Inside Aperture

Light Tables - what do you use them for?

Mon, 12 May 2008 09:31:03 -0800

When Aperture 1.0 came out and I was fiddling around with it, I came across the Light Table feature, played around with it for awhile and thought ‘neat!’, and then didn’t touch it for two years... Then, last week, I had a problem for which it was perfectly suited - viewing the source images for a matched set of stitched panoramas. I’d made a piece of work consisting of several upright panoramas along the local coast path. Now, normally I just dump all the images for a panorama in an Album, adjust one of them and lift-n-stamp the adjustments onto the other images - but this time I not only needed to do that but match the looks of the different panoramas as well.

I could have looked at all the images together in the Browser, but left-to-right grids and top-to-bottom-shot panoramas don’t combine too well, and I wanted to have an overview of how each panorama would look. Enter the Light Table. Using a Light Table let me group the shots for each pano and also preview how the panos would look as a set. Drag-selection of Versions on the Light Table also makes it easy to lift-n-stamp to one pano at a time.

After a bit of fiddling, I realised that the live guides would even help me line up each pano (they’d all been shot in exactly the same order in (almost) exactly the same relative positions.

This was really starting to come together as a handy tool! A couple of notes - to speed up performance, Quick preview mode was on - at this point I’m not doing any adjustments yet, just layout. Also, laying out each pano left-to-right, top-to-bottom automatically reduced the drop shadow’s appearance in each block, and hid the badges, although you can also turnoff the display of badges via View>Metadata>Customize...

If you add or click on them in the wrong order: It’s pretty easy to change the layering order - it’s based on the most recently selected image going to the top.

Add in the ability to hide all images that have already been added to the Table (the same as the option in the Book and Web Page Albums) and it’s speeding up a bit more. 120 images down, 60 to go...

A while later and all twenty panos are on the Table. Unfortunately it’s now too wide to see, even spread across two monitors... Ah yes, File>Print Light Table... and then Save as PDF... Unfortunately Print Light Table doesn’t appear to have the full set of PDF output options, so we can’t render out to a JPEG and import back into Aperture in one go. :-( Hmm. I hit ‘Preview’ so that I could use the PDF export menu from there, and just realised that Aperture’s going to render out ~180 RAW files into this PDF, it could be busy for awhile...

Quite a long time later a 1.3GB PDF file opened in Preview, at which point I decided that sticking some screengrabs together would have been a better idea... Ian P.S. If you’re wondering why this blog post went up so late in the day compared to normal, I’ve been getting the next version of Aperture Assistant out in time for the Apple Design Awards.

