The Aperture Workspace

Aperture is part of Apple's Pro application lineup, where it sits beside Final Cut Studio, Logic and Shake. As such, it sports the distinctive dark interface that Apple uses for these products, and works best on high resolution displays as it adopts a smaller on-screen font and a range of complex panels and palettes. It's even better when spread across two screens, where the management and editing workspaces will be separated out from each other and your pictures will have room to breathe (Fig. 2.1).

Figure 2.1: The Aperture interface follows the design of Apple's Pro apps, with a dark background, smaller font, and distinctive panels inside a unified interface. The main working area is the large Viewer, below which is the Browser, used for selecting images. To the left is the Inspector, used for organizing and adjusting

The interface is split into resizable areas dedicated to specific tasks, such as Project management, image editing, photo browsing and viewing at larger sizes. Each one is contained within the Aperture application interface rather than spun off as a separate panel as things are in Photoshop. This follows the methods used in Final Cut Studio, iTunes and iPhoto. There are exceptions, however, in the form of head-up displays (HUDs)and the innovative full-screen mode. When running in full-screen. Aperture hides its rigid gray interface and instead adopts a black background to better show off your photos, and strips at the top and bottom of the display showing, respectively, tools and...