Books
Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X Third Edition
2008-04-30
The third edition of Aaron Hillegass's book Cocoa Programming for Mac OS X is now available. It's been brought up to date with garbage collection, XCode 3.0, Core Data, Core Animation, and Leopard.
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Get Your Head Around Aperture 1.5 Edition 3 Now Available
2008-02-26
 | Eleven New Articles |
I have updated Get Your Head Around Aperture 1.5 with eleven new Aperture articles that were published on the blog between the second edition and the release of Aperture 2.0. For full details of the changes see the Publication History page.
If you have purchased the book, you will have received an email with a download link that is good for 5 downloads or one year, whichever comes first. Just use that link and it will download this new release.
If you have not purchased the book, then I'm afraid it is no longer available. Aperture 2.0 changed so much of the interface and features (and fixed so many problems!) that much of the material in the book is now unnecessary, incorrect, or misleading, especially to beginners. All the material in the book remains freely available on this site. If you really want a copy, then let me know. If there is enough demand I will reintroduce it for sale at a reduced price.
I am also interested to know what kind of information you would want to see in a future Bagelturf publication about Aperture or anything else.
How To Create High Quality Thumbnails Of Document Pages
2007-12-31
While publishing my book Get Your Head Around Aperture 1.5 I figured out how to create high-quality page thumbnails like the one above. It is almost possible to read the body text, and the small blue title is certainly readable: Importing Images From A Single Folder, even though the characters are tiny. The word Images is only 5 by 19 pixels.
I first tried taking screen shots and reducing the images in Photoshop, but that resulted in a horrible loss of detail and a very fuzzy look. The page size reduction was being carried out as though it were a photograph, not a page of text. I needed a way of maintaining the character information through the size reduction.
To create the high quality page thumbnails I printed the pages I needed to a PDF file:
Then viewing the generated page in Preview, reduced the page size until it was what I needed:
Since the PDF was being rendered at the reduced size, the detail was still present. Last, I took a screenshot with SnapzPro2 and added a thin border and drop shadow with the media inspector in RapidWeaver:
This also gives me an image with the drop shadow rendered in: I just click and drag the image from the published web page to my desktop.
Cocoa Cheerleaders
2007-12-02
Cocoa Cheerleaders is brought to you by the team at PyrusMalus. It's a large collection of links to blogs, articles, books, code, and other information about Cocoa.
My interest piqued by the name, I discovered that PyrusMalus is the Latin name for the Domestic Apple tree. And there is a mystery application in the works looking for alpha testers called Atlantic.
Get Your Head Around Aperture 1.5 Edition 2 Now Available
2007-11-27
 | Fourteen New Articles |
I have updated Get Your Head Around Aperture 1.5 with fourteen new Aperture articles that were published on the blog between the first edition and today. For full details of the changes see the Publication History page.
If you have already purchased the book, you will have received an email with a download link that is good for 5 downloads or one year, whichever comes first. Just use that link and it will download this new release. Or skip this update and get the next.
Aperture: How Do I Add Metadata To A Book That Is Not Offered In The Pulldown Menu?
2007-10-01
In a word, no. The choices given are the only ones available. Your only practical option at this point is to move or copy the metadata to one of the available choices before you import into Aperture. There are no capabilities inside Aperture for moving or copying metadata between fields automatically.
When laying out a book, metadata boxes can be added and linked to images. Having selected the Edit Layout mode and clicked on an image, the Add Metadata button (center) creates the box:
The metadata box is linked to the selected image and includes the data shown by the tag:
There is a drop-down menu that allows the contents to be changed:
Only this small selection of possible metadata can be displayed. The only way to get more data is to move it into the available fields.
But I have never been able to get anything to appear for the Title, Author, or Copyright selections. It's as though Apple has simply missed something out here.
AUPN Pro Members Get 50% Off Get Your Head Around Aperture 1.5
2007-09-25
Pro members of the Aperture Users Professional Network get 50% off my ebook Get Your Head Around Aperture. Visit the AUPN pro info page for more information.
Buy My Book! -- Get Your Head Around Aperture 1.5
2007-09-18
 | "Steve Weller's insights go far beyond that of a typical photographer. Get Your Head Around Aperture is filled with tips and tricks, a must read for first time users and Aperture masters alike" -- Micah Walter, photojournalist and contributor to Inside Aperture |
It's done! I've taken more than a year's worth of Aperture articles and compiled them into a living PDF e-book. Many people suggested that I do this, so thanks are owed to them and to everyone who reviewed the book and made comments and corrections.
