O'Reilly Digital Media

The report from Project Bar-B-Q 2006 is now online, and its annual predictions are as provocative as ever.

Bar-B-Q (I’m on the advisory board) is a four-day conference designed to shape the future of music on computers. Hosted by the Fat Man on a Texas ranch each October, it brings together 50 experts in chip design, music software, game music, online music, electronic musical instruments, pro audio, and numerous related fields to brainstorm five-year solutions to the industry’s most pressing problems.

Line 6 designer (and ADAT co-inventor) Marcus Ryle chats with producer Rory Kaplan.

Part of the reason Project Bar-B-Q has worked so well for the last 11 years is the majestic setting: there’s plenty of food, drink, and cigars; beautiful sunsets over the lake; meteor showers; and well-stocked jam sessions so we aren’t discussing music in the abstract. Attendees are forbidden to wear company logos that might blind them to competitors’ ideas. One year, I saw representatives from two companies that were suing each other back in the corporate world sit down and work out a shared reverb algorithm that later showed up in the Xbox.

BBQ attendees brainstorm dozens of topics before coalescing around four to six to solve. My group tackled the game-audio mixing challenge, introduced by Peter Drescher as “Why do game audio soundtracks have to suck so bad?!”

Today I’m going to write about a feature of Aperture that you’ve probably heard of but maybe never tried. We all establish our own personal workflow style pretty early on when using new software, and I’m no different. I’ve been using Aperture since the day version 1.0 was released and I have only very recently begun playing around with the Light Table feature. Based on that confession it is obvious that I am not final authority on the light table feature, but I thought I’d just bring it to your attention in case you never looked into it before.

First off, lets create a light table and get some images into it…

Friday has rolled around once again, and this week many of you have new digital music players to enjoy. Load ‘em on up with this fresh heap of Napster freebies.

“Make Love” by Jess Klein
Even with six albums under her belt, Jess Klein’s latest is her most revelatory. City Garden, which features today’s free download, is an emotional work which Klein hopes will “release and heal.” Download this track and get soothed. [Dec 29]

“Ella y Yo” by Aventura
Known for their excellent musicianship, look for these Dominican sensations to enjoy a long and prosperous career. This reggaeton offering features one of the genre’s heavy hitters, Don Omar. [Dec 28]

“Can’t Stop” by Ozomatli
This Los Angeles collective’s infectious mix of salsa, hip hop and jazz-funk has earned them a Grammy and countless fans. Download this track and be among the first to get an early taste of Ozo’s highly anticipated new album, Don’t Mess with the Dragon, currently set for release in March. [Dec 27]

“Two Ton Paperweight (EXPLICIT)” by Psychostick
Originally from Odessa, Texas, this band has undergone many transformations on their way to becoming what you hear today. Almost everyone can relate to this hardcore ode to a less-than-dependable hunk of metal (also known as a car) from Psychostick’s debut album, We Couldn’t Think of a Title. [Dec 26]

“Greensleeves (Alternate Take 6)” by Vince Guaraldi Trio
Merry Christmas from the man behind the music for the beloved Peanuts TV specials. This alternate take from the Charlie Brown Christmas sessions (done as a bossa nova rather than the jazz waltz version used in the show) is from the newly expanded and remastered soundtrack. [Dec 25]

“Jingle Bells” by Lisa Loeb
Pop star Lisa Loeb remembers that Christmas is really for the kids and offers this “gift,” as featured on Kid’s Club–Holiday Fun Volume 1, a diverse collection of children’s holiday favorites. [Dec 24]

“Mais” by Pierre Aderne
Originally released in Brazil in 2005, the third album from this former competitive swimmer has made its way around the world and has become a Top 10 album in Japan. This track features one of Aderne’s diverse Brazilian musical styles. [Dec 23]

Before Aperture, the missing piece of my workflow puzzle was a cataloging-archive system. Now that I’m transferring my archive into Aperture, I’m making important decisions about Aperture’s Library system, and how best to use it. The good news is that whatever you decide now can be changed down the road. But if you’re just getting started with Aperture, why not import your archive in a way that works best for you.

In Aperture, photos can be imported into your library as either “managed” or “referenced” images.
Both provide previews that can be used in a variety of exciting and practical ways. The difference? Managed master images are all located inside the Aperture Library package, which is located on the drive you designate to hold your library. (The drive needs to be big enough to accommodate your entire collection). A managed system means you have access to the “Vault” feature for easy one-click back ups. This is a good choice for those with smaller archives, especially when working with just one computer.

Importing Photos as “Managed” above; or “referenced”, below.

Referenced images can be anywhere, on any drive, CD or DVD. With referenced images, the masters can live in a variety of different drives or on just one. Though Aperture keeps track of them, only the versions are backed up–not the masters–which you need to back up manually (with an easy drag and drop). You are not limited to a library with just one or the other, a system of both referenced and managed files may work for you, and I’ll give an example later.

At first, I thought the managed system was a good idea for me, since I liked the idea of a one-click “Vault” back up. But in the end, I chose to reference my library for the flexibility it offers. A referenced system works best for my high volume shooting and my large and growing archive.

Managed and Referenced Images

Because Aperture previews are actually full-res JPEGs, they provide a big enough view that you can use them in a variety of ways: for slide shows, emailing, key-wording and adding detailed metadata for captioning, rating etc. With referenced files, you can perform all of these tasks even if the drive containing the masters is not connected. By making a copy of your Aperture Library for your laptop, you can take your entire library with you and do work on the images, yet take up very little room in your drive.

When you get back home, you can then replace the library on your desktop with the one from your laptop, and you’re back in sync. This is a workflow that works for those who are often on the road with a laptop.

What you can’t do with previews however, are most editing adjustments, (exposure, levels color etc.). This is because you need the master images to make these adjustments. The drive with the masters needs to be connected to do this work. This is one of the most important things to understand about Aperture’s preview scheme. You can’t do any image editing, only metadata changes.

In the preferences panel, If you plan on working with referenced images, it’s a good idea to check “New projects automatically generate previews” so previews are always created, and save previews at a quality of 9 or higher, which give big enough jpeg previews to be used in high quality slideshows or when emailing proofs. If you have a particularly huge library, you may need to choose a lower-quality JPEG setting to fit all of the images onto your laptop.

Aperture>Preferences

With my referenced library, I don’t have the luxury of the one-click back up into a vault, but I can still keep my masters on one drive for easy back-up. I make sure I regularly back up my archive manually onto two big drives, one kept off-site. Time Machine, the backup system included in the next version of the Mac OS, will make this chore much easier.