Out In The Streets

Fri, 09 May 2008 05:55:03 -0800

For the last couple of weeks I have been searching for the perfect street camera. I have been comparing three “point and shoot” cameras that could potentially fit the bill. I’ve been trying to make a decision as to which would serve a very specific purpose in my work, and although all fall just short of ideal they each seem to point toward a new class of camera that I am really excited about. The Niche There are a few requirements I have been longing for in a digital camera. Fitting this niche will always be difficult as consumers seems to look for other features than pros do, and the pro camera market is sort of focused around DSLRs at the moment. What I am after is essentially a compact camera with a fast and wide lens that creates beautiful files, worthy of printing for the walls of an art gallery. I need something I can take with me everywhere, that wont be a drag and that will continue to spark my creative juices. Oh, and it has to write a RAW file. The Sigma DP-1 The camera that looked most appealing to me at first was the Sigma DP-1. This camera has only been on the market a short while, but it was announced nearly a year ago and many enthusiasts had been eagerly awaiting its arrival. Well it’s here now, for around $800 dollars and it sure looks nice. It is certainly compact and discrete, and it has some really interesting features that sounded pretty great at first. Namely, its Foveon technology sensor, is what grabbed my attention. This is really the first compact camera to have a DSLR sized sensor built right in. A Foveon sensor differs in its design from most digital camera sensors in that it uses three separate layers of pixels to record the RG and B channels in an image. What this means is that each pixel is actually representative of the actual raw value that it captured. In nearly every other digital camera out there, a “Bayer” pattern of filters is layed over the sensor and interpolation is used to make a best guess as to what each RGB triplet should be for each pixel location. While the Foveon may record a more accurate view of the world, it makes a serious sacrifice in spatial resolution. The 14 megapixel sensor in the DP-1 results in around a 5 megapixel final image. It may be a crystal clear image, but its a crystal clear 5 megapixel image, nevertheless. But this wasn’t the biggest deal breaker for me. The DP-1 writes a RAW file, but one that is not currently supported by anyone but Sigma. You can’t convert it to a DNG using Adobe’s DNG converter, and Aperture hasn’t written support for it as of yet. In order to work with the Sigma’s RAW files you need to download their own processing software which can only write out a TIFF or JPEG. I just can’t imaging building this into my workflow. No way! The Ricoh GX-100 Another really appealing camera that fit this niche was the Ricoh GX-100. This little camera seemed to fit the bill. It has an optional electronic viewfinder, writes a DNG file natively, and a 24mm equivalent lens. Nice! There is a really extensive write-up about this camera over at Luminous Landscape (there are write ups on all three of the cameras I mention here at LL as well) and the writer makes some really good observations. My main gripe with this camera is the RAW write speed. If I am going to be shooting in RAW mode, I need at least a couple of frames in a burst I’m not going to be using this thing to shoot sports or anything like that, but there is a necessity for me to be able to capture a couple frames in a quick burst to keep the spontaneity of a shoot going. I am willing to wait for a couple of seconds for that next couple of frames, but I really need to be able to snap one and then another and then rest for as second. This really has to do with the way I prefer to shoot, and the interaction I get form my subjects. It’s a personal preference, but a must have for me. The Ricoh is also really hard to find. You can buy it online, but here in the DC Metropolitan area I wasn’t able to find a floor model anywhere. Most salespeople hadn’t even heard of it. That sort of scares me. The Canon G9 In case you haven’t guessed by now, the Canon G9 is the third camera that fits this very small niche. The G9 is nearly identical to its G7 predecessor, but they added one very important feature--it writes a RAW file. The G9 has all the markings of a perfect little pocket camera, but with a few added issues that make it a hard sell for me. Honestly these are all small peeves, and things that could be resolved in a firmware upgrade, but they are nevertheless, hard for me to get over. The main peeve with the Canon is that you really can’t turn off the LCD display. While the built in viewfinder may be pretty useless, an accessory hot-shoe mounted view-finder could really make this camera work for me. But I would really like to be able to turn of the view-finder while I worked in that mode. Apparently you can turn of the viewfinder, but this, reportedly causes the camera to slow down to a crawl. I haven’t tested this myself. On the upside the Canon probably makes the most sense. It is compatible with all of my existing Canon lighting equipment including the wireless TTL module I have for my flashes. It also works seamlessly with Aperture in RAW mode. You can shoot two quick frames in RAW mode before you have to wait for the buffer to unload, and at 12 megapixels, it certainly writes a decent sized file. Seriously, for around $480 bucks you can’t go wrong. There are already a bunch of great accessories for it and rapidly growing community of enthusiasts online, ready to answer questions and share results. While I don’t think the camera will fill the niche I have carved out perfectly, I will probably end up getting one as I think it would make a great notebook camera. Final Thoughts I would love to hear your thoughts on these cameras or other models that I have failed to mention here. I left out the Leica M8 as I think that for $5500 (for the body alone) the camera just isn’t there yet. The perfect camera for me is really a Leica M9, with a full frame BEAUTIFUL sensor, and all the ergonomics of its film predecessors. Until that model exists, I can’t see myself investing that much money in something substandard. The G9 will have to do for now. Hopefully it will fill that void between the little camera in my iPhone that I ALWAYS have with me, and my DSLR, that I just don’t like to lug around with me anymore unless I have to. Either way, these three cameras really do point toward a new class of camera. A "street-able," compact camera, pocket sized, that shoots RAW, works with Aperture, has a wide and fast lens (fixed is fine with me) and can produce large prints that I can hang on the wall. Hopefully the next iPhone will have a 12 megapixel APS-C sized sensor, with manual “touch” exposure controls and the ability to shoot at 2-fps in RAW mode indefinitely. Now that would be something! PS - The photo above was taken on the "streets" of Amsterdam with a Nikon D100 and a 20mm f/2.8 fixed lens.

Viveza Plug-In for Aperture v2.1

Thu, 08 May 2008 09:52:30 -0800

Nik Software released Viveza for Aperture yesterday. This is a plug-in that you’re going to want to give a test drive. It’s really pretty amazing software when you put it through its paces. I first saw a demo of Viveza a few months ago. Initially I was impressed and it struck me as an easy way to apply targeted adjustments without having to bother creating and finessing a layer mask in Photoshop. However I personally think layer masks are pretty easy to use, for the most part, so I wasn’t sure how much use the software would be to me. None-the-less there was one part of the demo that really stood out in my mind at the time ... and that was how they were able to modify a sky with just a few clicks. When I learned that they were working on a plug-in for Aperture, I was excited. Viveza makes it unbelievably easy to apply very sophisticated localized adjustments using a variety of parameters such as Brightness, Saturation, Contrast, Hue, Red, Green, Blue and Warmth. You click to create a Control Point and then set the sliders as you wish. You control the area to be impacted with a slider that appears to control brush size. But it’s actually quite a bit more than simple brush size. The software analyzes the content and applies the adjustments selectively within the area. If it goes too far and spills into an area you don’t want to affect, you simply add another Control Point and don’t make any changes on that control point. If you’ve ever struggled with making a precise selection for a mask and worried about feathering the edges, you’ll be impressed at how well Viveza works. In this image the hazy sky on the right detracts from the overall impact. To even out the sky I added a control point in the light area and then used the eyedropper to select the color that I wanted that area to be. (I sampled the sky at the left part.) The sky changed to a darker blue but I decided i wanted it to fade just a little, so I adjusted the sliders. The added blue spilled over onto the cliffs, so I added a Control Point and made no changes to it. The cliff returned to its original state. How easy can it get! Viveza is $249.95 but for that you get a version that works in both Photoshop and Aperture. Trial versions are available. At the very least download the trial and give it a go. The more you use it, I think the more you’re going to be impressed and realize it’s quite a time saver! The only downside (other than the price) that I've encountered is that some standard shortcuts that I rely on don't work - notably Command Z (undo!).

