Introduction

It's entirely possible that you might use your Mac and Aperture exclusively to organize and edit your image Library without ever launching another application. But not very likely. Images are usually just the beginning - only when they've been organized, categorized, sorted, rated, labelled and edited, are you ready to begin using them. And that's where Aperture's ability to integrate with other applications becomes critical.

To begin with, in this chapter we'll look at what to do if you're new to Aperture and want to migrate your existing image Library from iPhoto or Adobe Bridge. We'll also discuss the implications of this for your image metadata and lookat some of the differences in the Raw image processing tools provided by Aperture and Adobe Camera Raw (ACR).

Then we'll take a lookat how you can use Aperture in conjunction with a range of applications from Apple's own iLifeand iWork suites to other applications such as Adobe InDesign. We'll tackle this from two opposing angles: round tripping images to other applications from Aperture and accessing your Aperture Library from within other applications.

The potential for enlisting the help of third party applications to edit your images in Aperture is about to grow exponentially with the introduction of Aperture 2.1's new edit plug-in architecture. We'll also take a look at some of the first new plug-ins to become available.

Importing Your iPhoto Library

When you first open Aperture, a dialog box appears that allows you to import your iPhoto Library. If you...