O'Reilly Digital Media

A little while ago I wrote an article about my experience using esession.com, a web-based “virtual recording studio”. Esession struck me as having a very well-integrated collection of professional features. Now comes esession.com Version 2, and it looks like it’s going to be better - largely by incorporating more non-professional features. (Disclosure: esession founder Gina Fant-Saez has become a friend and musical collaborator, with my band The Desert Mothers, so while I can comfortably pass along news like the following, I’m out of the esession-reviewing business.)

I don’t usually recommend audio products in this post. But I think you’ll agree, this is an important milestone.

Without doubt, the most welcomed features of Aperture 2.0 are several new image adjustment features included in the program You can almost close your eyes and point them out because they’re so clearly evident. While I greatly welcome the new Lightroom-like features such as vignetting and vibrancy, when I tried out the little feature called Definition, all I could say was, sweeeet.

We all know that both Aperture and Lightroom basically make adjustments to the entire image when they are applied, but with Aperture 2.0, Apple has included Definition as a way of adding local contrast when adjusting an image. Basically it seems to add more contrast to a Contrast adjustment. While the latter affects the entire image, the Definition adjustment affects more local areas, helping to further get rid of haze in the photo.

You can see the changes when applied, but sometimes using the Loupe tool will help you see the changes even better.

Before Definition adjustment:

After Definition adjustment

When I read that Aperture 2.0 had been released today, I couldn’t resist setting aside responsibilities today so that I could get my hands on the updated version. After spending a couple of hours with 2.0, I can honestly that despite its “over 100 dramatic, new features” there’s little or no learning curve to getting up and running with the updated program.

If you’re avid Apple use, and if you have been using a previous version of Aperture for a while, then you’ll feel right at home with 2.0. However, if you need to know more about the new features, such as setting up your camera for tethered shooting or customizing keyboard shortcuts for Aperture, there’s no better place to look than Apple’s very own resource page of video tutorials.

Rarely have I seen a software program receive such a wealth of audiovisual tutorial support, for free! With these tutorials available on Apple’s site, you can always have access to them as you learn about the new features. While these tutorials may not take the place of a good manual book on the program, they make for a very thorough introduction.

To start with, I took a straight studio shot of a rare double hellebore blossom (immediately below). The flower is one of the first blossoms from the second year blooms of these special hellebore plants, hybridized by Barry Glick of Sunshine Farm and Garden, the self-styled “Hellebore King.” I photographed the blossom using a backlighting setup on partially reflective lucite with a black background.

The capture information: 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm terms), 1 second at f/36 and ISO 100, tripod mounted using a Kirk Mighty Low Boy.

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When I saw the photo on my monitor, I like the way it came out. But I definitely needed to play with the image in Photoshop (below and far below).

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I often get asked about the techniques I use to get effects like these. I’ve no desire to be mysterious about it. But the precise steps I use are different every time. It’s a process, when it’s working right, that feels like the image is calling out to me, and revealing the steps as I go along necessary to reveal the inner image. You could say that I am the image’s therapist, taking the external image and revealing its inner self.

Also the case: if you tell me that you prefer my straight starting place, I won’t be offended.

There is some commonality in the techniques I usually use. I start by photographing (or scanning) for high depth-of-field and transparency. I then work on the image in Photoshop using a variety of blending modes with duplicated inversions of LAB channels.

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The influence of Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi’s thinking on flow continues to spread. Partly, no doubt, because learning to say his name (”Me-high Chick-sent-me-high”) is a flow experience in itself: just the right amount of challenge, and a satisfying experience once it’s accomplished.

I joined a then-growing list of writers on the topic in late 2004, relating an effort at Project BarBQ to apply the principles of flow to musical instrument design, and since then have returned to it now and then, including via the still-in-beta Flow Awards.

Now comes Jim Ramsey, lead designer of Movable Type blogging software, applying flow-oriented thinking to website design (and by extension many forms of design), in a useful and thought-provoking post at A List Apart.