Aperture Makes You Better

Thu, 08 May 2008 09:28:02 -0800

I’ve been shooting for a very long time, and my enthusiasm for photography has only increased since picking up a camera at the age of 12 and somehow convincing my parents I can use the second bathroom as a darkroom in our small apartment. A lot has changed and most of us are no longer processing in the dark, but what has remained constant throughout the years, whether you use a D3, an 8x10 or an iPhone; it’s the content that counts, how you get there is up to you. Content is what it’s all about. Does the photograph work? Tell a story? Evoke emotion and/or say something? After shooting for so long, I sometimes make visual discoveries that surprise me. How can a street scene in Krakow Poland remind me of a landscape I shot in Alberta? When you shoot for a while you start to see connections between your work, as diverse as they sometimes are. This is how I think Aperture can actually make you a better photographer. I am not afraid to make many Albums in Aperture, since Albums take only a little “byte” out of your hard drive. By creating new albums you can easily experiment with ideas and series by placing as many new images together in as many albums as you want. There’s still only one master file. From the "Love" Album created in Aperture. Photos Copyright Steve Simon This freedom lets you experiment. For example, I noticed I had quite a few photographs of people kissing. I created an album called “Love” which allows me to put any and all photos on the subject in that album. When I start to see enough images start to form into a body of work, which fuels the fire to go out and get more images on the theme. You can connect images visually or create themes like textures, storefronts, door knobs, whatever it is you notice you keep shooting. Before you know it the album has grown to the point where you might want to do something with the work, or get serious by focusing on that theme or album. When you’ve got enough material, you might consider using the amazing Books feature in Aperture to create a book to shop around as an exhibition, or just to show off to friends, family or editors. Can Aperture make you a better photographer? In many ways, I think it can.

Black Point and Shadows

Wed, 07 May 2008 05:00:00 -0800

I've shooting lately in very rough lighting conditions. From shooting kiteboarders in black wetsuits, towards the west, over water, around 1-3pm in hazy conditions to shooting them against the setting sun, it's been one exposure challenge after another. As I've been working with the images, trying to get the best results possible, I've found a nice exposure adjustment trick that I wanted to share.

The situation I'm often facing is that I need to open up a stop or so to get detail in the person's face, and I'm ok with parts of the water going white. But when processing the images, I want to preserve the dark part of their wetsuit along with the detail in their face. Just making an exposure adjustment (compensating down) wouldn't work, because that would make the white areas gray, and I don't want that.

Here's a sample image where I was trying to retain some color in the sky while also keeping detail in the rider. This isn't quite as extreme as some of the images I've been working with (see my images in the latest issue of The Kiteboarder for an example of extreme lighting), but it's a good shot to see the difference between these two adjustment techniques.

After exposure, the next adjustment thought that comes to mind is to use levels to tweak the image--bring the black point in and then adjust the quarter tones to restore the detail in the face. Unfortunately, even when I tweak individual channels, I tend not to get results that look good with levels; I sometimes see weird color artifacts for example. In this second image, I've exaggerated the effect, but you can see what I mean. Instead, what I've found to work really well is a mix of black point and shadows. I start by adjusting the black point until all of the areas that I want to be black are black. Then, I pull the shadows slider to take the areas that aren't black and restore detail in them. This last image shows what that adjustment looks like. It's really amazing to see how much detail is available for us to work with in modern RAW files!

Let there be ... DFT Light!

