How do I erase a photo background?

Aperture does not support transparency, layers, and alpha channels - it is not a program for graphics compositing. Aperture excells at developing and adjusting your raw image to a printable image, but for compositing you are supposed to send your image to an external editor (Photoshop, Gimp, Pixelmator, ...) or to use an editing plug-in. And yes, you can only crop to rectangular sections.

What is it that you want to do? If you do not need transparency, just want to make the background of a subject less distracting, you can use brushes to brush in local adjustments (blur, colors, saturation). Or use the retouche brush to remove annoying details.

Regards

Léonie

Marilyn,

I have to be off to work now, but I'll come back later, unless somebody else answered you question by then.

What I love to use Aperture for is to organize my images, so I can easily retrieve them. I have all images from childhood till now in one single database, neatly organized. And it is easy to create slideshows, books, prints.

What Aperture can do is preprocessing: noise reduction, white balance correction, straighten the horizon, cropping, retouching, enhance the lighting, sharpening : improve the image in any way, but it does not combine sepate images into one - composing images.

Regards

Léonie

Hi Marilyn,

Aperture is not what you think it is -- sorry. It is a superb program, but that may be like being given perfume when you are hungry.

Aperture does two things extremely well:

- it allows photographers to organize for storage and access digital photograph negatives (files) and developed pictures. It does this more efficiently, and with more powerful tools, than any program on the market.

- it allows photographers to develop each digital negative (the data file from the camera) into the very best picture possible (the photographer, of course, determines this).

If you need to manage a collection of digital photographs (files), or process (in another word: develop) picture files made by a digital camera in order to prepare them for publication or print, Aperture can be a stalwart helpmate, worth many times the cost of purchase.

Aperture is not, however, a graphics program. You do not use Aperture to create new graphics entities by combining pieces (whether they come from photographs, a text engine, drawing tools, etc.). For that you need a graphics program (Photoshop is the most widely-known; look at GIMP (free) and Pixelmator (very popular)). You can get Photoshop Elements for the Mac. Graphics programs are designed from the ground up as compositors. Aperture is not a compositor.

Almost everyone who uses Aperture owns a graphics program as well (often several 🙂 ). Aperture provides a bridge to and from these programs, either by designating one as the "External Editor" or through the use of Plug-ins. Nevertheless, more and more photographers are discovering that they can do well over 90% of their work without having to leave Aperture (or its close competitor, Adobe's Lightroom).

Depending on what you are really trying to accomplish, you might be able to do it in Preview. Preview has a tool called Instant Alpha. Open Preview Help and search for "Extract an image from its background".

As someone who just came over from Dell and pse10 I would say you have not made a mistake so much as an investment. Aperture using PSE10 for Mac as an external editor would be a stunning combination. I would bet you will soon use Aperture for all adjustments apart from lasso and layer work.

Fortunately my PSE came with two sets of discs for PC and mac so I am in heaven.

I would also say PSE Organizer is appalling in comparison.

OT: I wonder if you can use your PSE for PC serial number on downloaded trial PSE for Mac? You would need to uninstall from PC whilst online like I did.

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