A PDF version of the Aperture articles on the site is convenient and useful. It's portable since you don't need to be on-line. You can put it on your laptop to read in the field. It's searchable by Spotlight and Preview. And it's printable. You get three editions: one 490-page edition optimized for screen viewing at 100%, so you can stash it to one side and have Aperture next to it, and two 160-page editions optimized for printing -- one for A4 paper and one for US Letter paper.
It's available only from this site. More information on the Get Your Head Around Aperture product page.
Aperture: Resources for Book Designs
2007-05-22
Mac:Method is selling Aperture book templates. The format that Apple uses in Aperture is not documented, but it is straight forward and easy to adapt and build on. There is always a risk that installing the next update will break this kind of add-on, at least for a short time while the developers catch up. [Update: A reader has informed me that Mac:Method had accepted his payment for one of these templates but had not provided them. Further investigation seems to show that Mac:Method is no longer in business, but Kagi is accepting payments through their site].
Another way to jazz up Aperture's books is with graphics, frames, textures, and backgrounds. Gina Miller sells all of these. Using the wash feature of Aperture's books backgrounds can be desaturated so they don't overpower the images. Here is an example of a coordinated kit that contains many elements that can be used together in a book:
In my own book examples I specifically took pictures of some things so that I could use them as backgrounds and textures. The result was the pebble background that I incorporated on some pages.
Aperture: How Do I Change The Color Of The Boxes In A Book?
2007-05-18
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.
Photo Book Quality
2007-04-17
Mike Franklin has been testing the quality of photo books created by a number of different suppliers: Blurb, Apple, Viovio, and MyPublisher.
Getting Real
2006-12-15
Getting Real is a book of advice about creating web-based applications. It also has a lot of good information for anyone creating any kind of product or any kind of business. It's the creation of 37signals, makers of several web-based utilities and applications including BaseCamp, Campfire, and Backpack.
It is available free as HTML, as a PDF for $19, or as a dead tree edition for $29.
Here is an example essay from the HTML version of the book:
Hire good writers
If you are trying to decide between a few people to fill a position, always hire the better writer. It doesn't matter if that person is a designer, programmer, marketer, salesperson, or whatever, the writing skills will pay off. Effective, concise writing and editing leads to effective, concise code, design, emails, instant messages, and more.
That's because being a good writer is about more than words. Good writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else's shoes. They know what to omit. They think clearly. And those are the qualities you need.
Which is why blogging is so valuable to the blogger: it's great practice for the brain.
It is available free as HTML, as a PDF for $19, or as a dead tree edition for $29.
Here is an example essay from the HTML version of the book:
Hire good writers
If you are trying to decide between a few people to fill a position, always hire the better writer. It doesn't matter if that person is a designer, programmer, marketer, salesperson, or whatever, the writing skills will pay off. Effective, concise writing and editing leads to effective, concise code, design, emails, instant messages, and more.
That's because being a good writer is about more than words. Good writers know how to communicate. They make things easy to understand. They can put themselves in someone else's shoes. They know what to omit. They think clearly. And those are the qualities you need.
Which is why blogging is so valuable to the blogger: it's great practice for the brain.
Aperture: Fix For A Book Printing Problem
2006-12-04
Submitted by Jim DeWitt to Macintouch:
I struggled all weekend to upload an Aperture photo book to Apple Print Products. I was not successful. The following tip from Apple Print Product Customer Service solved the problem, so I thought I'd pass it along:
1. Quit Aperture.
2. From the Finder menu, choose Go > Utilities to access your Utilities folder (or press Shift-Command-U).
3. In your Utilities folder, launch the Keychain Access application.
4. Find the iNetServicesi entry in your Keychain Access window.
5. Select the iNetServicesi entry and press the delete key.
6. Relaunch Aperture and attempt to place your order again.
7. You should be prompted to enter your account information if you deleted the keychain entry successfully.
8. After entering your account information, you should be able to complete your order.
Customer Service's message suggests this is a known problem and that Apple is working on a real fix, instead of this workaround. In the meantime, maybe this tip can spare somebody else a weekend of headaches. And credit to Apple for a prompt response to my complaint.