What I can do that a library of mostlly managed files won’t allow (it’s just too big), is to make a copy of my Aperture Library to take my entire collection with me on the road in a MacBook, MacBook Pro or small bus-powered drive, since the previews take up relatively little space and fit comfortably in the built-in drive.

If you only use one computer and love the idea of one-touch back up using Aperture’s vault system, then importing “managed” images into your Aperture library may work best for you. Or you may want to have a combination of mostly referenced images, with managed copies of only your five star portfolio images, backed up using the vault system in Aperture. Nothing is carved in stone, and you can change your mind and system later on–it will just take an investment of time.

I’m going to talk more about how best to approach Managed & Referenced Libraries and Vaults, including importing large archives in a single step–in my next post. In the meantime, let us know how you use Aperture Libraries. Do you keep more than one? Do you like your images managed, referenced or a combo of both? Dealing with our archives is crucial for the long term, and understanding how libraries function is important for strategizing how grow your library in a way that works for you best.

Kodak Moment

I found the You Tube video linked below at the photoinduced.com website. This movie was first used internally within Kodak, but became so popular with employees that Kodak execs decided to let you and me see it. Frankly, it’s refreshing to see a company as big as Kodak, have a sense of humor about itself while telling the world they are still a photographic force to be reckoned with.

See the video

A friend called a couple of weeks ago with an Aperture workflow question. As we worked our way through her problem I finally realized that part of what was complicating her methodology was that she wasn’t using one of Aperture’s core features. Just a few days after that, I was talking to another Aperture user and found the same curious gap in their knowledge and then, at a recent talk I discovered still more people with the same deficiency.

All of this led me to sit bolt upright in the middle of the night, with a terrible thought: “Am I the only one who uses Aperture’s Compare mode?!”

I can only hope that I’ve experienced a bad sample. If that’s true and you’re all wantonly using the Compare feature, then just skip right ahead to the next entry. If not, then this is a feature you’ll want to know about.

If you select any image in Aperture, and then press Return, you will enter Compare mode. The image you selected will shift to the left-most side of your Viewer, and will be bordered with a yellowish-orange rectangle. That image is now your compare source. The next image in your project will automatically appear to the right.

You can use the Loupe and Zoom features to compare the two images. If you like the righthand image more than the compare source, press Return and that image will become the new compare source, and the next image in your project will be selected. If you don’t like the righthand image better than the compare source, use the arrow keys to navigate to the next image. In this way, you can quickly run through a bunch of images, comparing one to the other, and progressively selecting the best image.

When you’re all finished and have a compare source that you like best, press Option-Return to exit Compare mode. Your last compare source will remain selected, meaning you can now easily add a select rating or start editing.

If your images are stacked, you can use Stack mode, which operates in a similar fashion. The great thing about Compare mode is that it doesn’t require you to stack, and you can easily enter it at any time just by pressing Return. It will work anywhere in Aperture - even when building a book or web page.

Brad Fuller’s article “Inside Pandora: Web Radio That Listens to You” went behind the scenes of the Internet radio station with the human touch. As Brad explained, Pandora’s playlists are shaped by a staff of expert music analysts. Now one of those analysts has launched a podcast that goes inside the music itself.

The working title Pandora Podcast is the only bland thing about the show. In each fast-moving but clear episode, host Kevin Seal demonstrates some of the “dimensions” by which Pandora analysts classify songs. Episode 1 explores types of vocal harmony; Episode 2 demonstrates drum patterns. Each episode starts with a basic definition and then rapidly walks through short audio examples to reinforce the concepts.

One listener compared the effect to developing a greater appreciation for wine after hearing an wine expert talk. Another wrote, “Is the ultimate goal to turn us all into music analysts? Fine by me.”

An especially nice touch is the list of Pandora song links in each podcast’s show notes. Although the music clips to which they lead don’t always reflect the point of the episode, it’s a quick way to learn more about each artist. Highly recommended.

As 2006 comes to a close I find myself taking a moment to reflect on all of the wonderful things that have happened to me over the past year. As of this moment, I am writing this post from my apartment on a tropical island in the West Indies. My girlfriend and I moved here last August and we will be living here for the next year while she attends medical school.

Spending the holidays on a tropical island is a bit odd. It’s in the 80’s today, and I spent most of my afternoon sitting on a dock, overlooking the Caribbean Sea and reading a book. As I sat there I began to think about this past year. I looked over to my girlfriend, as she sat at the bar eating lunch with our two visiting friends and I thought to myself, “Man, I really have a great life.” 

I mean really, I have some of the best friends anyone could ask for. I live on a tropical island, and I’m living out my dream-job as a photographer and writer. Did I already mention the weather?

One of our visitors this holiday season is Scott. I met Scott right around the same time I met my girlfriend. Scott is, well, a Mac guy. It wasn’t long after we met that I began to consider him to be more than just a friend—he was also my new personal Mac consultant. I think every photographer should have one.

In October of 2005, Scott and I attended the PhotoPlus Expo at the Jacob Javits Center in New York City. Now, it’s important to note here that Scott is not a photographer, though he does own a Canon Rebel XT. But, Scott was just as interested as I was to see what Apple had in store for the photography industry in 2005, and so we made the trip together.

Of course the rest is history. Apple unveiled Aperture at the show, and wowed photographers the world over. Scott was moderately impressed, but he was interested and began to experiment with the application, eventually making the decision to use it for his entire photo archive. 

Fast-forward to present day. As it happens to just about everyone who lives in a big city like New York, Scott eventually decided he needed a change of scenery. He packed up his belongings, moved out of his apartment, and convinced his girlfriend Katie to go on a trek across Central America to volunteer on organic farms.

The most surprising news about their odyssey was that Scott had decided to leave his MacBook behind. For his journey he packed his Rebel XT, a new lens, and a pile of compact flash cards. He also bought an Apple iPod camera adapter so that he could back up his cards to his iPod, and a small USB card reader so that he could email photos back home and post pictures to his blog from any antiquated yet USB enabled internet café computer. This allowed for travel through the thickest of Central American jungles without worrying about protecting a laptop in rough terrain.

Needless to say, when Scott and Katie arrived, Scott was in Macintosh heaven. We quickly set up a user account for him, and began to discuss how he could back up and send home his travel pictures. This would allow him to format his cards and continue shooting.

Scott and Katie’s Project Folders

Obviously, this sounded like a perfect job for Aperture. We got out his cards and began importing his photos. We spent some time creating albums for each city they had visited, and added keywords and caption information. Katie also had a camera, so we created a top-level folder containing separate projects for each of them.

After all the files were imported and organized, Scott and Katie went through and gave their favorite images star ratings. Once they had edited their shoot, they used the flickr export command to upload their best images for use on their blog.

Scott picked out a few recent photos and used Aperture’s Mail feature to send out updates to his family and friends back home.

