It's Saturday morning and you finally have chance to sit down and use Aperture. Your wallet weighs the same as it did yesterday because you are taking advantage of Apple's free trial. Now what? You have thirty days to play; how do you make the most of it?

Aperture Is Different
It's not Photoshop. It's not many things. It is not your current workflow. It will cause you to think about why you do the things you do, because under Aperture many of the limitations that created your ingrained habits have been removed. This blog article is a short recommendation on how to ease into Aperture so that you understand the important stuff early enough to not get frustrated when your misunderstandings are challenged later.

Create A Play Area
First set up an area you can play in. Create a folder on your desktop called Play. Find a couple of hundred photos and copy them in.

Next go to your Pictures folder in your home folder. You will create a new empty Aperture library to play with. Aperture does not have a File > New Library command, so work around it as follows. Look in your Pictures folder in your home folder. If there is a file called Aperture Library there already there and you have put photos into it you want to keep then:

1. Quit Aperture
2. Rename Aperture Library to Old Library
3. Launch Aperture, then quit it again. A new Aperture Library will be created
4. Rename that to Play Library
5. Rename Old Library to Aperture Library

If you have an Aperture library already and don't care about it, then just drag it to trash. Do steps 3 and 4 above to make the Play Library.

Now whenever you want to play with Aperture double-click on the Play Library icon, not the Aperture application icon. That will explicitly open the Play Library and you have no chance of messing anything else up. Create a few more folders inside the Play folder and use those to experiment with exporting, relocating, and other fun features. When you are done, just trash the whole folder.

Do A Little Reading
Aperture is set up by default to create previews for everything you put in. These slow down the performance, so you probably don't want them until you know you need them. Go and read Who Needs Previews to learn how to fully turn them off.

Next, make sure you understand the difference between referenced and managed masters by reading the Relocate and Consolidate article. And then have a look at how the library works in Five Simple Rules and Brown Folders. If you are feeling intrepid (and patient) then try Advanced Importing.

Import Your Images and Poke Around
Now you understand a little about how Aperture works, go ahead and import the throw-away images you put into the Play folder on your desktop. Work your way through the short articles on Workspace and Workflow and try a whole bunch of things.

Get Intrepid
Once you know your way around a little, try the Metadata and Stacks articles, and take the time go to the help menu and read all the material that Apple provides, including the entire user manual from cover to cover. I can't stress that enough. It is a very well-written and organized manual and will answer many of your questions.

Ask For Help
Apple's Aperture forums are busy and helpful. And this site has a Question and Answer page that invites you to email me with your problems and then shares the answers. There are also a lot of Aperture links at del.icio.us.

If the Aperture information here has been useful to you, then consider using the link on the Store page to buy Aperture. By doing this you will be contributing a small percentage of the purchase to this site.