Apple Aperture Workflow: My Aperture Ratings
I’ve never been entirely convinced that my rating system is adequate. I changed it way too many times and finally settled on one more out of frustration with having my photographs all over the place than anything else. Either way, I don’t think I’ll be changing it any time soon... unless I discover (or somebody shows me) a much smarter way.
I did search the web for what others were doing, but couldn’t find much. It seems photographers don’t like sharing this kind of thing. Or maybe they’re just as confused as I am about the whole thing. So, I’m posting what I do. Hopefully it’ll help you to decide on a rating strategy that works for you.
In Aperture, you use stars to rate your photographs. As the screenshot above shows, you have from no stars for “unrated” images up to 5 stars. There’s also a “reject” mode for those shots that just don’t cut it. Aperture has a “pick” button that I never use as it assigns 5 stars to the image. To me, a 5 star image is a final, edited, and superb shot. And there are very few of those in my library. This is one aspect that I feel Lightroom is superior, as it gives you not only stars, but a flag for “pick” or “reject”, and you can even assign colors to the shots.
So, here’s what the stars mean to me:
- 0 Stars - All photographs are “unrated” on import. I leave unrated my average shots, those not bad enough to delete
- 1 Star - Picks on First pass. As I go through my photographs, I assign 1 star to my “picks”. Basically any shot I consider decent.
- 2 Stars - Picks to Edit. I do a second pass of the 1 stars and give an extra star to the best of the shoot. These are the ones I’ll spend some time editing.
- 3 Stars - Edited. Once I’ve done some post-processing and I’m happy with the results, I’ll give them 3 stars. These are the final photographs.
- 4 Stars - Out of the final ones, I’ll give 4 stars to the best of the shoot. Very few get 4 stars.
- 5 Stars - Portfolio Shots. Some photographs may not have any 5 star shots. I reserve this for my very best only.
As I go through the first pass, I also mark as “reject” the photographs I know I won’t want to keep.
Aperture makes it really easy to go through a shoot and rate your photographs. I almost always go into full screen and use the keyboard to rate them as I go along. The numbers in the keyboard correspond to the amount of stars, and hitting the 9 marks them as rejects. I advance to the next shot with the arrow keys.
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Reader Comments (8)
Thanks for sharing this! I just found your site and it seems to be fairly new. I hope you keep it up as you seems to be on the right track for the kind of information I'd like to see.
I second that! Keep up the good work!
This is great - thanks for sharing! I've had many of te same problems you describe and keeping a consistent rating system has always been a challenge. I like your approach of using ratings to not only 'rank' images but also track Teiresias stage in your workflow (another issue I have been struggling with). I'll give it a try!
@SimonK, yes, I struggled with a way to keep both the ratings and the stage in the workflow organized until I came up with this solution of using stars for both. It's worked well for me so far and I'm not so used to it that it's automatic. Let me know if it works for you!
Thanks for sharing your workflow. It is hard to find people that talk about Aperture workflow. Even though I have never put exact terms to my own rating system it is almost identical to yours. I like the way that you explained your system and feel that I can adopt to to fit mine with no changes. Maybe Aperture 3.0 (if they every come out with it!!!!) will have some extras in it to help better organize like the colors and flagging tools.
Thanks for that Nathan. Yes, not too many people share these things and I found it really hard to get to a place where I'm happy with my workflow and things work well for me, that's why I'm sharing! Check out the post today about how I organize my library. Maybe you'll find it useful as well.
Hi, I really like the way you rate your photos, I think i'll give a try to your technique. :) That is, only if I can get the damn shortcuts to work. Right now, I press a number (1 to 5 or 0) and I rate one picture, I go to the next photo, and press another number lets say ''one'' and I hear a beep and the photo will not rate, no stars appears... I can't rate more than one photo once every minute or so... with the numbers shortcut that is, I can go with the minus or plus sign, these works but it's not good enough, especially with the wireless keyboard without the numpad.... you need to add shift to the plus shortcut in order to add a star... Anyway, the sortcuts exists and they should be working... maybe it has to do with a french keyboard setting... I can't find anything about this on the apple forum... Thanx again for your tips! =0)
Turned out I was right, I changed the language setting in aperture from french to english and all the shortcuts work just fine now! :)
Thanx anyway!