I struggled all weekend to upload an Aperture photo book to Apple Print Products. I was not successful. The following tip from Apple Print Product Customer Service solved the problem, so I thought I'd pass it along:
1. Quit Aperture.
2. From the Finder menu, choose Go > Utilities to access your Utilities folder (or press Shift-Command-U).
3. In your Utilities folder, launch the Keychain Access application.
4. Find the iNetServicesi entry in your Keychain Access window.
5. Select the iNetServicesi entry and press the delete key.
6. Relaunch Aperture and attempt to place your order again.
7. You should be prompted to enter your account information if you deleted the keychain entry successfully.
8. After entering your account information, you should be able to complete your order.
Customer Service's message suggests this is a known problem and that Apple is working on a real fix, instead of this workaround. In the meantime, maybe this tip can spare somebody else a weekend of headaches. And credit to Apple for a prompt response to my complaint.
Aperture: Book Metadata
2006-09-18
Metadata can be added to books. Here I've created a page in the small soft cover book I already had started and dragged a photo on to it:
I need a border to leave room for the metadata. To do that I drag the corners in and then change the way that Aperture fills the box by right-clicking and changing from Scale To Fit Centered to Scale to Fill:
Now adding metadata should be easy. I make sure I am in Edit Layout mode, select an image, click on the Add Metadata button::
And there it is. Or is it? It turns out that this does not work. At all. It turns out that you can't add metadata boxes to small soft cover books -- or at least I can't make it work. So lets start again. I'll pick a new theme, say Special Occasion, and edit it a little. Now let's add metadata to this image:
After moving the new metadata box I get this:
And now I can go to the metadata format drop-down and select something else:
Such as aperture:
But that is not very friendly. It looks like I have to create a separate box for each item I want to add. No metadata sets here? Apparently not. I hope that is coming in a later version. Anyway here is the result:
Another neat thing you can do with books is to automatically flow all the photos into the template and then rearrange:
Some of its choices are inspired, like this one:
And this one:
Unfortunately there is no way to randomize the images into a book. That would be a real boon.
A neat feature of the books is that as long as you are in Edit Mode, if you drag photos about on a page they will swap, not replace. In other words, there is no need to cut and paste and reposition. Drag to rearrange, simple as that.
I need a border to leave room for the metadata. To do that I drag the corners in and then change the way that Aperture fills the box by right-clicking and changing from Scale To Fit Centered to Scale to Fill:
Now adding metadata should be easy. I make sure I am in Edit Layout mode, select an image, click on the Add Metadata button::
And there it is. Or is it? It turns out that this does not work. At all. It turns out that you can't add metadata boxes to small soft cover books -- or at least I can't make it work. So lets start again. I'll pick a new theme, say Special Occasion, and edit it a little. Now let's add metadata to this image:
After moving the new metadata box I get this:
And now I can go to the metadata format drop-down and select something else:
Such as aperture:
But that is not very friendly. It looks like I have to create a separate box for each item I want to add. No metadata sets here? Apparently not. I hope that is coming in a later version. Anyway here is the result:
Another neat thing you can do with books is to automatically flow all the photos into the template and then rearrange:
Some of its choices are inspired, like this one:
And this one:
Unfortunately there is no way to randomize the images into a book. That would be a real boon.
A neat feature of the books is that as long as you are in Edit Mode, if you drag photos about on a page they will swap, not replace. In other words, there is no need to cut and paste and reposition. Drag to rearrange, simple as that.
Aperture: Laying Out a Book
2006-09-14
Now I have the cover of my book in place, it is time to add some content. On the left side of the book viewer is a schematic of the pages that make up the book:
The first page is the outside cover and is unnumbered. The inside of the cover is not shown (gap to the left of page 1) and is blank in the final output. The page numbered 1 is the first non-cover page (on the right) and the following page pairs are shown as they would look if the book were opened flat on a table.
