Looking up - and into the Aperture user manual

Birch

Hazel

Branching

Rowan

I made today a short walk in a forest nearby, looking up there. And I continued to experiment with LX5 RAW files in Aperture: only one of the above photographs is a JPEG file from the camera.

I had a look at Aperture User Manual, and several unclear things became clear, such as what "master" means and how versions are derived from a master. Seems to be a very smart implementation!

I also learned the meaning of some terms, such as projects, albums, folders and vaults, and it is all a bit mixed up in my head now. But in time I guess I'll learn to use these things properly.

Concerning vaults, one question which arose was the topic of backup. With iPhoto I relied on Time Machine, but Aperture has also vaults for backing up photographs - should one use those or rely on Time Machine?

There is a drawback to the complexity of Aperture: it needs some investment to use it properly, and there is the question of other family members learning to use it also, to view photographs. But because Aperture is so complex you can easily get lost, or do something which you can't recover from, making a mess of things. In that sense iPhoto was much better, really simple and not easy to get lost in, or do much damage to the photographs there.

Another thing: I realized you can make a photo book from start to finish in Aperture, generate a PDF out of it, and get it printed at Blurb. (See here.)

This might be the perfect way of making photo books - no need to use Pages any more. But maybe there is some catch I don't know yet about.

Speaking of photo books, I got the last of my SoFoBoMo books from Blurb, The Secret of Tremanskärr. I printed this in hardcover, and as I found a 20% off coupon somewhere on the net, the price was about the same as for a softcover. But I forgot to check one thing: there was nothing printed on the spine of the book, although it would have been a nice touch. (With thin softcover books Blurb is not able to put text on the spine.)

Anyway, the hardcover book was nice indeed - I used "imagewrap" to get the photographs on the covers go around the edges. And print quality was once again reliable. My only wish was to have better photographs in the book...