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.

Tags: Thumbnails, PDF, Get Your Head Around Aperture, Books, Documentation, RapidWeaver, Screen Shots, Photoshop

See how the photo was taken by watching this YouTube video. It wasn't so much taken as composed: five separate elements were shot a number of times to get the right images, then those integrated and tweaked with Photoshop.

Credit goes to Brandon Voges at Bruton Stroube. To see more of his work, click on Portfolio, then select his name from the list of photographers.

Tags: Photography, Photoshop, Paintball

Ben Long has a great article at O'Reilly that explains how to use a folder action and Automator to launch Photoshop actions from Aperture. I plod along with PS Elements 3.0, so none of this applies to me.

Tags: Aperture, Photoshop, Automation