Using The Loupe

Just as a film photographer uses a loupea small magnifierto examine slides on a light table, you can use Aperture's virtual loupe to magnify your images.

You can activate the Aperture loupe by clicking the Loupe icon on the toolbar, but keyboard control is much easier. You can toggle the loupe on and off at any time by pressing the ~ (tilde) key. The loupe will appear and will follow your mouse around, magnifying the area at the mouse's position (Figure 2.28). If you move too close to the edge of the screen, the loupe will automatically reorient itself to fit on your monitor.

Figure 2.28. Drag Aperture's loupe over any image or thumbnail to see a 100 percent magnification.

Note that you can even use the loupe on thumbnails. Position the loupe over any thumb-nail in the Browser pane, and the loupe will magnify it just as if it were an image in the Viewer pane. This feature can be particularly handy for quickly checking a series of images to find the one with the best focus.

Tip

When you activate the loupe, it appears at the current mouse position. So if you want to examine a particular part of an image, simply position the mouse on that location and then press the ~ key. The ~ key is a toggle, so you can dismiss the loupe at any time by pressing it again.

You can change the size of the loupe, and thus the size of the magnified area, by pressing Command-+ or Command- - or by selecting View > Increase Diameter or View > Decrease Diameter (Figure 2.29). If you want the loupe to magnify to more than 100 percent, press Command-Shift-+. To turn the magnification back down, press Command-Shift- -.

Figure 2.29. You can change the size of the loupe by pressing Command- + or Command- -, and the magnification power of the loupe by pressing Command-Shift- + and Command-Shift- -.