Great site of Aperture how-to's and tips. A question for you. In a book, special occasion template, how does one change the color of all those colored boxes? What are those boxes, If I drag one from one page to another the color seems to vanish, though the selection handles are still there.

Here is an example of the colored boxes in that theme:

The colored boxes in the Special Occasion book are defined in the Aperture application itself. They are part of the theme, and so unless you hack into the theme by opening up the Aperture application bundle and edit plists, you cannot change them. You can, however get rid of them and add your own without any hacking.

If you do want to hack, then open the Aperture application with a control click and select Show Package Contents. Navigate to the folder Contents > Resources > Book Themes > Special Occasion > Hardcover > Graphics and you will see that it holds the files that define the blue rectangle and other things:

The BlueRect plist file contains just this, as shown by the plist editor:

and can be easily modified. However any modification will be lost if you update Aperture, so this is not advised.

To replace the blue rectangles with your own creation, you will need a colored graphic. Just a plain color square made in PhotoShop or some other utility will work fine. Perhaps you have some already available.

Here is is how I do it with ImageWell. I launch ImageWell and click Edit and delete anything that is there by selecting it and pressing delete:

I click on the rounded rectangle top left and drag the rectangle onto the editing area:

And change the size using the numbers bottom left to something that is big enough for print, say 3000 x 3000 pixels. I click the small rectangle on the right just below the yellow rectangle in the image above:

This opens the color picker and lets me pick a nice color. I don't have to be particularly fussy with my choice as you will see. I also set the border width to zero by editing the number bottom right:

I click the ImageWell icon top left to go back to the main window and give the image a name. Then I click and drag the image to the desktop.

Now I have my green image I import it into Aperture (just dragging onto a project works) and then drag the Aperture thumbnail to my book album. Here it is:

In my book I change to editing the layout:

and click on the blue rectangle I want to change. A right-click and a Cut removes it:

To put in the color I want, I create a new photo box and drag in my color image:

And there it is in the book:

If I don't like it, I can always change it. I just click on the thumbnail image and adjust the color and lightness using the controls in the HUD:

Adjusting the thumbnail will affect all the boxes that show that same color image, so I can adjust the look of the whole book with just a few HUD sliders. I can work with multiple versions of the same starting image and adjust each of them independently to vary the color scheme in many ways. This same method can be used to set background colors and patterns as well, of course.

Tags: Aperture, Color, Boxes, Books, Q&A, Hacking, Templates, Themes, Backgrounds