Tue, 06 May 2008 20:47:44 -0800

Drab and gray? Flat? No highlights? It can happen. Maybe you're on location, and it's getting late and the light is fading fast. Or, you're in the studio and there's not enough strobes for the kind of setup you want. It really is frustrating when you can't shoot right just because the light is not right. On location, it would, of course, be fantastic if you can get done while there's still available light. Or, when in the studio, the light setup is complete and up to your specs. But if you're running out of luck, it is at least good to know that a post-production editing plug-in that can touch up, improve or cure a photograph's lighting is now available. This plug-in, made available to Aperture users, is DFT's Light! So now, with DFT's Light! plug-in, you can just go ahead with the shoot, dial the exposure right, and capture as much detail as possible even if the light is not up to snuff. The usual advise works: Get the brightest image without blowing up the highlights, top that with an interesting subject or an interesting composition, and you are good to go. DFT's Light! can then work its magic on your pictures in post-production. The idea is, with a few tweaks, you can quickly and easily add the right light you want in your pictures. And, by playing around a bit, it is even possible that you might see other or better lighting possibilities that you may have never before imagined. The award-winning technology that now allows you to do this in Aperture is not new. DFT's Lights! has been available as a Photoshop plug-in for quite some time now. And now, you can already install and use this tool from within Aperture as well. Because of what DFT's Lights! can do, it is actually possible that this plug-in might end up being one of the most essential and most-used in your expanding arsenal of tools to help you spruce up flat and lifeless images directly from inside Aperture. DTF's Lights! contains an extensive library of 567 pre-built lights and textures created by Gamproducts, Inc. This includes all sorts of commonly shaped blendables, breakups, Christmas, cityscapes and towns, clouds, fences and openings, fire and water, flags, flowers, foliage, holidays and symbols, moons, natural elements, religion, signage, sky and stars, spirals, spotlights and pinspots, stones and bricks, structures and sets, themes, tress, vignettes and windows. This is all well and good, as you spend time figuring out which shape to use, but in the process, you might easily overlook one important thing which is built right into the DFT Light! plug-in: the GamColor system. You can, and you should, take advantage of this sophisticated color system that simulates the front-of-light use of colored filters and gels designed to evoke a mood and achieve the desired effect. The digital equivalent of the lighting gels can be quickly and easily applied--running the visible spectrum of nine color selections with circular classification of colors logically arranged by hue, referencing the primaries, secondaries and important subdivisions. As you work in and master DFT's Light!, using extensively both the gobo patterns and the color system, You can begin to create and add in this step in post-production, a user-selected pre-defined shaped lights/shadows as well as colors. With your own pre-defined settings, you can easily apply any of these to any of your photographs, figure out which works best, and then, tweak it some more. You'd be able to almost magically add realistic lighting and shadows to any of your photographs, just as if you were adding lights and shadows and using actual and real colored gels at the time of the shoot. If it's impossible, difficult or expensive to setup real lights, the virtual lights (and shadows) as well as virtual colored screen gels of DTF's Light! will come to the rescue. Because of DFT's Light!, I've recently been going through my previous shots, selecting a few images that I like but have not picked because of less than ideal lighting. I want to see how much of an improvement I can give my not-too-perfectly-lit photos with this plug-in. Here now is the right tool that I can use to turn these photos around. Other than that of course, I can also imagine that this plug-in will come in handy whenever I shoot with imperfect lighting conditions in the studio or on location. The DFT Light! plug-in seems very capable of producing the kind of stunning lighting that appears natural in order to save the images. It is simple to activate the DFT Light! plug-in. Just select the image and press Right-Click, or, press Option-Click. You can also initiate the plug-in from Aperture's Toolbar. Press Images, and from the drop-down menu, select Edit With, and then DFT Light! The editing interface comes up, and you can go straight to work. I just have one observation about the convenience and ease-of-use of editing tools such as the quick-to-use plug-ins: While the editing tools and the technology behind them have been around for quite some time, translated from analog to digital, and then adapted as a plug-in tool, the adaptation of these editing capabilities into easily accessible and convenient add-on tools changes the nature of photography's "final image." Nowadays, there is no longer a single final image. Any one of the 5-star rated images in Aperture can now be versioned into many different final images, endlessly repurposing each adaptive, edited version for a thousand and one variety of usage. Depending on the need and the purpose, images can be further custom-made into a new final version, and there won't be an end to it. The technology is there. It is a technology solution that is now looking for a problem to solve. Digital Films Tools, the company that created and brought DFT Light! plug-in to Aperture, is composed of software designers, motion picture visual effects veterans, video editors and photographers. With an impressive background that includes three Emmy Awards combined with years of experience in creating visual effects for hundreds of feature films, commercials and television shows, their products are designed with the needs of the visual and imaging professionals in mind. The right ingredients are all there: understanding of photography, film and video editing, particularly visual effects, They want to produce software that is useful and easy to use. And the company is on a mission: to put visual effects tools and techniques into the hands of as many visual and imaging professionals an hobbyists as possible at an affordable price. The technology that was once found only in expensive high-end packages or as propriety in-house tools are now availabe to the photographers with this plug-in. If I were to rate DFT's Light!, I'll give it a 4 out of 5 rating. You should try it, as well as DFT's two other plug-ins, Ozone and PowerStroke. Head over to the Aperture plug-in page of their website, download the free trial version, and see for yourself how it works. [Note: Photo in screenshot by Dominique James of The Studio and The Playground. Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.]