Once we were finished with all of the organizing, editing, meta-tagging, uploading and emailing, we exported the top-level folder to the desktop. The folder contained all of their Aperture projects, complete with master images, and all the work they had done in Aperture. We used Apples .Mac Backup utility to make two sets of DVDs, one of which we mailed to his parents in the states, and one of which he will take with him on the rest of his journey. We also copied the entire top-level folder to Scott’s iPod, just to be safe.

A few of Scott and Katie’s 5-star images

When Scott and Katie return home, they will have everything in one place. They can simply fire up their Macbook, restore the DVDs to their local drive and import the top-level folder into Aperture. Everything will be in one place, and all the work they did while at our apartment will be preserved. More importantly, they will no longer need to worry about losing their pictures during the rest of their travels, as the pictures are now safe in multiple locations, and on multiple types of media.

Over this past year I have really come to enjoy working with Aperture. It has certainly made my life easier. But, it is even better when I get a chance to use what I have learned to help out my friends. I hope all of you have been having a great holiday season, and I look forward to a new year, and many future posts.

Cheers.

Despite all the cool features we’re discovering in the Photoshop CS3 public beta, one of the most talked about items seems to be the replacement of the “feather” icon with a simple 2-letter “Ps” on a blue block. Because the public beta also gives us a glimpse of the “Br” icon that comes with Bridge CS3, we can extrapolate that there is a trend afoot. In fact, Adobe Sr. Product Manager John Nack has been hosting a passionate conversation about the new icons on his blog, and even has a preview of some of the icons planned for other CS3 apps.

For those who are comparing loss of their feather, shell, butterfly, or starfish (there was a starfish somewhere, right?) to the end of the world as we know it, John’s got a point when he says, “…isn’t it nice that in this world, at the end of 2006, it’s computer iconography that constitutes our nightmares?” With the critical mass of applications in the new suite, the demise of the arbitrarily assigned nature-themed icons seems inevitable. But I can’t help but wonder what that means for the name of InDesign guru Sandee Cohen’s Survivor-styled InDesign trivia game, “Escape from Butterfly Island.” In a few generations, the name of the game itself may be a bonus question only veterans can answer.

Based on the e-mail I receive, there are some common problems in Aperture that can be easily solved with some simple tips.

Problem Number One: Having trouble keeping track of your photos? Some people have e-mailed stating that they lost track of certain pictures or that certain images ended up outside the Aperture Library. Here’s a simple fix. Go to FILE>CONSOLIDATE MASTERS. In most cases this will help round up all your Aperture-related photos, putting them where they belong.

Problem Number Two: There seems to be a bug in Aperture that sometimes causes the wrong image being connected to the wrong thumbnail. One workaround for this is to select the image(s) that have the wrong thumbnail. Click on any checkbox in the adjustments panel. Don’t actually make any changes. This will usually cause the image and the thumbnail to line up. If that doesn’t work, delete and rebuild any previews for the files in question.

Problem Number Three: Some photographers need higher quality books out of Aperture than are available through Apple. The fix here is easy. Simply use Aperture to layout your book as you normally would, and instead of sending it to Apple, save it as a PDF (Click Print > Save As PDF) and export that file to any printing company with a digital press. I’ve used my local printer and received great results.

Photo Copyright Scott Bourne 2005 - All Rights Reserved

One of the most intimidating audio interfaces for beginners is the conventional mixing board — the Neve console at the studio where I used to work had well over a thousand knobs, buttons, and faders. (We used to record settings by snapping Polaroid photos.) At the same time, having one control for each function can make a device easier to use.

The problem, I think, may lie in presenting too many options. I had to laugh when I saw this over-engineered toilet in Tokyo last week. Someone at the office felt compelled to label it with a PostIt note so others wouldn’t be confused.

With buttons for everything from bidet-squirt to massage, this Tokyo toilet intimidated even Japanese readers. The PostIt note helps visitors home in on the essential Big Flush and Tiny Flush buttons.

One of the areas in which Aperture excels is in managing, applying, and searching metadata about your images. To get the most of this feature, however, you need to make sure you add the appropriate metadata to your images in your library. It doesn’t take much time to edit the metadata for each image, but it does add up. There are several places in the Aperture workflow where you can work with metadata, but the most used place is the Metadata View panel.

By default, this panel comes with several view presets that give you lots of options for which metadata you want to see. For me, however, no one view worked quite as well as I’d like. There are certain IPTC fields that I care quite a bit about and others that I don’t use at all. And, I like to see my camera’s EXIF data mixed in to the meta data view.

Here’s a dozen of some of the most popular (and arguably among the coolest) consumer electronics goodies available this Holiday season:

– Sony PlayStation 3
– Nintendo Wii
– iPod Shuffle (1 GB)
– iPod (80 GB w/video)
– Zune (30GB)
– Creative Zen Vision: W (60 GB)
– SanDisk Sansa MP3 players
– Motorola Q
– Blackberry Pearl
– LG Chocolate (cel phone & MP3 player)
– Bose Noise Canceling Headphones
– Sonos Digital Music System

…….comments/feedback welcome here. Thoughts? Are some especially cool items missing? Chime in!

Here’s this week’s edition of Napster Freebies. To sum up the feedback from the last few weeks, these links seem to work internationally and do not require a Napster account to use. If you find otherwise, let me know by email or add a comment below. I hope you enjoy the music and that you discover an artist or two this way.

“O Come, O Come Emmanuel” by Aaron Shust
This staff member and worship leader of the Perimeter Church in Atlanta paid his dues playing colleges and coffee houses, drawing on influences including Motown, Bob Marley, and U2. Hear the result in his take on this enduring carol. [Dec 22]

“Stalk U” by Los Abandoned
Los Abandoned unite the Casio keyboard with gritty electric guitars and bittersweet ukulele to form their post-punk/Latin-alternative sound. What does that sound like? Download this track and find out. [Dec 21]

“How Long” by Kenny White
Veteran songwriter/composer Kenny White has done everything from commercial jingles to working with the likes of Linda Ronstadt, Dwight Yoakam, and Gladys Knight. This track is from his latest album, Never Like This. [Dec 20]

“The Awful Things” by Simon Dawes
Malibu’s most wanted indie-rockers keep it loose, clanky, and cool on this fan favorite from their first full-length album, Carnivore. Enough chunky guitars, melodic hooks, and hand-claps to satisfy the most jaded power-pop aficionado. [Dec 19]

“Grim Reaper Blues” by Entrance
On his fourth Entrance album, Guy Blakeslee realizes a fully amplified electric orchestra to channel his free-flowing spiritual theater, equally inspired by the Tibetan Book of the Dead, Timothy Leary, and Delta-Blues legend Charley Patton. [Dec 18]

“When We Were Young” by Life of Riley
Houston-based alt-rock brothers Cassidy and Brice Campbell made a name for themselves producing hits for Christian groups including Inhabited and Modern Day John. This wistful rocker is the first single is from their new band’s debut album, Days Aw [Dec 17]

“Posters” by Jeffrey & Jack Lewis
Already known as an underground comic book artist and for his association with the Moldy Peaches, Jeffrey Lewis has just released his third album, recorded with his bass-playing younger brother, Jack. Is that a snippet of Gilligan’s Island melody we detect at the top? [Dec 16]

Today I’m going to stray away from Aperture a bit and discuss a post processing technique that, while it can involve Aperture for part of the processing, it uses other software for the majority of the post processing.