I'll go with this style and make my page 1 just have the title. If I paste in the title from the cover, I get this:
No style has been applied. So I have to apply the style I want by selecting the text and control-clicking to get the Styles:
The style I have previously defined is called Title. So select that and click Apply:
to get the effect needed:
Now pages 2 and 3 are set to full page photos. What I would like to have here is a 1-up spread: a single photo that spans both pages. I click on the little triangle next to page 2 and select the 1-up spread like so:
That changes the page thumbnail to look like this:
and I can now drag an image onto the spread and adjust it to get the desired result:
There is so little color in this image that I think I will convert it to monochrome with a filter. I can filter the images in the book without affecting the version I am using. I switch to Layout Edit mode and select the image, then apply a filter from the filter pop-up:
to get this:
For the next page I want a close up image of some action. The image I want is part of a stack (the one on the right), so lets drag it onto page 4:
But it doesn't work. I get this:
The problem here is that I can only use the stack pick. But there is a way out: I can make a special kind of pick called the Album Pick. It's the pick just for this album (or book or web gallery). I select the image and go to Stack > Set Album Pick (command vertical bar) and a new badge appears to show the album pick:
Now the drag to page 4 will work, and I can close the stack it it will work as well:
For the facing page, page 5, I want some descriptive text. It's about time this book actually said something about wind and water. So I select a blank page and create a new text box, and put my text in. I select Palatino as the font and make it italic. My friends are all Romans, so the text is in Latin:
That's nice, but I want to have drop caps for the C and the second Q. However, I can't figure out how to do this with Aperture.
On the next two pages I want to use a picture of the stones on the beach as a background for lots a small images. But if I drag the same stones image to both pages it will be obvious that it is a duplicate. So I create a new version of the original and then manipulate the two before putting them on the pages:
That generates a new version and automatically makes it the album pick in a stack. So I have to drag it out of the stack to be able to use both:
I select the left thumbnail and hit F to go into full screen mode. Then hit C to bring up the cropping tool and select a part of the image:
Hit A to end the crop and F to exit full screen. I repeat that for the right thumbnail and include a rotation and a different part of the image. Here are my pages:
To use that as a background I want it to be much lighter, so I filter it with a light wash from the filter pop-up:
Next I want to add images. If I drag and drop any images they will simply replace the ones that are there, so that will not do. I need to create a new photo box for each image I want to place and then drag and drop into those.
From Layout Edit mode, I select one of the pages and the use the action menu to add a new photo box:
Then I repeat and rearrange as needed. If I want I can select preset aspect ratios for my photo boxes with control-click:
There, done:
Now I can fill the boxes and adjust the photos:
It's a pity that the typography in Aperture is not up to scratch. I am hoping that they transplant the Pages features into Aperture and make the text handling more consistent.
The first page is the outside cover and is unnumbered. The inside of the cover is not shown (gap to the left of page 1) and is blank in the final output. The page numbered 1 is the first non-cover page (on the right) and the following page pairs are shown as they would look if the book were opened flat on a table.
I'll go with this style and make my page 1 just have the title. If I paste in the title from the cover, I get this:
No style has been applied. So I have to apply the style I want by selecting the text and control-clicking to get the Styles:
The style I have previously defined is called Title. So select that and click Apply:
to get the effect needed:
Now pages 2 and 3 are set to full page photos. What I would like to have here is a 1-up spread: a single photo that spans both pages. I click on the little triangle next to page 2 and select the 1-up spread like so:
That changes the page thumbnail to look like this:
and I can now drag an image onto the spread and adjust it to get the desired result:
There is so little color in this image that I think I will convert it to monochrome with a filter. I can filter the images in the book without affecting the version I am using. I switch to Layout Edit mode and select the image, then apply a filter from the filter pop-up:
to get this:
For the next page I want a close up image of some action. The image I want is part of a stack (the one on the right), so lets drag it onto page 4:
But it doesn't work. I get this:
The problem here is that I can only use the stack pick. But there is a way out: I can make a special kind of pick called the Album Pick. It's the pick just for this album (or book or web gallery). I select the image and go to Stack > Set Album Pick (command vertical bar) and a new badge appears to show the album pick:
Now the drag to page 4 will work, and I can close the stack it it will work as well:
For the facing page, page 5, I want some descriptive text. It's about time this book actually said something about wind and water. So I select a blank page and create a new text box, and put my text in. I select Palatino as the font and make it italic. My friends are all Romans, so the text is in Latin:
That's nice, but I want to have drop caps for the C and the second Q. However, I can't figure out how to do this with Aperture.
