New Aperture Book is in My Hands

Tuesday, May 06, 2008 Filed in: Apple

I came home tonight and found a copy of Apple Pro Training Series: Aperture 2 sitting on my door step. I'm quite happy with how the book came out (especially since we were able to work in all of the new features in the 2.1 release). The book should start shipping within days... you can order it here. In the mean time (here are some features you won't want to miss).

Customize the Default Adjustment Set
Specify exactly which adjustments you want to appear by default in the Adjustments Inspector/HUD. Two new commands — Add to Default Set and Remove from Default Set — are accessible in the Action pop-up menu for each adjustment in order to configure these settings.

Keyboard support in Adjustment Panels
Make precise image adjustments using the arrow keys on your keyboard to drive the various sliders in the Adjustments Inspector/HUD. To activate keyboard control, click once in the numeric field of an adjustment control (such as Exposure). You can then use the arrow keys to increase or decrease values. Hold down the Option key when using the arrow keys for even more precise adjustment. You can use Tab to move to the next adjustment control (and Shift-Tab to move to a previous control).

Simplified Crop Tool
Choosing a standard preset aspect ratio when applying a crop has been streamlined with a simplified HUD that appears when using the Crop tool. The Crop tool now includes a setting for automatically preserving the aspect ratio of the original image. You can also crop images so that they perfectly match the aspect ratio of your display — perfect when preparing images for a slideshow. The option to match the aspect ratio of your primary or secondary display is available in the update Crop tool.

Flip images
Flip images horizontally or vertically (or both) within Aperture using the new Flip adjustment that can be added to the Adjustments Inspector/HUD.

Dodge & Burn Plug-in
A sample plug-in is pre-installed with Aperture 2.1, taking advantage of the Edit API introduced in Aperture 2. The plug-in adds brush-based tools for Dodge (Lighten), Burn (Darken), Contrast, Saturation, Sharpen and Blur.