The iTunes Analogy

Mon, 05 May 2008 04:50:18 -0800

Aperture’s virtual filing/organisational structure can be quite intimidating when you first experience it, but as new as this seemed when Aperture first came out nearly two and a half years ago, it was firmly rooted in existing Apple software and concepts - iTunes (and to some extent, the Finder). Aperture’s various ‘containers’ (Blue Folders, Projects, Brown Folders and Albums) fit quite closely to equivalent structures in iTunes. Project = iTunes Library It’s the main ‘home’ of images/songs (or videos, of course), it’s the place you go to to view all those images/songs. The basic building block, if you like. Obviously the analogy breaks down in places as you don’t have multiple iTunes Libraries open or searchable at once but it’s pretty close, and helps explain some of the constraints and limitations of images and Projects in Aperture. For instance, importing images. Many people struggle with the ‘limitation’ that you always have to import into a Project (or an Album in a Project, more on that later). Think in terms of iTunes Libraries and it makes perfect sense - bring a song into iTunes, where is it going to live but in the main Library? You could put it in a Playlist as well but Playlists are pretty clearly just collections of things from the Library. Albums = Playlists While we’re talking about Playlists... Albums make extremely closely to Playlists - they are both temporary collections drawn from the Project/iTunes Library and are not where things actually ‘live’. You can add the same item to as many Albums or Playlists as you want, and it doesn’t increase the number of items because Albums/Playlists only contain references back to the ‘home’ of the images. ‘I changed my image in an Album and it changed everywhere!’. Yep. As we’ve seen above, there’s only the one Version, no matter how many places it appears - would you expect to change the name of a song in a Playlist and expect it to keep the old name in all the other Playlists it’s in? In the same way, this explains the behaviour that confuses many people when trying to move images from one Project to another by dragging them into an Album in the new Project - as Albums only ever refer back to the originals, adding something to an Album will never move the original. To move the home of the image to the new Project you need to drag the images to the top level of that Project. Tip - to copy the images instead of moving them you can use the same Option/Alt-drag as you can to copy items in the Finder and many other apps such as Keynote or Pages. Smart Albums and Smart Playlists don’t really need any extra description, apart from the scope of Smart Albums being based on where they were created - if you want the Smart Album to search through the entire Aperture Library you need to create it at the top of the Library. Folders = Folders Unfortunately I can’t remember when Folders were added to iTunes, but the parallels are clearly there. Well, mostly. Folders in both applications are there as ways of collecting together other containers - you can’t actually drag images or songs into them. Beyond that, they differ slightly in that Aperture has two distinct types of Folder while iTunes only has the one. Blue Folders - these are mostly used for collection together multiple Projects, a function which has no equivalent in iTunes because you are only working with a single iTunes Library at once. Like iTunes Folders, selecting the Folder itself will show you the content of everything inside the Folder, making a convenient way to search through a set of projects at once. Blue Folders can also contain Albums, and this is quite a useful way of making a Smart Album that looks through specific Projects - move a Project into the Blue Folder and the Smart Album will automatically add it to the search. Note that trying to import images into a Blue Folder-level Album won’t work - the Album isn’t in a Project, so there’s no logical way for Aperture to know which Project the images should be stored in. Brown Folders - live inside Projects and therefore can’t contain Projects. The only thing they can contain is Albums. In Aperture 1.5.6 and older, selecting a Brown Folder didn’t show you the content of the Albums, this was only added in 2.0. Like Blue Folders you can’t add images to Brown Folders, they are just for collecting together Albums. In fact I wonder if Blue and Brown Folders should have been given some name other than ‘Folder’ as it makes everyone expect them to behave like a Finder folder. That’s my take on it, anyway. Ian P.S. It's worth noting that the Finder (and indeed Windows Explorer, Linux equivalents etc.) is also a form of virtual organisation - when you move a file from one folder to another on the same partition nothing is physically moved - all that happens is that the files that keep track of which file is where are given the new 'folder path' of the file. So Aperture's internal organisation is a virtual structure on top of a virtual structure... ;-)

PDF Services Provide Big Bonus for Aperture Users

Fri, 02 May 2008 12:04:35 -0800

You may have missed that the "Save as PDF" button has changed to a PDF pop-up menu in the Print dialog box for the Book tool. There are a few things going on here, many of which I'll cover in next week's podcast with Joe Schorr. But to help you prepare for that show, I want to spend a couple minutes with PDF Services right now.

The PDF Services folder is located in the Library at the root level. Inside that folder are a handful of Automator workflows that you can tap directly from the Book tool in Aperture 2.1. Little goodies such as, "Save PDF to folder as JPEG" offer you a whole new set of goodies.

It's especially powerful now because the book making tools have been beefed up. Essentially what you have is a layout program that enables you to design custom pages with your images embedded, then output them just about anyway you can imagine. You want a series of photos with the captions on the images themselves for a slideshow? No problem. Design the pages in the Book tool, then use PDF Services to output the individual pages to JPEGs.

Additional workflows available for Aperture.

You can grab additional workflows from www.apple.com/applescript/aperture, such as "Render PDF as Images to Keynote." And if that wasn't cool enough, you can open these workflows in Automator, adjust them to taste, then save as new workflows... and they will appear in your PDF pop-up menu with the others.

More on this in next week's podcast. I thought you might want to play a bit this weekend first.

Go further...

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 21:38:28 -0800

The Aperture Adjustments sliders give you a wide range of control for fixing most images well within the range of the slider. It doesn’t happen very often, but there are times when you’ve moved the slider to the far left or right, and it’s not enough to correct that particular image. It is not all that well known, but if you hover the cursor over the data to the right of the sliders, you’ll notice the cursor icon changes. Then, when you click on your laptop trackpad or mouse, it changes again into a two-way arrow which, when dragged to the right or left, extends the range of certain sliders. Here are the sliders that will go beyond their normal range: White Balance normally from 2,500 to 10,000 degrees Kelvin, will extend from 2,000 to 50,000. Tint normally lets you adjust from -50 to 50, but can extend from -150 to 150. Exposure range is normally - 2.00 to 2.00. but will allow you to go from -9.99 to 9.99! The other sliders that go above, below and beyond the normal range include Brightness, Contrast, Saturation and when changing Colors, Hue, Luminance and Range. You might rarely need the extra adjustment room, but it’s nice to know it’s there when you need it.

