From the 2008 programme
In our session on evaluating and comparing images we'll introduce you to Aperture 2's new and streamlined interface, help you master the new Quick Preview mode, plus take control of the powerful and amazing Loupe, introduce the Full Screen and Light Table modes and delve into Stacks, talking about the best ways to cull through thousands of images to find just the ones that make the cut.
What it still teaches
Quick Preview was one of the headline features of Aperture 2. It let photographers flick through raw files using their embedded previews instead of waiting for each one to render. That sounds minor, but for anyone culling a two-thousand-frame wedding it was the difference between an evening and a weekend.
The Loupe was the other famous piece: a circular magnifier that could be dragged over any thumbnail to check focus at 100 percent without opening the image. It's the circle at the top of this site. Stacks grouped bursts and near-duplicates under a single pick, and the Light Table let selects be laid out freely, like slides on a lightbox, to see how a set would sit together.
Every one of those ideas survived. Burst grouping, fast preview modes and side-by-side compare are standard in culling software, and newer tools use face and eye detection to flag closed eyes and missed focus before anyone looks at the frame. Software can say a face is sharp. It can't say the moment is the right one, so the judgment still belongs to the photographer.
Three passes
- First pass fast: picks only, no editing.
- Second pass inside each stack, keeping one frame.
- Third pass across the whole set, which is the job the Light Table was built for.