Ramsey identifies 4 principles:

1. Set clear goals
2. Provide immediate feedback
3. Maximize efficiency
4. Allow for discovery

One example, under the heading “Maximize efficiency”:

Google Reader has several features that make it feel fast and effortless. Perhaps the best example is the “endless scroll.” It eliminates the need for pagination by fetching new articles as you scroll down the page so that you can read all the articles in a tag or feed without ever clicking to go to a new page. The user never has to disrupt their reading by clicking a link to the next page.

Another way that Google Reader ensures efficiency is through the email feature which, when clicked, appears directly below the article and allows you to send a story to a friend without losing your place. Google avoids causing a disruption in flow by reducing the mental cost of taking an action, thereby promoting more engaged use of the site.

I am in Chicago this week, doing a photo shoot for the campaign of Fusion. Fusion is a new yoga school partly owned and operated by my good friend, a yoga master and instructor, Juanita Monaghan. The past two months, I’ve been traveling and I’ve been getting valuable first-hand education on what it actually feels like to be mostly doing on-location pictorials.

Before this constant traveling, and for the past 15 years, I’ve been shooting almost exclusively inside the comfortably controlled confines of a photo studio. Sure I’ve done quite a number of location shoots in the past, but not on a very regular basis (meaning, not all the time). Shooting on location almost all of the time is therefore a somewhat new experience for me and I’m in the process of getting used to it. I am a fish out of the water, so to speak, but hopefully, not for long.

I am guessing that many if not most photographers who are using Aperture are shooters whose work and passion takes them to interesting locations both far and near. These are photographers who may be shooting in some of the most exciting places but maybe under unpredictable conditions. They may be constantly traveling, alone or with assistants, from one place to another, lugging lots of stuff and moving about, while at the same time, keeping in mind the process of consistently producing required output on-the-go and certainly keeping deadlines.

While veteran location shooters may have the on-the-go Aperture workflow down pat, I’m figuring out how it can work for me. Here’s how I’m doing it:

1. All my equipment are stashed in a single backpack: a D2Xs camera body with 6 Nikkor lenses and a Lensbaby 3G , and, an overly accessorized 17? MacBook Pro with an Epson P-5000, and a few other stuff, including an iPhone.

2. After the shoot, or even while shooting, I load all RAW image files into the Epson P-5000. It seems easier and more convenient to load the photos to a handy and compact portable storage device than into a laptop while on the go.

3. Meanwhile, on my MacBook Pro, I have Aperture installed and waiting with an empty Library.

4. The soonest that I am able, I connect the Epson P-5000 to the MacBook Pro, and reference all the shots in Aperture. I keep lots of other stuff on my laptop so I may not have enough space to create a managed Library in Aperture. Also, it seems that referencing the images stored in an external drive attached to the laptop seems faster.

5. First thing I do once the images are referenced in Aperture is that I export the masters out of Aperture, or and burn them into DVDS, and stash these away as a backup.

6. And then I just go ahead and start working on the new shots inside Aperture (with the P-5000 hooked up when necessary).

7. At whatever stage I may be in the workflow in my laptop’s Aperture, when I reach my home studio, I export the Project (with Consolidate Images checked) out of my laptop, and then import it into my MacPro’s Aperture, where I then continue working. I also do a little housekeeping at this stage, with all unnecessary and secondary backups and copies are judiciously deleted to conserve space and to avoid confusion.

8. The DVDs I burned as a backup on location undergoes a quick check and then filed and referenced away.

9. Once I’m done with the Project, I export the final Project, burn in Toast spanning multiple discs, label, reference and stash away.

This simple workflow seems to work for me, and I’m enjoying the location-to-studio workflow in Aperture. Being new to “being always on-the-go,” I am meeting photography challenges that others may have already solved ahead of me. The straightforward workflow I outlined above, although I might need to refine it a bit more, helps me concentrate on the images and meet my deadlines. I’m just glad to be able to do this with Aperture as one of my main workflow tools, on the road and in the studio.