Stacks and Filtering

Wed, 30 Apr 2008 05:00:42 -0800

Although Aperture has offered stacks all along, it’s a feature that I personally haven’t used a lot. But last week I was doing a lot of spring flower photography and experimenting with narrow depth of fields. In some cases I wanted to combine a series of those shots using software such as Helicon focus . So I’ll tell you about my missteps in hopes that they save you some grief. I went through and labeled some of the images with various numbers of stars, and then organized some of them into stacks. I made sure to give the first image in the stack 4 or 5 stars to remind myself that I wanted to use that stack and then closed the stacks. I continued sorting through my images and applying ratings. When finished, I set the filter to show only the 4 or 5 star images. I was all set to start to use those stacks and create the depth of field composites. Although several of my stacks appeared, I couldn’t open them. Instead I’d see the dark background, indicative of a stack, and an icon indicating something like 1 of 6. From the title of this blog and the way I’ve written it, you probably know what the issue was ... the filter was blocking the other unrated, or lesser rated images from displaying. Honestly - this is logical behavior on Aperture’s part, but it did have me perplexed for awhile. The better workflow is to create the stacks first, close the stack and then apply a rating to the stack. That way when you apply the filter, the stacks appear and you can open them as expected. I have to admit that when scanning through a project, seeing similar images stacked together gives a far more organized, less overwhelming view. However, I’m probably going to limit stacks to those images that I want to use for a composite. Otherwise it might become far too easy to forget to delete similar pictures that I don’t need. That clutter is kind of an annoying, but useful reminder to cleanup and delete images I don’t need. (I’m the kind of person who leaves the clutter on my desk to remind me what I need to do, rather than carefully filing everything away so that I can quickly forget about it!) If you’re more disciplined than I am, you might like using stacks more often. One other thing I want to mention is that Josh and I just announced a workshop to photograph Northern Lights and Fall tundra. Seeing, let alone photographing, an aurora is an awesome experience. Details are available at my website www.ellenanon.com

Framing the picture with Aperture BorderFX

Tue, 29 Apr 2008 08:00:00 -0800

While a lot of interest and excitement is now focused on the awesome capabilities of new editing plug-ins for Aperture, particularly with the recent introduction of Apple's Dodge & Burn, DFT's Power Stroke, Ozone and Lights!, as well as Tiffen's amazing collection of filters in the Dfx Digital Filter Suite, many might have overlooked that a lot of the old export plug-ins for Aperture are getting an upgrade. One export plug-ins recently updated and upgraded is Reinhard Uebel's Aperture BorderFX. Aperture BorderFX is a unique plug-in that allows you to add border, as well as text, copyright notice and watermark, when exporting an image. The latest version, which is now at 1.1 and is fully compatible with Aperture 2.1, includes added functionalities. You can do almost all common tasks associated with creating a frame or border using the Aperture BorderFX. The features of the previous version, as well as the added features of the current version, are all designed to allow the easy and quick creation of straight edge or rounded-corner border styles with a certain degree of flexibility. You can do many things to a selected image as you prepare to export it with a border. Among them includes image scaling, horizontal or vertical flipping, adding a drop shadow, applying sharpening, re-framing the image, cropping the photo, including title and copyright texts, and drawing a watermark. These features will help you create stylish borders beginning with the basic black. You can then add to it or modify it with strokes, rounded corners, translucent edges, dropped shadows, desaturated frames, letterboxed lines, lines of photo titles and captions, transparent watermarks, and so on. In addition, you can create your own border presets, and, then export the images in a number of supported formats from JPEG to PNG and TIFF. When you export, you can include both the EXIF and IPTC metadata, including keywords, in the exported files. This is all well and good. However, Aperture BorderFX does not yet include the more fancy and themed "rough border edges" such as photographic edges simulating that of various 135mm film strips, 120mm medium format transparencies, and large-format films, as well as frames that shows brushed, perforated cut, and burnt edges. This feature, however, may likely be introduced in future editions via image-masking. While this is something we can hope to expect in the near future, meanwhile, the current straight and rounded-edge black boarders with line, translucent, shadowed and desaturated variations, are great additions that can set off your images and make them stand out, without the need for round-tripping to a full-blown editing software. If I were to rate this plug-in, I'd give it a 4 out of 5. Knowing that I can easily and quickly add borders and lines from within Aperture when I need is always a good thing. And because it's free (although donations to fund the continued development of this plug-in are accepted via PayPal), there's no reason why Aperture BorderFX should not be installed in everyone's Aperture. Download Aperture BorderFX now from Apple's Aperture Download page, and from Reinhard Eubel's Aperture BorderFX official website. [Note: Photo in screenshot by Dominique James of The Studio and The Playground. Copyright © 2008. All rights reserved.]

