CMD) + A and then CMD + BACKSPACE, so first CMD+A and then CMD+ BACKSPACE. This first selects all your rejected photos and then moves them all to the trash. Push CTRL+6 to show all the “good” images again. Congratulations you just saved yourself a lot of time with simple keyboard shortcuts and cleaning up the first round.

Round 2: Grade the rest

Coming back to the American Idol analogy, this is where your photos go through the process of elimination by being scrutinized a little more, so you will need more time on this.

You have to, again, be ruthless on this so just go though the left overs from Round one and assign star ratings to the photo. To do this, simple when the photo is displayed, hit any number from one to five, five being the best. If you want to remove a rating, simply hit zero. So from 1 to 5 are stars and 0 removes all ratings from an image. When you are  done and have photos with no rating, push CTRL + 7 and only those photos that do not have a rating will be shown. You can then do the nice CMD+A, CMD+BACKSPACE to move them to the trash. Now you should have only photos left that have SOME value because they have at least one star. To show the different star levels, simply push CTRL+ 1,2,3,4 or 5 and the display will show you always the number of stars OR BETTER. So if you push CTRL+2 you will see all 2,3,4 and 5 star photos but not the ones with 1.

Round 3: Making the great ones

You have to ask your self a question now, when you look at the 1 star photos, could they become 2 stars? and if so, can the 2 star photos become 3 stars and so forth. You need to do this until you have them all on a 5 star level. Those are the photos you are happy with and want to absolutely keep. So now you have your photos all in one level and you want to work with them. Aperture is very much metadata driven, which means you want to assign keywords to photos (and locations if you want to but we do that later) and then maybe even stack some photos together. Stacks are great for several shots of either the same subject or location.

So lets go first with key wording similar subjects. In our example I have several shots of an icicle. I select them all using CMD+SHIFT+ARROW or if I have something else in between I hold the CMD key and use the mouse (yes you do!) on the next related image. This will allow you to select photos that are not in sequence.

When you have some photos selected, push CMD+SHIFT+B, this will open the Batch Change window. Now if you hit the TAB key twice your cursor should be in the Keyword field. Type a comma separated list of keywords related to the subject in the photos. Once done hit ENTER and it will apply the changes and you see a little new icon in all the selected photos.

Now you can form them into a stack by pushing CMD+K and then to collapse the stack SHIFT+K. You can now see on the key photo the number of images in the stack and to open the stack again, just select it and push SHIFT+K again. Easy. Once you have key worded all your photos, you have mastered the first level of a smooth workflow, with nothing more than your keyboard.

Essentially you went from a whole mess of photos to a rating system, key worded your photos and created groups (stacks) of similar ones and all that in a very short amount of time. This takes time, believe me, to get used to but once you do it once or twice it flows and then its easy and comes naturally.

There are may more shortcuts and Aperture 3 let’s you configure them as well (Aperture -> Commands -> Customize) but with these you have a huge load done already. While a lot of photographers also use keyboard shortcuts to do adjustments etc. I prefer not to, YET. I still feel more comfortable using the mouse to do adjustments to the photo but selecting, keyboarding and rating, no way.

Stay tuned to the Advanced Aperture guide coming soon.

Tags: aperture, aperture 3, aperture workflow, keywords, organizing, photography, photos, post processing, stacks, tutorial