On the next two pages I want to use a picture of the stones on the beach as a background for lots a small images. But if I drag the same stones image to both pages it will be obvious that it is a duplicate. So I create a new version of the original and then manipulate the two before putting them on the pages:
That generates a new version and automatically makes it the album pick in a stack. So I have to drag it out of the stack to be able to use both:
I select the left thumbnail and hit F to go into full screen mode. Then hit C to bring up the cropping tool and select a part of the image:
Hit A to end the crop and F to exit full screen. I repeat that for the right thumbnail and include a rotation and a different part of the image. Here are my pages:
To use that as a background I want it to be much lighter, so I filter it with a light wash from the filter pop-up:
Next I want to add images. If I drag and drop any images they will simply replace the ones that are there, so that will not do. I need to create a new photo box for each image I want to place and then drag and drop into those.
From Layout Edit mode, I select one of the pages and the use the action menu to add a new photo box:
Then I repeat and rearrange as needed. If I want I can select preset aspect ratios for my photo boxes with control-click:
There, done:
Now I can fill the boxes and adjust the photos:
It's a pity that the typography in Aperture is not up to scratch. I am hoping that they transplant the Pages features into Aperture and make the text handling more consistent.
Aperture: Making a Book Cover
2006-09-08
The easiest way to get started with a book is to make a selection of images that you want to put in it and then do File > New From Selection > Book. Here is what you get:
Don't miss the softcover books, selected by picking from the pop-up top left:
Here I have made an image selection, created a new book and called it Wind and Water:
There are 40 images in there that are straight from the camera. I went through several hundred that I had shot recently and gave anything that was part way decent one star and deleted the ones that were no good for anything, then filtered to one star, selected all of them, and created a new book.
So why not adjust and tag and rate and all that and then make the book? Well partly because I don't have to do things in that order if I don't want to: that is one of the beauties of Aperture. It is non-destructive and non-linear as well. Not so much of a workflow tool as a work freedom tool. And partly because I want to see how the images look together in a book before I start messing with them. And partly because I don't think I will use these images for anything else ever, so why bother with the extra work?
So here is the book that it created:
Except that I don't see a book here. Apart from a few new icons upper right, it looks just like the grid view to me. I have to press V to bring up the viewer because the viewer was not visible when I created the book. The book appears in the viewer. Aperture should really do that step for you.
Here I have used shift W to put the thumbnails at the bottom and W to get rid of the project pane. I magnified the book image a little by using the slider top right. On the left is the layout of the pages in my 20 page softcover book.
So far there are no images in the book, so everything is gray. To get images in I just drag and drop from the thumbnails to the grey boxes. Here is the first page with an image dropped on:
I clicked on the text and changed it to make a book title as well. The thumbnail I used now has a little number on it showing that I have used the image once:
But I don't like this image the way it is. It should be bigger and more central. And I think it would look better flipped 180 degrees. So I select the image and hit ] twice to flip it and then double click to bring up the Image Scale slider and adjust the size. To centralize the image, I just click and drag:
To end this I click outside the image. Was there any exposure adjustment when I took this photo? Just put the cursor over the image and press T to to bring up the metadata:
No exposure bias there. Now the colors look too dull for a title page, so I hit H to bring up the adjustment HUD and play a little. Am I making the image too grainy? Bring up the loupe and have a look:
It probably is too grainy, so I'll reduce the magnification, change the composition some more, and crank up the saturation:
Good. Now what about that font? I want something more interesting, but there is no obvious way to change it. It's done through the pop-up menu. If I control-click on the text and select Fonts that gets me this:
And now I can select something better:
But I want the text centered and there is no obvious way to do this either! This is because the alignment of the text in the text box is a property of the text box, not of the text inside it. So I have to switch to Edit Layout mode. So far I have been in Edit Content mode, so moving text boxes and all that has not been possible. This is good because I can't accidently mess anything up. To change modes I click the right button of these two on the top left:
And now I can change the setting either by selecting the text box and control-clicking on one of the control points:
or by selecting the text box and using the Actions menu (cog icon) on the lower left:
And here is the text centered:
While I'm in Edit Layout, I'll take the time to move the box up and add some more text. Moving the box up and down is tricky because the box snaps to the edge of the page and the image, but this only happens if I use the control points on the edges of the text box. If I use the corner points the movement is smooth and I can get to where I want:
For that extra text, I use the action menu (cog icon) to add a new text box and position it. Then add and style text:
Now I will probably want to use these styles again in other parts of the book. By selecting some text and right-clicking I can get to the Style dialog:
and that lets me add it to my favorites. The style is actually shown in the white area, but you can't see it because it is white on white:
I click Add To Favorites and can give it a name:
I can repeat this with the other style I used and then select these later through the Favorite Styles selection. The way all of this works is really kooky. I don't know why there is not just an inspector like in Pages that does all of this. To style new text, select it, control-click to get the styles sheet, click Favorite Styles, and pick the one you want:
and click Apply. The styles two I added I called Overtype and Title, and you can see them in the list above.
