I’ve just scheduled Session 016, where I’d like to wrap up adjustments. Thing is, what to talk about? There are many more, but most are minor and I’d rather not spend three more sessions covering these. So this is your chance to dictate what will be discussed!

[form closed] you can tell me what you want to learn and how you’d like to see it — even submit your own photo for me to work with.

It’s online folks!

Session 015, all about Dodge & Burn in Aperture 3, is now available for download.

As usual, just $2, and this session went long… so for that two bucks it’s over an hour of Aperture goodness! It was a great session, and I hope you enjoy it.

If you aren’t subscribed to the mailing list, then you missed today’s newsletter… but it’s not too late to see it!

Click here to subscribe, and once you’ve confirmed your subscription, you’ll receive a link to view previous newsletters.

The next Live Training has just been scheduled; this one continues with the Adjustments, moving into the Quick Brushes and starting with the basics, Dodge and Burn. Time permitting, we may go into the other brushes there as well.

It’s schedule for Thursday Feb 23 at 2pm PST. You can check the time in your time zone on sign-up.

For those big-event photographers out there who don’t have time to edit their work but can’t justify hiring a full-time assistant, you’re gonna love this.

Today’s Live Training session on retouching is now available for download.

Click here for more info, or click below to add it to your cart… or, watch the first five minutes for free below.

The amazing application Aperture Inspector is now being sold by ApertureExpert — and we’re very excited to add this to the collection!

A user posted a question in the forums about a technique called “double raw processing”. Admittedly I had never heard of it and first said “erm, that’s not possible”, but then on googling it I discovered what the term actually means. (It’s a method of combining two versions of an image that have been processed differently from the RAW file, almost like an HDR technique).

Let’s talk retouching! Using the Retouch, Spot & Patch and Skin Smoothing tools can save you a trip to Photoshop, and used properly will give superb results!

[UPDATED on Feb 5, thanks to Whitney Dunn in the comments below! I had calculated based on the Aperture 3.2 release being the present, which threw everything off by several months. Oops!]

The App Store is filling up fast with awesome little applications that, like iApps, do just one or two things — but do them really well. The app Snapseed from Nik Software that I mentioned a few days ago is one of those.

The problem with many of these apps for Aperture users however is that they don’t simply “save”, but only “save as…”. The ability to simply “save” means from Aperture you can Open in Editor, (for example Photoshop), do your work then simply save and close the image, and it’s automatically updated in Aperture. It’s one of those fantastically simple features in Aperture that opens it up to just about any app you like.

But as soon as you can’t simply “save” — as you can’t in Snapseed — that process breaks. You now have to “save as…” to some other location, import that into Aperture manually, merge it back to your project, etc. etc. and the process, while not particularly hard, is just annoying.

Automator to the rescue

Reader Jon Parsons of Jon Parsons Photography sent over his workflow which makes this process a lot easier. I’ve modified his steps a little as he had an extra step in there, plus I’ve modified for Referenced master users, and added a tip on how to easily switch between External Editors, but other than that he gets credit for this technique.

By the way, this has the potential to get even easier through AppleScript. If it can, I’ll certainly let you know here.

What it’ll do

In brief, you’ll create a dedicated folder for all those “Save as” images, and attach a script to it that will automatically import photos added to that folder into Aperture. Unfortunately it has to add them to a dedicated project, so you’ll need to manually move them to your current project (assuming you want to keep versions together), but otherwise this is quite clean.

Setting up Aperture

First let’s make it easy to switch External editors. I gave this tip once before, but it’s worth repeating. You probably know that to switch editors, you just go to the menu Aperture > Preferences… > Export > External Photo Editor: and choose the one you want. But digging through your entire Application folder can get tedious, so I’ve set up a folder of aliases to the apps I’m using from Aperture. I also keep that folder in the sidebar, making it quick to get to at any time.

As you can see above, just click on the Choose button next to External Photo Editor: and then using the handy-dandy External Editors folder set up in the sidebar, quickly navigate to the app you want to use, and click Select.

Unless you’re sending to Photoshop, you may as well set the filetype to TIFF (8-bit). Many apps won’t read PSD files, so you could just get an error, and you’re not saving back to this format anyway when working with alternative apps, so just keep it simple.

Next up, you’ll need a Project in Aperture that’s dedicated to importing these externally edited photos. I called mine simply Externally Edited (clever, no?) and that sits at the top of my Library list.

I’ll do a proper look at this later, and be sure to talk about how to best integrate it into an Aperture workflow, but just in case you haven’t seen it yet… Nik Software (the maker of my favorite plug-ins for Aperture, and no, I’m not paid to say that!) also makes one of my favorite iApps, called snapseed, available for both iPhone and iPad.

How big of a difference is there between TIF and JPEG quality 12, 10 and 8? I ran a bunch of tests, and the results may surprise you!