The process/technique is known as High Dynamic Range processing or simply HDR. HDR and Tone Mapping is a process which two or more differently exposed images (normally one properly exposed, one underexposed by one stop, and one overexposed by one stop) to produce a single image with much higher dynamic color range. Why would we do this? Well, a digital camera sensor is capable of capturing about 3-5 stops of color dynamic range where the human eye is capable of seeing about 11 stops of color dynamic range. What this means is that you see a beautiful scene and then photograph it and then get home and review your images and you are disappointed that your images are just not the way you remember seeing the scene. There is nothing technically wrong with your images, they just are not what you remember seeing when you were there.

There is a lot of information on the web about HDR, tutorials, etc so I will not get too deep into the mechanics of how it all works. What I’m aiming to do here is to make you aware of this process and you can go out and do some research yourself if it interests you. One thing I would like to mention is that in my opinion HDR processing should be used to enhance good pictures and it should be used sparingly … sort of like the same analogy I’ve heard used to describe post-processing with Photoshop “use it like an emery board, not a sledge hammer”. In my opinion a lot of people use HDR to push images way too far and they end up with something that looks like a cartoon …. but that’s just my opinion, all that really matters is if the finished product looks good to you.

Here are some good HDR resources:

Photomatix software by HDRSoft (my choice for HDR processing)
Some of my HDR Images on Flickr
Trey Ratcliff’s HDR Tutorial
HDR on Wikipedia
HDR Tutorial at PopPhoto

Until next time,

Keep shooting.

Allen Rockwell
Allen Rockwell Photography

Fresh from the press release: Getting a Zune for Xmas? For only $7.99, you can get the real scoop on Zune in “Eight Great Ways to Get The Most Out Of Your Zune” by Erica Sadun in a 70-page PDF Short Cut.

You’ll learn:

• How to get the most out of your Zune.
• The best methods and secrets for managing your media, loading up your player, and sharing your data with others.
• Which accessories are vital and which are not.
• How to hack your Zune to work around Microsoft’s built-in limitations and take your Zune to the next level.

In this quick guide, you’ll learn the down and dirty truth about getting
the most from your Zune. No holds barred. No stones unturned.

http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/zune/

Zune is now Vista Friendly The 1.2 firmware update now plays nicely in Vista’s sandbox.

Leo Laporte on Zune Let’s just say that he’s not a big fan.

Zune Games on the way? Microsoft may be considering the Zune as a possible (and limited) gaming platform.

Old habits are hard to shake. The first thing I did when putting together my Heroines book after returning from Africa, was to squeeze the best frames from my 250gb hard drive of raw images into a pile of color laser selects. Sadly, I didn’t have Aperture at the time, to help narrow down nearly 800 selected photographs into the final 98 for the book.

When working on books in the past, I had always spilled hard copies onto the floor to edit with the help of trusted, passionate visual colleagues and friends, getting their opinions on how images should flow; which need to come out and what order the photographs should take.

But the more I use Aperture, the more I think that my old way of putting together a book may not be how I do it in the future. There is no doubt I will use the powerful compare and select tools in Aperture to weed down my take to the best of the best. But the ease and sophistication of putting together books with Aperture makes creating them fun and easy, and the end result is a powerful way to showcase work, both projects and general portfolios.

Seamlessly move things around to see what works best. ©Steve Simon

When putting together a book (or portfolio) it’s crucial to be ruthless in your editing and it’s hard to do it on your own. You’re often too close to the images you’ve made, and you need the advice of others who can articulate ideas, criticisms and suggestions in ways you can understand. I like to let things percolate a while as I think about the book, and ultimately take final responsibility for the edit.

One nice thing about the books feature in Aperture, is the ability to try different layouts and save as many as you want without committing to one. Books are long term and you’re always adding, deleting and changing things around–Aperture lets you duplicate a book to, in effect “save as” a different version without taking up hard drive space. This lets you experiment with the order and rhythm you create with your design, that will no doubt evolve and change over time. You’re not bound (had to say it) by any one version.

For more complex page layouts involving several images on a page, I find it useful to throw them onto an Aperture light table and try different arrangements before customizing a page template. When I place images together, I look for visual and content connections, contrast or maybe it’s a specific narrative I want to tell, chronological or otherwise. Of course every project is different and there are no rules, but it’s important to eliminate redundancy, so every image builds upon the story or message you want to communicate. This occasionally means eliminating favorite images, which is often heart-wrenching for photographers, but for the greater good of the project.

Booking

As you drag pictures into the layout, you don’t have to delete an old image to replace it, just drag the new one onto the page and voila, in with the new. Change the page to one with a smaller photo and the photo is automatically scaled down–magic. Add pages, delete pages, edit and create new templates with as much customizing and as many images as you deem necessary.

Once an image is on the page, double click on it to scale up or down cropping to your exacting whims. If you happen to use a small photo-file in the book, Aperture alerts you to the fact that quality might suffer with an “!” in the top right corner of the photo. It will also let you know if a photo has appeared more than once, with a number in the right corner of the thumbnail. Just try and make spelling mistakes when typing text, the program will let you know what a poor speller you are with a red broken line under all misspelled words. And the book function is only going to get better!

Scaling up or down to crop is easy with Aperture (just double-click on the photo), and the “!” warns you that you’re up-sampling too much–quality will suffer. ©Steve Simon

With my book, I could have given all the selects to the publisher in Milan and their design team could have done a good job. But I think that if it’s your project with your name on it, you need to take control over how it will look. By creating a book dummy in Aperture, I converted it to PDF and sent it to the Italian design team, who could see my vision for the book and respected it in the final version.

As Micah commented on my last post, there are many companies that provide printing and binding services for custom books. Some will even sell books for you, printing on demand when someone buys your book. Here are a few places you may want to visit:

Fastback Books

Lulu.com

Article on Lulminous Landscape

Whether it’s creating portfolios, e-books, small run artists books, keepsakes for clients or wedding shooters opting to publish books instead of the traditional album, books are one of the best ways to communicate your photographic vision to an audience.