In my quest to track my photos out in the wild, I’ve settled upon an efficient but slightly–less–than–ideal solution: drag the photos in question from Lightroom (both the filmstrip and grid will work as drag sources) to my destination of choice. I’ve settled upon a VoodooPad document with one page for each publication; dragging photos from Lightroom into VoodooPad will result in a link back to the file, wherever it happens to be located on my computer. I include any relevant publication information that I wish to catalog alongside the link back to the file. Here’s one page that illustrates my simple solution:

Every software program that I’m familiar with includes some automatic adjustments, and without fail, until recently, I’ve been opposed to using them. The reason is that any auto adjustment is a software engineer’s best guess of what adjustments usually work for most images with similar characteristics. I prefer to make adjustments that are image specific. I do use batch processing via the Lift and Stamp tool when images have been shot under similar lighting conditions. But even when taking advantage of the Lift and Stamp tools, I often tweak the adjustments for individual images. So until recently I could accurately claim to never use auto adjustments. But you’ve heard the old adage, “Never say never!”

Not long ago I was experimenting with some underwater photography. I’m new to this type photography and left my camera set on Auto White balance. (OK, some of you are saying, “See, you do use auto adjustments,” and perhaps you’re right. But that’s an in camera setting not a software setting.) As is often the case with underwater shots, there was a strong cyan/blue cast to the images. I tried adjusting the Temperature slider in Aperture but that wasn’t enough and there isn’t a red/cyan white balance slider. I also tried increasing the red saturation and decreasing the cyan saturation, which improved the image somewhat, but the cyan cast was still present. Out of curiosity ( I clicked the Auto Levels buttons that are under the histogram in the Adjustment HUD. And to my surprise the colorcast was gone!

Once again, virtual instrument maestro Gary Garritan has compiled a collection of Christmas carols recorded by his customers. You can download all 19 MP3s plus cover art to make your own CD (or iTunes covers) from his Xmas page. I’m grabbing them right now with the handy Firefox extension DownThemAll.

This year, Garritan’s core software orchestral and band instruments are joined by his company’s new virtual violin and cello. (You can hear the expressiveness of the latter on Digital Media Insider podcast #7.)

What a great showcase for desktop musicians and public-domain music!

For more on Gary Garritan, read our interview, “A Personal Orchestra for Everyone.”

Last week, over on the Inside Aperture blog, Micah Walter mused on what would happen if his RAW workflow tool went away. What would happen to the metadata and the image adjustments? I have to admit, it’s a thought that I’ve wrestled with quite a bit myself having used both Aperture and Lightroom and moved between the two. It’s a different set of issues than we had with back in the good (*cough*) old days of film, but it’s just as important.

Luckily, thanks to XMP and the like, transporting metadata such as titles, copyrights, and descriptions between tools is no longer rocket science. But, what can and does get lost in a move between tools is all the work you put into adjusting images. Given that each RAW processor works differently, and supports a different set of image adjustments, it’s probably not going to be possible to come up with a standard for preserving the processing instructions that go along with each image. I could be wrong (and I hope I am), but I think it’s a long shot.

This problem, however, doesn’t just manifest itself between tools. It also manifests itself between versions of a tool. As RAW converters are improved, the images you made adjustments too last year might not look the same after upgrading Lightroom. I’m aware that Aperture provides a way to use previous converters, but how far back will that support go?

So what is one to do if they perfectly tweak an image to their liking and want to keep it for posterity? At this point, the only sane thing to do is to bake—my pet term for export—a TIFF or PSD file, preferably in 16-bit format. This will ensure that you can keep your currently processed image no matter what happens in the future with your choice of tools. Of course, now you have another file to manage. And that becomes another problem.

