Using Photo Ninja with Aperture 3


Photo Ninja can be used as an external editor for Aperture 3. When you choose to edit an image in Photo Ninja, Aperture will render a TIFF from the raw file and send the TIFF to Photo Ninja. You can configure Photo Ninja to ignore the TIFF and open the RAW file directly, and then overwrite the TIFF with the results. You can also embed Photo Ninja's settings in the TIFF so that you can re-edit the RAW file with the same settings if you send the TIFF back to Photo Ninja later.

External editor setup

To use Photo Ninja as an external editor for Aperture, follow these steps:

  1. In Aperture, configure Photo Ninja as an external editor.
  2. Make sure the file naming scheme for the intermediate TIFF matches one of the patterns described below.
  3. In Photo Ninja's Preferences dialog, go to the File Handling page and enable "Attempt to open/re-edit matching RAW file when JPEG/TIFF received from another application".
  4. When you render a JPEG/TIFF, make sure you check "Include Photo Ninja settings" in the Render dialog (in the Metadata section). This will embed editor settings in the JPEG/TIFF that are "linked" to the original raw file.
  5. In Aperture, right-click on a thumbnail and choose "Edit with Photo Ninja". This should launch Photo Ninja if it isn't already running, and send the image to it. If the image is a raw file, it will be opened directly. If it is a JPEG/TIFF and you have followed steps #2 and #3 above, then Photo Ninja will attempt to locate the matching raw file, and it will apply the linked settings that were embedded in the JPEG/TIFF.
  6. Make adjustments in Photo Ninja as usual.
  7. When you are finished, render over the TIFF that Aperture provided. The Quick Render button should already be pre-populated with the path and name of the intermediate TIFF.
  8. If you sent a JPEG/TIFF to Photo Ninja, then you can render the new adjustments on top of it. The Quick Render button should already be populated with the file name, path, and rendering settings.

Naming requirements for the intermediate TIFF

For the intermediate TIFF, you must configure Aperture to use one of the following naming schemes so that Photo Ninja can locate the RAW file:

NOTE: The "Re-edit original" functionality is described in more detail here.