How Cool Is THIS

While catching a wave on Rob Galbraith’s site, I came across a feature in my beta copy of CS3, that I didn’t know was there. It’s called Zoomify, and It really works, though I couldn’t figure how to post it to this blog. See how cool this feature is and figure out how you might employ this technique in your own photographic world. It’s under File>Export where you will find “Zoomify”, and it’s easy to use and way cool!

I stumbled across this little Windows tech support article on Mercury News. I suppose it wouldn’t occur to me to copy the raw files from CDs onto Windows rather than use a program like iTunes or Zune Software to do the rips, but apparently there’s a built-in security feature in Windows that automagically sets copied CD-ROM files to read-only. If you then want to copy them to your iPod, you’ll need to turn off the “read only” property for each file. Select the files you want to work with, right-click any file, select Properties from the pop-up, and uncheck “read only”.

Here’s my selection for the best vocal and the best instrumental CD of 2006, for rock/pop music. First, my criteria. Personality is everything. When I hear someone playing, I love to realize “No-one else in the world would think of doing that”: the Joe Zawinul/Garth Hudson/Mike Oldifeld class of musicians. Similarly, when I hear someone singing, I love to think “In some way, I know that person now”: the Al Green/Carole King/James Bowman class of singers.

Best instrumental CD? Squarepusher Hello Everything in particular The Modern Bass Guitar which really shows how far the goalposts have moved for live digital musicians.

Best sung CD? Yusef An Other Cup I’d have preferred more of the old aggressiveness (don’t laugh), more Jean Rousel, more post-1974 sounds, and few extra vocal takes. But while it doesn’t make me want to convert to Islam, other singers sound shallow and insincere after it.

One of the most important tools to have when prepping files is a RGB on-screen color value readout (a.k.a. floating densitometer). This is especially important when working on files with a lot of highlight or shadow data. As we get close to R255G255B255, we risk losing important image data, which can result in pure white areas in our files and prints. Conversely, as we get close to R0G0B0, we risk losing important shadow detail. Of course, this is image dependent, but in general, the two extremes are not favorable. Having the color value readout is also great for determining whether specific areas are neutral (RGB values will be equal in those cases).

Aperture gives us a few different options for displaying color value readouts. The first is at the top of the Adjustments HUD (circled in Red below - Fig. 1). The H key shows and hides the whole HUD. Anywhere your curser travels, an RGB and L value is displayed in real time. The L value represents the luminosity values from 0-100 (similar to the readout you would get from a grayscale image).

To reduce the number of dialog boxes showing, you can move the Adjustments HUD all the way down so that only the top part peeks above the bottom of your screen (see bottom right area of Fig. 2, circled in red).

Fig. 1

Fig. 2 - Image © Andrew Darlow

Another tool that does a good job of showing us an on-screen color value readout is the Centered Loupe. By choosing “Color Value” from the Centered Loupe’s contextual menu (shown in Fig. 3, below), or by choosing View>Show Color Value in Loupe, you will see the RGBL values inside the loupe. I prefer to then set the Centered Loupe to “Focus on Cursor,” so that it is easier to read precise areas. The “Focus on Cursor” option is also available from the Centered Loupe’s contextual menu. Another feature of the Centered Loupe is that it can be moved quickly to the area of your cursor by holding down the carat/tilde key for about one second. The carat/tilde key (`) is in the top left hand corner of your keyboard. Thanks to Scott Bourne and some Inside Aperture readers for pointing that out a few weeks ago!

Fig. 3

Using just the Centered Loupe in this way gives you a very clean workspace, with the ability to move the loupe anywhere on the screen. In the screen shot below (Fig. 4), the Centered Loupe is set to the smallest allowable size in which the color value will still be displayed. Another interesting item is that if the referenced image is not online (the images below are just previews of archived photos), then a small alert message comes up inside the loupe that reads “not found.” This is displayed whether or not the color value readout is enabled.

Fig. 4 - Image © Andrew Darlow

As you can see below (Fig. 5a), you can show both the Adjustments HUD and the Centered Loupe on screen at the same time (even in full screen mode), which can be helpful for those who use multiple and/or large displays, or for those who just want to be closer to their RGBL readouts.

Fig. 5a - Image © Andrew Darlow

But that’s not all. How about three on-screen color readouts at once..that can’t be possible! Well, yes it is. By choosing Window>Show Adjustments when not in full screen mode, a gray Adjustments window will appear “inside” the main interface. You can then add a floating Adjustments HUD that will mirror in real-time the adjustments made in the gray window. Then add a Centered Loupe and you’ve got the power of three (Fig 5b).

Fig. 5b - Images © Andrew Darlow

Another on-screen readout that gives us information is the Image Tooltips box (circled in red below - Fig. 6). The default behavior is for the Image Tooltips info box to pop up shortly after you rest your cursor on any image. The T key allows you to quickly display or hide this box. However, the esc key (top left corner of your keyboard) does something very similar. If you press the esc key while the Image Tooltips box is showing, it will instantly hide the Tooltips box. However, shortly after you move your mouse and pause, it will reappear. If you do a little “cha-cha” with your mouse by keeping it in motion, the Image Tooltips won’t appear. For some people, this will be the preferred way of showing and hiding the Image Tooltips box. I’m still debating which way I like more. And while we’re speaking about the esc key, it will also get you out of Full-screen mode (the standard shortcut is the F key).

Fig. 6 - Image © Andrew Darlow

Another interesting item to note is that when you are in Standard or Centered Loupe mode, the Image Tooltips box will not be displayed on top of your images.

For more imaging tips, subscribe to Andrew Darlow’s Inkjet & Imaging Tips Newsletter at ImagingBuffet.com.

Downloading a photo from a Web page is easy—you just right-click it or drag it to your desktop. But what if you want to grab an embedded movie or sound? Try this simple technique.

Last week, Ben Long penned a post, Aperture Alpha Channel Aberrations, in which he showed an organization trick for how he keeps different versions of the same Photoshop file stacked together in Aperture. His example underlines an important point that we should all keep in mind: Aperture isn’t just a tool for working with RAW photographs. It can handled JPG, TIFF, and PSD files as well and with ease. Aperture provides a pretty good RAW conversion engine, and one that saw substantial improvement in Aperture 1.1, but RAW processing is still only one part of Aperture’s story.