Maybe DNG could help us out with this. It’s already possible to include multiple representations of RAW data in a DNG file. Maybe if the keepers of the DNG spec were to add an ability to include “snapshots” in TIFF or PSD format into a DNG, we could package our processed versions of a photograph together with its RAW data in such a way that could survive the test of time in one handy package. That way, even if you move from Lightroom to SuperDeluxRAWTool in the future, you can always access how your photos looked when you made your edits in late 2007.

I’ve been using Aperture since it shipped in Nov. 2005 — more than two years of building projects, adding metadata, and organizing images. There have been many little rewards along the way, such as being able to quickly locate this photo from an Apple event. But the big payoff just happened recently.

Over the last few months I’ve been working on a new book, Digital Photography Companion, and I’ve had to cull hundreds of pictures (from a catalog of thousands) for possible inclusion in the project. In the past, this was an agonizing endeavor. Pictures and various iterations of them spread all over the place, difficult to find, hard to organize.

For Digital Photography Companion, it’s an entirely different universe. My Aperture library contains everything I’ve shot for the last two years (except for photos captured with the Canon G9), and the images are totally organized and accessible. I’m building preview catalogs for my publishing team, outputting Jpegs for sample designs, and will soon be exporting high resolution Tiffs for CMYK conversion in Photoshop. (I know what you’re thinking… wouldn’t it be nice to output CMYK directly from Aperture. Answer: yes it would be lovely.)

So the last two years I’ve spent gleefully organizing my images in Aperture is now paying off handsomely. I’m actually enjoying the photo editing process instead of dreading it. If I could only go end to end and output in CMYK, it would be a total victory. Ah, maybe someday. But for now, I have to say that my photography workflow has made a giant step forward. And I feel like my return on investment is excellent.

In my latest Digital Story podcast, I talk about this process. You might want to tune in if you have a hankering for more.

On Friday, Apple unveiled the new West 14th Street store, its largest store in Manhattan. I had a chance to check out the store yesterday and though at this point we expect Apple stores to be impressive, this one really takes it to the next level. It occupies a corner lot in the trendy Meat Packing district and it features three floors of Apple products and services. One of the coolest aspects of the store is that the third floor is dedicated entirely to service, featuring a huge Genius Bar for repairs. Perhaps more exciting for Aperture users are the new Pro Labs that the store will offer. These are four-part, eight-hour courses covering either Aperture, Final Cut Pro, or Logic Pro. Students will have their own Macs to use during the classes with all the software pre-configured. And get this: they’re free.

This is pretty impressive. With these Pro Labs, Apple can now offer three ways for new Aperture users to learn the software:

There are the instructor-led workshops, where anyone can sit in the audience and listen to a demo-style presentation and ask questions. And there’s “One to One”, in which customers can sign up for one-hour personal training sessions. This was formerly included in the $99/year ProCare service, but was spun off into its own offering a few months ago. Still, $99/year for weekly personal training sessions is a great deal. Even if only one out of ten sessions is truly mind-altering, it’s still 99 bucks a year. Most Apple trainers I know charge more than that for an hour. And, of course, the level of training that pro Apple Certified Trainers can offer is far beyond that of the Apple Store, but I still think that these sessions can be quite useful and are an affordable option for a lot of beginners using Aperture.

Add to workshops and One to One training sessions these new Pro Labs and you’ve got a really compelling reason to go with an end-to-end Apple solution… I’m thinking specifically of the new user, just starting to get into digital photography and trying to make a decision between Aperture and Lightroom. It’s a pretty strong selling point for Apple to be able to say “hey, go with Aperture and come back to the store for free training and workshops”.

One thing that I’ve heard a few rumblings about from some of the Pro Trainer channels is a feeling that these Labs might threaten some of our prospective business. And I suppose it may. But I don’t think that these Labs are intended to parallel the experience or depth of an expensive multi-day Apple Training course. And I’d be perfectly happy to direct a beginner Aperture user to an Apple-led course and then have the chance to work with him or her in-depth once they have a foundation in the software.

