Professional Tips (2)

Professional Tips

Apple’s Mail Stationery for Mac Photographers

One of the ways to show off your photos is use Apple’s Mail Stationery. The Apple web site will show you to use it if haven’t already. Like most of Apple’s applicatio, Mail Stationery involves templates that you can customize with your own photos and text. Read more…

Custom Album Layout Tips for Aperture 2.0

If you’re an Aperture 2.0 users, you no doubt know that you can create custom books within the application. You’re not stuck with the pre-designed albums that Apple offers, though those templates are great.

This article won’t go into how to set up a custom book in Aperture. There are other articles and resources already published about that. Aperture User Network has good introduction that you can read here. Read more…

RAM it up!

Sometimes it’s embarrassing to admit the obvious, but I’m going to share this anyway for other Mac photographers like myself who are slow to get a clue.

I finally got around to adding four gigabytes of RAM (making a total of six) to my Mac Pro this morning. And damn it sure has made an epic difference in performance. I knew I needed more RAM/memory, but I kept thinking 2gigs should be sufficient, not realizing that the more I opened up and used memory hungry applications like Photoshop and Aperture –while running several other smaller applications in the background–the slower my computer navigation would be. Read more…

Using Automator to Import Photos into Aperture

I’ve written several articles about Automator, and so here’s one more that Aperture users might find useful.

Here’s how I use it: I recently wrote a blog entry about using Eye-Fi for uploading Wirelessly. Though I could use this device to upload directly to Aperture, I typically discard most photos and choose only a few from a particular shoot to import into Aperture. The process of dragging selected photos into a selected Aperture project is not that difficult. But an Automator workflow makes it even easier. Read more…

Aperture for Approval v1.5

Last night I went over to the Apple site to check to see if there were any new plug-ins and application for Aperture 2.0 and I was pleased to see an updated version of Publish for Approval. I downloaded the application a while back, but I think it required a costly third-party application to run it. Read more…

Black-and-white Presets in Aperture 2.0

When I started using Aperture, I struggled to find a good greyscale or monochrome mix for my images. While there are tons of Photoshop approaches to black-and-white (greyscale) conversion, I rather use Aperture to make the conversion. Read more…

Create a Media Browser Using Automator

If you haven’t noticed yet, each of Apple’s main creative suite applications including iMovie, iDVD, Address Book, Keynote, Pages, Numbers, and now, Mail’s Stationery feature, includes a photo browser whereby you can access photos stored and managed in your iPhoto and Aperture libraries. This means that if you’re sending an email, creating a DVD slide show, editing a video movie, creating a postcard or newsletter letter layout in Pages, or putting together a spreadsheet in which you need photos or images, you can now access your images directly from the program you’re working in. Read more…

Eye-Fi, Inc: Photo Uploading Wirelessly

In their press release a few days ago, Eye-Fi Inc. announced an upgrade to their popular memory cards for digital cameras.

Because I take a few or more photos on a daily basis, and I’ve always wanted a way to wirelessly upload my images without the hassle of making a wired connection to my camera or the media card reader. This wired process is such a waste of time, especially when taking day-to-day shots around in and around my house or when doing studio portrait photos. Plus, I’ve always thought that being able to wirelessly upload photos to my laptop or to a photo Web sharing site like Flickr might be useful as business feature for event photography shoots. Read more…