In the analog darkroom, we had lots of choices. Different kinds of film. Different papers. Different processes. Each of these affected the final image and we were free to choose how we wanted to work with a particular image. It’s not that different now. Different RAW processors give us choices with our images akin to different kinds of film. And even though Aperture provides one kind of RAW processing (well, two if you count the 1.0 RAW processor and the 1.1 RAW processor separately), it doesn’t limit you to it. It’s simple enough to take your RAW file, process it using another tool, and still use Aperture to organize the results.

This ability has recently become a useful strategy for me. I’ve found, and blogged about on my personal blog, a couple of my images that Aperture’s RAW processing engine doesn’t do so well with. However, these images look great when processed with Lightroom. After determining what was going on, I wrote up my findings, sent feedback to Apple, and then moved on with my real job: creating pleasing interpretations of my photographs. Once I had made the renderings I wanted in Lightroom, I exported them as TIFF files and pulled them back into Aperture to be stacked with their RAW original files.

Of course, this doesn’t just apply to making different interpretations of your RAW images. It can also apply to whatever kind of processing that you do to your images and which Aperture doesn’t provide. For example, if you are creating panoramic images, you can’t stitch together multiple frames in Aperture. You can, however, pop the frames over into Photoshop, stitch them together, smooth out the joins, and then keep the resulting final image in Aperture along with the original source frames.

It’s like having your cake and eating it too.

What a difference a year makes. Aperture is just more than one year old. Its launch was a big media event built around Photo East in New York in October, 2005. The official release date was November 30, 2005.

Initial reactions were mixed, but mostly negative. Ars Technica came out with a scathing review, blasting the program on almost every count. Other Mac rumor sites predicted the demise of Aperture, claiming the entire Aperture team had been fired by Steve Jobs. Adobe rushed out a competing product called Lightroom in an attempt to steal Aperture’s thunder. It became very popular to bash Aperture.

If this were a movie plot, you’d assume Aperture was the black-hatted bad guy and that the Adobe Photoshop fanboys were wearing the white hats, riding in to save the day.

Yet, the facts indicate that the rumors of Aperture’s demise were to say the least, premature.

Despite negative reviews from people who had little or no experience with the program…despite resistance to completely changing the digital photo software paradigm…and despite stiff competition from Adobe Lightroom, Aperture has flourished.

One of my favorite things about Aperture 1.5 is its extensible architecture. This means that third party software developers can create plug-ins for Aperture, opening up endless possibilities for integration with their applications.

One such application, which jumped on the plug-in bandwagon along with the release of Aperture 1.5, is Soundslides.

If you do nothing else this weekend besides shopping and downloading the Photoshop CS3 public beta, I highly recommend watching at least the second entry (”The new interface”) in Deke McClelland’s video Photoshop CS3 Beta One-on-One Preview, which is available for free viewing for the time being from lynda.com (you’ll see a link to Deke’s video at the top of the page). As I mentioned in my last post, the interface is one of the more obviously changed elements of Photoshop. And while I trust Deke’s opinion that it may be an improvement once you get used to it, I think it will have a fighting chance in your affections if you spend 7 minutes one-on-one with Deke first.

Some of the younger readers might not recognize the title of this post as a line from the 1980’s movie Top Gun, and others of us barely remember it because it was so long ago :)

But this post is about speed. If you are like most photographers you are happier behind the camera than you are behind a keyboard. So, when you are processing images on your computer you are usually taking time away from shooting. It doesn’t matter if you are a pro or an amateur, I’m sure you’d rather be shooting than editing. Like a lot of photographers I have investing in computer hardware and software that allows me to get in, do my job and get back out again.

But, the question that always seems to come up is; how much faster is one computer than another? Magazines and websites do tests of processors, RAM, graphics cards under a variety of situations and these results are often interesting and informative but don’t always tell me how much faster one system will be than another when I’m doing the type of real-world work that I do.

Since last week, more and more international readers have e-mailed me to let me know that they’ve been able to download tracks from the O’Reilly Friday Napster posts. Because of that, I’m just going to stop saying “US Only”, because clearly it isn’t. As always, if you enjoy these posts or want to give me some feedback, drop me an email or leave a comment. And don’t forget to tell your friends to pop by on Fridays and pick up their freebies.

“Tightwire” by Tom Langford
Over a decade has passed since Langford hitchhiked through Europe, living on bananas, tea, and toast while playing in cafés and bars. Download this track to hear why XM Satellite Radio named him Best New Acoustic Rock Artist of 2005. [Dec 15]

“Do the Coup D’Etat” by Hot One
Not content with having made the transition from post-punk rocker to busy film composer, singer/guitarist Nathan Larson assembled this politically charged band featuring musicians who have worked with both David Bowie and Guided By Voices. [Dec 14]

“Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop” by Romeo
Following in his father’s footsteps, the son of rap mogul Master P has already has four albums and his own Nickelodeon show under his belt. Not one to rest on his laurels, the young man is back with a first single from his latest release, God’s Gift. [Dec 13]

“Confidence” by Motion Man (with Kutmasta Kurt)
You may know this Kool Keith cohort from his many appearances on the Wake Up Show and his work on the Masters of Illusion album with another Keith crony, beatsmith Kutmasta Kurt. The two team up again for this cut from Motion Man’s Pablito’s Way [Dec 12]

“Down” by Terron Brooks
Terron Brooks is an accomplished singer/songwriter/actor who has performed and won fans all around the globe. He has also performed on Broadway in the The Lion King and Hairspray. “Down” is from his new album, coming in early 2007. [Dec 11]

“Calima” by Armik
This accomplished, passionate flamenco guitarist turned pro at 12, has had a unique instrument created for him, and had his music played during the 2004 Summer Olympics. Listen and be moved. [Dec 10]

“Drown You Out” by Amity Lane
Members of former band Trust Company changed their name after getting caught up in the major label shuffle. Now with a new label and a new album, they continue to rock, as on this appropriately titled free download. [Dec 9]

By now you’ve heard, Adobe has announced that a public beta version of Photoshop CS3, will be made available starting tomorrow to anyone with a valid CS2 serial number. This unprecedented release gives users (especially Intel-Mac users who will get to benefit from the Universal Binary-ness of CS3) a chance to see what’s in store for Photoshop before the official release sometime next Spring. So what’s interesting about the next version of Adobe’s image editing tool? I figure the quickest way to get up to speed is to ask Deke McClelland, our own resident Photoshop expert and author of the Adobe Photoshop One-on-One books. Deke has been working with online training site lynda.com to release a preview video on the new Photoshop features, which as of early tomorrow PST you’ll be able to check out for yourself. Here are some highlights from Deke:

• A reconfigured workspace with a whole new docking mechanism. While Deke admits it takes a bit of getting used to, he’s convinced most will agree that it’s ultimately better than it used to be.