The Pro Labs are currently only being offered at West 14th Street, but it seems likely that Apple is using the new store to try the concept out. If Apple’s track record is any indicator, the initiative will be a huge success and we’ll see these classes offered at other stores. Even if Apple decides to charge a nominal fee for the courses, I bet it will still be a steal over the alternatives.

Last week, Dominey Design, the makers of SlideShowPro, announced that they have created a new version of the popular slideshow software that works within Lightroom. Ever curious to find new ways of using Lightroom I downloaded a copy of the software and have been playing with it all weekend. The array of slideshow options is dizzying. The interface is excellent - basically it is like using any other module in Lightroom. The only downside to the interface is the bewildering number options. Hence, it will take some time to figure out all the possible changes that can be made. It is hard to call options a downside though - just more to figure out and I’m sure the results are worth it. Below is a screen shot in mid-production of a slideshow I made using SlideShowPro in Lightroom’s web module.

Strangely enough the SlideShowPro software eliminates some keystrokes while working in Lightroom. For example, while in the web module - which is where you work with SlideShowPro - if you want to get back to the Library tapping the “G” key does nothing. You have to physically go up to the upper right menu to chose Library to get back to the grid. Not to worry though, the software is powerful and incredibly customizable and a little strangeness is worth it. Once you exit the web and SlideShowPro module then all of the keystrokes work normally.

Looking around the web, you might be surprised to find out how many photographers have used SlideShowPro to display their images on the web. I have seen a few websites that were pretty much entirely built around SlideShowPro galleries. As you can see in the sample slideshow layout below the resulting slideshows are simple and elegant.

While working on a recent slideshow I realized that for the best results, i.e. to have your images sized properly and sharpened correctly it is best to export the images and constrain them to the size that you’ll create your slideshow. For example if you are creating a slideshow that is 800 x 600 pixels, export horizontal images so they are 800 pixels wide and verticals are 600 pixels tall. I would then apply some sharpening to the images in Photoshop (in a batch) and then re-import those images into Lightroom to build the slideshow so they will look their best. This is kind of a pain but it works nonetheless - and since I don’t know how to use Flash very well it is easier to use SlideShowPro in Lightroom.

Once you are finished with your slideshow, you can preview it just as you can with any Lightroom web gallery and you can also export it to your desktop or upload it to a website directly from Lightroom. The SlideShowPro software pretty much acts just like any other web gallery template except it is building slideshows and flash web galleries. What would be nice is to be able to customize the gallery around the actual SlideShowPro interface in a similar manner as the other web templates offered by Adobe.

If you are interested in checking out SlideShowPro you can download a copy here.

At $25, the software won’t be breaking any banks. It is one heck of a deal for the money. I am going to start playing around with a few slideshows and look into incorporating them on my website. I have put up a sample slideshow created in Lightroom just so you can check out what they look like. To see it go to:

http://www.michaelclarkphoto.com/slideshow/index.html

That’s it for this session. See you next week.

Adios, Michael Clark

As an argument for keeping photos on file, and being prepared to revisit their treatment in the digital darkroom, this image is a good case in point. The original was a wild flower along the lines of a dandelion in a field near Sea Ranch. I photographed it this summer in the early morning, covered with drops from a heavy ocean mist.

Retrieving the photo from my files a few days ago, I gave it an alternate (and I believe more compelling) treatment.

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Another issue this image raises is the extent to which digital photography is a new medium. I’ve made very clear my view that the post-processing part of digital photogray is integral. Ignore what you can do in Photoshop at your peril.

With freedom comes responsibility: the capture is the starting place, and my image can go almost anywhere from that starting place. That’s nice, but then I am completely responsible for the image, and I can’t excuse it by saying, “But the scene was like that!”