So here is my finished title page:
I have no idea how this would look printed as a book, but for this exercise I don't care. I could simply print this book to a PDF document and email it if I preferred that.
Don't miss the softcover books, selected by picking from the pop-up top left:
Here I have made an image selection, created a new book and called it Wind and Water:
There are 40 images in there that are straight from the camera. I went through several hundred that I had shot recently and gave anything that was part way decent one star and deleted the ones that were no good for anything, then filtered to one star, selected all of them, and created a new book.
So why not adjust and tag and rate and all that and then make the book? Well partly because I don't have to do things in that order if I don't want to: that is one of the beauties of Aperture. It is non-destructive and non-linear as well. Not so much of a workflow tool as a work freedom tool. And partly because I want to see how the images look together in a book before I start messing with them. And partly because I don't think I will use these images for anything else ever, so why bother with the extra work?
So here is the book that it created:
Except that I don't see a book here. Apart from a few new icons upper right, it looks just like the grid view to me. I have to press V to bring up the viewer because the viewer was not visible when I created the book. The book appears in the viewer. Aperture should really do that step for you.
Here I have used shift W to put the thumbnails at the bottom and W to get rid of the project pane. I magnified the book image a little by using the slider top right. On the left is the layout of the pages in my 20 page softcover book.
So far there are no images in the book, so everything is gray. To get images in I just drag and drop from the thumbnails to the grey boxes. Here is the first page with an image dropped on:
I clicked on the text and changed it to make a book title as well. The thumbnail I used now has a little number on it showing that I have used the image once:
But I don't like this image the way it is. It should be bigger and more central. And I think it would look better flipped 180 degrees. So I select the image and hit ] twice to flip it and then double click to bring up the Image Scale slider and adjust the size. To centralize the image, I just click and drag:
To end this I click outside the image. Was there any exposure adjustment when I took this photo? Just put the cursor over the image and press T to to bring up the metadata:
No exposure bias there. Now the colors look too dull for a title page, so I hit H to bring up the adjustment HUD and play a little. Am I making the image too grainy? Bring up the loupe and have a look:
It probably is too grainy, so I'll reduce the magnification, change the composition some more, and crank up the saturation:
Good. Now what about that font? I want something more interesting, but there is no obvious way to change it. It's done through the pop-up menu. If I control-click on the text and select Fonts that gets me this:
And now I can select something better:
But I want the text centered and there is no obvious way to do this either! This is because the alignment of the text in the text box is a property of the text box, not of the text inside it. So I have to switch to Edit Layout mode. So far I have been in Edit Content mode, so moving text boxes and all that has not been possible. This is good because I can't accidently mess anything up. To change modes I click the right button of these two on the top left:
And now I can change the setting either by selecting the text box and control-clicking on one of the control points:
or by selecting the text box and using the Actions menu (cog icon) on the lower left:
And here is the text centered:
While I'm in Edit Layout, I'll take the time to move the box up and add some more text. Moving the box up and down is tricky because the box snaps to the edge of the page and the image, but this only happens if I use the control points on the edges of the text box. If I use the corner points the movement is smooth and I can get to where I want:
For that extra text, I use the action menu (cog icon) to add a new text box and position it. Then add and style text:
Now I will probably want to use these styles again in other parts of the book. By selecting some text and right-clicking I can get to the Style dialog:
and that lets me add it to my favorites. The style is actually shown in the white area, but you can't see it because it is white on white:
I click Add To Favorites and can give it a name:
I can repeat this with the other style I used and then select these later through the Favorite Styles selection. The way all of this works is really kooky. I don't know why there is not just an inspector like in Pages that does all of this. To style new text, select it, control-click to get the styles sheet, click Favorite Styles, and pick the one you want:
and click Apply. The styles two I added I called Overtype and Title, and you can see them in the list above.
So here is my finished title page:
I have no idea how this would look printed as a book, but for this exercise I don't care. I could simply print this book to a PDF document and email it if I preferred that.
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