• One of the much-maligned features of Photoshop, the Brightness/Contrast tool, now works amazingly well. Deke’s video even shows you a comparision of how it used to work and how it works now. Per Deke, “It still has the same two sliders, but it used to suck and now it’s awesome.”

• Smart Filters can be applied to Smart Objects with the result being nondestructive application of Photoshop filters. You can turn the filter effects on and off and modify settings in the Layers palette like you would an adjustment layer.

• Vanishing Point 2.0, the feature that began in CS2 that allows you to manipulate the perspective of images, now allows you to “swing” formerly perpendicular planes to different angles. In the video, Deke demo’s this feature by wrapping an image around a DVD box of his popular Photoshop CS2 Channels and Masks video.

• Bridge (a beta version of which you’ll also get with the Adobe download) now offers a Loupe feature (which some of you may be familiar with from certain other applications) which allows you zoom in at high magnification to make focus and sharpness evaluations directly from the Bridge Preview window.

You can discover that and much more in Deke’s video, Photoshop CS3 Beta One-on-One Preview, which describes these features and many others in detail. For a limited time, the video can be accessed for free on lynda.com.

It’s fun listen to Deke, a seasoned Photoshop veteran and author of more than 20 books on the program, wax enthusiastic about the new CS3 features. You’ll be able to get more of Deke’s popular, accessible brand of One-on-One training in full length video form from lynda.com as well as in his book, Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-on-One, coming from O’Reilly this spring.

A friend wrote, “Each year my brother and I tend to exchange bizarre sound-making devices at Christmas. Until I get back to being an active musician, my connections to the sound world are rusty at best, and I don’t have ‘the coolest new thing’ at my fingertips. Can you suggest something crazy that you might have come across in your recent travels?”

I replied, Hey, that’s a cool assignment!

How ’bout a Thingamagoop?

Or…

If you’ve got a Photoshop CS2 license, you will soon be able to download the Mac CS3 beta. Details here. John Nack of Adobe states the beta should be available within the next 24 hours. FAQ is here. Update: Download is now available here. You’ll need to generate a serial number for the CS3 beta by entering your CS2 serial number here. More updates and first impressions after my download completes and I get time to start playing with the software.

Books are arguably the ideal display for a photographic project, giving the photographer ultimate control. You can choose the images, the order, size, text and design that best communicates your photographic vision. I love photo books. I collect them and I use them for reference and for inspiration. I also think that creating your own photo book is the best way to preserve a project for posterity and it becomes a great portfolio piece.

Many photographers I know have book projects they would like to see published and so often ask for advice. In previous posts, I wrote about the serendipity and luck of having my book dummy plucked from the garbage, which lead to finding a publisher. But sadly, you can’t always count on this happening.

Photography books are expensive to produce and generally are not very profitable, and it’s tough to get a first break in photo-book publishing. But it is easier than ever before to self-publish books– and the history of photography points to many artists, like Eugene Richards or Ralph Gibson for example, who believed in their work and found ways to publish it themselves. Today, even the most reputable photo book publishers often ask photographers to come up with some financial guaranty, pre-sales or grant money before they decide to move forward.

But regardless of how your book proceeds, your first priority should be the making of a book dummy or the prettier description, the book maquette. I find it surprising that even publishers, who should know better, often don’t recognize the book potential of a body of work until they see the images in book form.

The Publisher’s Showcase at Photo-Eye Books is a great
resource to see who is publishing photography books today.

The first thing I suggest is to edit down your project to a workable number of pieces. The main reason I grabbed a copy of Aperture 1.0, was an urgent deadline for my latest book Heroines & Heroes. When I first got Aperture, I had pre-edited my selects, which I imported. I then went straight to the Books Panel to create and design the book. I had other software that could do the job, but I didn’t want to spend time re-learning software I would rarely use. I was looking forward to incorporating Aperture into my workflow and I hoped the Book function would be easy enough for me to get the job done quickly and without previous experience. It did not disappoint.

I have long made my own book maquettes to use as portfolios. One great thing about Aperture is the integration of the entire archive, allowing me to turn groupings of images into albums and then books, easily and seamlessly. In this way, the book function in Aperture inspires me to experiment with various portfolios, and to create new ones. I find that as I add to my archive, I start to see relationships between images, connecting previously unconnected work, leading to whole new projects and books. For example, it’s easy to make new albums which group your images by mood or atmosphere, or specific subjects like night scenes or dogs or whatever you seem to be photographing on a regular basis. Before you know it, you have an interesting new set of pictures and a new project to pursue.

Of course you can order the Apple books, but I like to print my own. In Aperture, I choose File > Print and Save as PDF. You can save a lot of money by burning the PDF’s to CD for distribution; or FTP them to potential publishers if they allow it. But many publishers prefer to see hard copies, and I have found that a color laser printer does a nice job of providing decent quality work images for a book dummy. I invested a little extra and got a color laser with duplex feature, which means it will automatically print both sides of a sheet. This is a great timesaving feature. It can print out a book dummy in probably 10 per cent of the time it would take to stand there and manually insert each sheet into the printer, something you need to do if you want double-sided copies for the look of a real book.

This has become a cheap and effective way to create multiple copies for submission, and I usually include a high quality inkjet sample print or two to show the ultimate quality of the work. Of course for those who only the best quality will do, (never a bad thing, only more expensive) you can create the book entirely with high quality archival prints if you like.

A sample book dummy for America At The Edge,
created in Aperture.

I’ll give more specific tips for creating book maquettes next post. In the meantime here are two competitions you should consider.

The European Publishers Award is a very competitive contest where photographers enter book dummies for the amazing prize of having their book co-published by seven European publishers in different languages. The winner also gets royalties, an advance of $10k Euros and a specially engraved Leica Camera and an all expense paid trip to the award ceremony in Arles, France. But there is only one winner and winner takes all.

More on European Publishers Award.

The Center for Documentary Studies (CDS) at Duke University and The Honickman Foundation (THF), based in Philadelphia, co-sponsor the biennial first book prize for American photographers, who, if lightening strikes, get their first book published, a traveling exhibition and $3k cash. The deadline has passed for this round, so you have until 2008 to work on your book entry.

First Book Award Info.

A new book: Heroines & Heroes: Hope, HIV and Africa by Steve Simon
(Designed in Aperture)

A lot of Aperture’s functionality comes not from Aperture itself, but from Core Image, lower level operating system features that Aperture can tap into. For example, the Mac OS has built-in routines for opening and displaying various file types such as JPEGs, TIFFs, GIFs, PNGs, and Photoshop documents. While this helps integrate Aperture with other OS features, it also means that, as Aperture users, we’re sometimes subject to the bugs and errors of other OS functions.

Consider this image, which I shot in London.

