In my previous post I got all my shots imported into Aperture, now we pick up where we left off.
So now I have all the day’s shots in Aperture, this is where the fun begins. The first thing I’ll usually do is scroll through all the images and look for the obvious rejects. Before version 1.5 you could mark a reject by pressing the “0″ (zero) key, but for some reason they have changed that in v1.5 and now you press the “-” key. Once an image is marked as a reject it will display a small X in the corner of the thumbnail and the thumbnail will disappear once you move on to the next thumbnail. If you are wondering where the rejects go, they are not deleted, they are simply moved to the “Rejected” album where you can delete them later if you want.
Now, I’ve chucked all the rejects in the bin and it’s time to move on. Scott Kelby said once (or twice, or three times…) that the only images you should apply sharpening to are images that you care about. So the next thing I do is select all the remaining images and apply the Edge Sharpen (CTL-S) command with the default settings, knowing that I’m going to eventually want to sharpen most of them anyways and I can always adjust the settings or even uncheck the Edge Sharpen on a single image if I want to later.
One of the things that I do when I’m out shooting is always shoot several frames in burst mode, because you never know when someone is going to blink, move quickly or just change their facial expression. Shooting in burst mode almost always assures you’ll get one or two interesting shots. As a result I often end up with between 5 and 10 shots of the same subject, in the same light, same settings, etc because all the shots were taken within a 1-2 second period. So the next thing I do is look for groups of photos (you can have Aperture automatically group photos based on elapsed time between exposure if you like) and when I find a group I start making adjustments to the first photo in the series. I sometimes do a levels adjustment, white balance, Highlights and Shadows, maybe a crop and often a slight bump up on the Saturation slider (I like a little extra saturation).
Once I’ve done all these adjustments to the image I use the super handy “Lift and Stamp” tool to lift (copy) these adjustments and stamp (paste) them on to the other images in the series. This tool is a HUGE time saver, even if you need to go back and further adjust the individual images it usually gives you a real good starting point.
Well, this post has become a little long winded so I’ll wrap it up here. My images are off my camera, in Aperture and they are all adjusted. In the next few posts I’ll discuss different output and export options for getting your images out of Aperture and in front of the people you want to see them.
Until next time,
Keep shooting.
Allen Rockwell
Allen Rockwell Photography
If you missed part 1 of this article, please click here
Heath,
If I'm understanding your question, while in an album you create a Duplicate Version, then at some point you reject that version (assign the "X" tag to it). You'll notice at this point that the new rejected version does not disapear, you need to Unstack, then the rejected version will disapear and show up in the "Rejected" smart album. You can then delete it from there.
Two notes:
You are not really going to save any disk space by deleting that version because it's only a version (a reference to the original) and not a copy of the original source file.
Secondly you can delete a version right from inside the album by right-clicking (control-click) on it and selecting delete version.
I did a similar workflow. My question is when you delete the 'rejects' using delete version does it delete the master file if that is the only version?
The reason I ask is that I marked the rejects, and then did some edit on others, then rejected some of them keeping a better version. Now the reject smart album has rejects that I want to delete the master to save disc space AND rejects that are just a version that I want to keep the master file.
Hope that makes sense.
Wow, these are really good, simple suggestions for a good work flow. I'm taking lots of mental notes.
Roger,
You are correct, they are not actually moved to a "Reject Album", the Reject Album is a dynamic album at the Library level that displays all images in all albums with a reject tag. I only used that terminology as it appears that the images are "moved" there when they are taged as rejected.
Thanks for the clarification.
I don't think rejects are moved, it's just that the default view is "items rated 0 or better" and so items rated reject, -1, don't get shown in the normal view.
I also think that the reject button changed from 0 to - to keep with the new theme of "the number key for the rating gives that rating" so you get 1-5 for ratings 1-5, 0 for no rating, and - for a -1 rating.