Anatomy of an Interface

Mon, 28 Apr 2008 08:21:23 -0800

Aperture has a very ‘particular’ interface. We all know by now about doing colour corrections against a neutral background, in fact most books on digital colour always recommended setting your desktop picture to a mid-grey. But is there more to Aperture’s greyscale GUI (graphical user interface) than first appears? I think there is. Following on from last week’s slightly dismissive comments about DFX’s Aperture plug-in interface, I though I’d have a closer look at the Aperture interface, from a designer’s and user’s point of view. The regular interface, that is - bringing fullscreen mode into this is just going to complicate things... So, it’s grey. Actually, it’s lots of different greys. Several main greys, and then a whole bunch of more subtle tones. By the way, a neat way of looking at screen colours, if you’re interested, is to fire up DigitalColor Meter from the Utilities folder, but note that it’s showing screen colours, so don’t expect accurate RGB values for the original colour space of an image. Grey 1 - Projects/Metadata/Adjustments pane. At 74.9%, this is the palest ‘block’ of grey in the interface. This is especially noticeable when displaying a short metadata view, leaving a large expanse of flat colour. Designer observation - look carefully at the Projects pane and you may be able to make out a difference between the tab at the top of the pane and the actual list of Projects etc. - at 74.1% the list area is just that fraction darker to make it sink back slightly. Grey 2 - ‘the twiddly bits above and below the panes’. Sitting at 74.5%, these are the area below the Viewer pane which hold the tool buttons, the area above the Browser pane which holds the view order, view type and search fields, and the area at the bottom of the Browser pane which holds the thumbnail size slider, the number of images selected and the number of images displayed. Basically, much of the outer framework of the image viewing areas. Designer observation - look at the tops and bottoms of these areas and see how the embossing helps differentiate these areas from the filler spaces between them. Designer observation 2 - the filler space isn’t a flat colour! It’s mostly 69%, making it enough darker than the twiddly bits for contrast, but if both the Viewer and Browser panes are visible, there’s a gradient leading up to the middle, just about bringing our eye to the grabbable divider marker in the middle. I’d not actually noticed that until researching this post. Grey 3 - the Browser pane background. Obviously, this is configureable from the preferences, but the default setting of 33% is pretty good and I don’t often come across people changing it. Designer observation - there’s another grey (22%) for the surroundings of opened Stacks, but it’s not as dark as: Grey 4 - the Viewer pane. Again, this can be changed but most people use the default 18% setting. Note how the closer we get to the actual image, the darker the interface gets? It’s consistent enough that there’s no way this is an accident - the tonality appears to be designed to give us a clear progression showing how close we are to viewing the image itself. The Loupe The Loupe is a special case - it’s a totally non-standard interface item - it’s not a window or palette but can move around, it’s not a button, slider, text field or any of the other things you normally find in an application. On the other hand, it fits right into the ‘the darker it is, the closer you are to the image’ concept. At ~12% it’s the darkest thing we’ve seen so far, and is clearly the closest we’re getting to the image, short of zooming in to 100% or going fullscreen. Designer observation - the the loupe is slightly transparent it’s not too easy to get an exact figure. The slight drop-shadow helps reinforce the idea that this is not a conventional UI element, while the tiny 1px lighter grey border inside and out help distinguish the edges of the Loupe from almost any tone of image. Text Fields Aperture uses a lighter tone for it’s text fields such as the ones in the Metadata tab, presumably for a greater contrast with the black text in them. Like most Mac applications, Aperture uses reduced contrast as a signal when the controls aren’t available, for instance if there is no image selected. In the same way, the adjustment bricks get ‘greyed-out’ with offline Masters or in Quick Preview mode. Designer observation - make sure there are no images selected and swap between the Metadata and Adjustment tabs - the entirety of the adjustment bricks grey out, but not the tag titles in the Metadata pane. Designer observation 2 - pick a metadata view which contains both editable tags such as IPTC data and non-editable tags such as EXIF data, the default ‘general’ view is good for this. As well as the tonal difference between the fields (the EXIF ones are only a couple of percent lighter than the background) there are other visual differences - the non-editable fields have no hint of embossing, and are very slightly rounded, compared to the angular, embossed editable fields. The difference is still visible when you’ve clicked off an image and the whole lot is greyed out. In summary, Aperture's interface is full of little visual tweaks and details that aren't initially visible but can make a big difference in guiding the user towards the application's use, presumably making use of the same 'affordance' design concepts that the physical design of the various Macs is based on so strongly. And that's not including the HUDs... maybe next week. ;-) Ian

New Views

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 06:19:34 -0800

This past week and a half has been a blur. I am finally settled into my new apartment in Baltimore and just beginning to be able to relax. Between shipping our dogs and all of our belongings, traveling up the east coast from Miami and opening up our new apartment, I have had just about zero time to think. But now it’s done. We are in, our stuff is here, our power is on and most importantly, the Internet works! Two days ago I picked up an iPhone, which I now think may be the coolest thing I own. It’s a great companion for someone new to a city. Yesterday I found myself stuck out on the front porch, waiting for the Baltimore Gas & Electric guy to arrive somewhere between the hours of 8 and 4. Around noon, I used the phone to locate the closest pizza place with Google maps and 45 minutes later a pizza arrived. Very cool. While I was sitting on the porch I had some time to play around with the camera, which I think is actually quite good for what it is. I know this is all old news as the iPhone has been out for nearly a year now, but it’s all new to me! The little camera in that phone is going to make a great notebook/sketch tool. So this post is really about photography. While I was sitting out on the porch I started thinking about what I wanted to start working on. There is so much going on in this city, and I am living right in the middle of it. Do I just start shooting whatever I see? Or, should I pick a theme and try and stick with it? I’m going to be living here for at least the next two years, so I should probably make a go of documenting the area in which I live. The location of my apartment is just north of the Mt. Vernon area in Baltimore. It’s close enough that I can walk down to get coffee and food and there are good street photography opportunities all over the place. It’s a pretty vibrant neighborhood. So that is one option. I could just shoot the city. There are also all sorts of social issues going on here that I could focus on, but those require more research. I’m sure it will all come with time, but I am so eager to get out there and take some pictures. So eager in fact that I am planning to walk around this afternoon with my iPhone and get started on my sketchbook. I will probably make a new project in Aperture called “iPhone Sketchbook” or something like that, and maybe I will sync those pictures with a flickr photoset, or .Mac web gallery. It could be a nice way to keep tabs on things. Having the iPhone in my pocket means I always have a camera ready to go. I have tried in the past to be one of those photographers who carries their camera with them everywhere they go, but it just never worked out. A SLR is just too big and bulky to cary around all the time. What’s more is that the iPhone seems to be pretty discrete. People can’t really tell when you are using the camera. It just looks like you are using the phone for something else. So it is pretty stealthy. Yes, it seems to blow out highlights and the files is really small, but if you use it with some caution it can certainly take a decent picture. Again, a great sketchbook tool. Eventually I am going to want to start using something with better quality. Maybe my Canon, or maybe something else. I’m really not sure what at the moment, and I am trying not to think about it. But for now, it will be all iPhone pics all day long. Maybe I can get one of those small photo printers and hang the iPhone pics out in my hallway. Ah, it’s great being back in the U.S. I have access to all this stuff again. I’m re-energized creatively speaking. I’ve got the next two years to photograph a city I’ve never lived in. This is going to be fun! The photo above is my new view from our new studio/apartment in Baltimore's arts district. Not quite the same view I had before, but at least I still have a view!

Tethering with Aperture, Fun and Easy

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 21:01:09 -0800

I wanted to demonstrate some different flash effects in the class I teach, bounce, direct, off-camera, side light, scary light from below, etc., and I planned to photograph a student and import the images into Aperture to talk about the results. But of course, there’s a much better way to do this demo if you remember that Aperture supports “tethering”, which means it instantly imports the picture just after it is shot, in full screen glory - all in real time with the camera connected to the computers’ USB port. I know that studio/commercial/advertising photographers are tethering on a regular basis, but this was my first time and for some reason I expected it to be complicated, but it was simple. You just connect a supported camera (click here to see if your camera is supported) via a USB cable and your camera will pop up above your local drive in the import window. Go to File>Tether > Start Session and the Tether Settings HUD will pop up. You can then add metadata much like regular importing, to each image you shoot and bring in to Aperture. That’s it. As you shoot there’s a slight delay and the image you just shot is in your library and up on the screen. When your camera is tethered you’ll see a little camera icon appear next to the project or album you choose to place the live images. You can even fire the camera from the computer, clicking on the “Capture” button in the Tether HUD. Aside from the obvious uses for working with clients, it’s great for teachers who want to show specific effects of lighting for example or how different focal lengths or lens to subject distances will effect your end results.

Lift and Stamp Tip

Wed, 23 Apr 2008 05:00:00 -0800

It's funny how when you don't use a tool for a while, you forget about certain features. In this case, I'm talking about Lifting and Stamping a specific change. For those of you who haven't used the Lift and Stamp tool before, it's a quick way to lift adjustments or metadata from one image and stamp those values onto multiple other images at once. A common use case is that you want to set the white balance to the same value on multiple images. When you pull up the Lift tool (choose Metadata > Lift Metadata & Adjustments), you see a window with different sections for different types of metadata and adjustments as well as checkboxes next to each adjustment. It's fairly clear that you can check and uncheck different sections, e.g RAW Fine Tuning, and when you stamp onto another image, Aperture will only stamp the checked sections. What's less obvious is if you only want to lift one setting within a section. As an example, if you have an image that you cropped, adjusted the exposure, and changed the while balance on, how would you just lift and stamp the white balance onto other images? The checkbox in the window is for Adjustments, and if you uncheck it, you won't lift any adjustments.

Well, the feature I forgot about (and a co-worker reminded me of earlier yesterday) is that within the Lift and Stamp window, you can open up each section, select the items you do NOT want to stamp onto other images, and press the Delete key. Aperture will remove the item from the table. Going back to our previous example, I would select the crop item, press Delete, select the exposure item, press Delete, and then stamp the remaining item, white balance, onto the desired images. Keep in mind that when you delete an item, it's not undoable. If you mess up, you'll have to start over by selecting the Lift tool again. I know I won't forget about this again :)