Because I wanted to perform a separate set of edits on the sky, I used Photoshop to create an alpha channel mask so that I could manipulate the sky and the building separately. I used a number of normal Photoshop masking operations to create this alpha channel.

When I import this Photoshop document into Aperture, though, I see this in the thumbnail:

and this in the Viewer pane:

The problem is that OS 10.4.8 has a bug in its Photoshop routines that causes some Photoshop documents that have alpha channels to render improperly (this bug does not affect Photoshop itself, as it uses its own routines for interpreting files). If you open this same image in iPhoto or Preview or any other app that relies on the OS-level Photoshop renderer, you’ll see the same results. (This bug has been around for a few OS revs now. If you’re using Aperture 1.5, you must be running 10.4.8.)

To get around this, use Photoshop to save a separate version of your document, delete any alpha channels from this document, and import the new version into Aperture. I like to keep the old version in Aperture also, just in case I want to perform additional Photoshop edits that depend on my mask. It’s easy enough to keep them both stacked together, giving me quick access to the Aperture-friendly version, and the complete, masked version.

Note that layer masks attached to a Photoshop layer do NOT cause this problem. Only stand-alone alpha channels.

Creative’s Xmod audio enhancer delivers virtual 5.1 surround sound to your headphones or speaker pair. It’s a great little device. Unfortunately, its default settings on the Mac do not let you experience all the great 5.1 sounds you should be hearing.

Here’s how to fix that.

1. Connect the Xmod to your computer and your speakers or headphones to the Xmod.
2. Open /Applications/Utilities/Audio MIDI Setup. This application lets you tweak the system settings for your input and output devices.
3. Select Creative Xmod from the Default Output pop-up.
4. Select Creative Xmod from the Properties For pop-up list.
5. Click Configure Speakers. This is a rectangular button to the right of the Clock Source. A settings window opens.
6. Click MultiChannel. You’ll find this button at the top-left.
7. Choose 5.1 Surround from the pop-up at the top-right.
8. Click Apply.
9. (Optional) To test any of the virtual speakers, click the rectangle with the speaker name. A brief white noise will sound from that “speaker”.
10. Click Done.
11. Your configuration is complete. You may quit from Audio MIDI Setup.

Thanks Jean-Michel.

First, allow me to introduce myself. My name is Micah Walter and I am a freelance photojournalist, writer and teacher. I’ll share a bit more about my background in just a few minutes. But first that iPod tip I promised…

With the release of Aperture 1.5, you can now easily put images on your iPod directly from your Aperture library. Just make an album in Aperture with all the images you want to have on your iPod. You can make as many albums as you like. Attach your iPod and open iTunes to the Photos pane. You will see a drop-down box where you can now select photos from your Aperture library.

If you click the option for including full resolution photos, iTunes will store the jpeg preview file of your images on your iPod. This is a great feature if you like to carry your portfolio around with you everywhere you go. You just never know when you might run into a prospective client!

“Tis the season for gift guides to be sure. (Yes, we have one here if you’re looking for an O’Reilly book.) But I’m guessing many people are going to follow Scott Bourne’s advice from the end of the great gift-giver’s guide edition of the iLifeZone podcast (episode 16) and just go for the iPod. Why not? Scott’s right, this gift is guaranteed not to disappoint (and how freaking cool is the new Shuffle?)

But if everyone’s doing it, how do you make your iPod special? Well, of course you can get it engraved if you order from Apple online. (And seriously, with all these new iPods swimming around in the wrapping paper flotsam on Christmas morning, I don’t know how else my family is going to be able to tell our new iPods apart.) But I have another idea: Load it up.

You know they’re going to love it, you’ve gone to the trouble of putting their name on it, so why not get it ready to roll? Go ahead, break the seal, charge it up, put some songs on it, put some pictures on it. (Admission: I haven’t gotten to this part of my holiday preparation, so I’m not sure if the shuffle I just bought has any charge out of the box.) Get it ready to use even if your recipient is spending their holiday visiting the in-laws in the middle of nowhere and is miles from their own digital music library.

Sure, they’ll have to overwrite it later when they get back to their own computer, but you can provide a CD for backup (if you’re legally entitled to do so, of course) so they don’t lose anything. Or give them an iTunes gift card so they can purchase their own copies of stuff they like from your personally chosen collection. (Loving that Apple finally has printable or emailable options there for us last-minute types).

And speaking of iTunes cards, the store now makes it fairly easy to give specific content, but I have a more flexible idea that allows you to be personal without being tyrannical. Create an iMix. Let your giftee know how to find it, then they’ve got a convenient list for buying the tunes they like. You get to do the personal thing of choosing music (and the order, the order is always important!) for them, but you’re not forcing them to your will forever (not everyone is going to appreciate your love of REO Speedwagon’s “Roll with the Changes.” I know this from experience.) This obviously works even if you skip the iPod part of the plan and go straight for the iTunes gift card/certificate/email. Personal and last-minute, it’s like they know me.

I have been using Aperture on a first-generation 15″ MacBookPro and a new MacPro desktop. While there’s no doubt the desktop machine outperforms any Mac laptop, I recently realized just how much I prefer using a laptop as my core machine.

So I ordered the new MacBookPro Core 2 Duo 17″ laptop with 2.33 GHZ processor and three gigs of RAM. I also ordered the smaller, faster 7200 RPM disk. I’ll get to that in a minute.

There was one “feature” in version 1.5.1 that really annoyed me. It was in the export module, it you specified a watermark file Aperture would apply the watermark before it resized the image. So if you were carefull to create a watermark exactly the size you wanted it, it would never actually be that size on the exported image unless you exported your image at full size.

Well, v1.5.2 just got released tonight and they added a “Scale Watermark” checkbox. If you leave that box unchecked your watermark will always be the size you intended it to be, regardless of the exported image size.

Thanks Apple!

Aperture users can download version 1.5.2 (a whopping 129MBs) via Software Update. According to the accompanying notes, this update addresses issues related to overall reliability and performance in a number of areas, including:

• Contact sheet printing -
• Smart Albums -
• Watermarks -
• Lift and stamp -
• Image export -
• Versions created using an external editor -

Apple recommends this update for all Aperture users. I’m going to download it now…

Remember when getting your music on a CD was the Holy Grail? Here’s something even retro-hipper. The free Says-It Cassette Generator will instantly mock up a downloadable cassette-tape graphic for you in a variety of styles.

There’s a lot more at the site, including the wonderful Church Sign Generator, but the guilty pleasure of seeing your name on a vintage tape is hard to beat.

(Via Jancee Dunn, author of the brilliant But Enough About Me…a Jersey Girl’s Unlikely Adventures Among the Absurdly Famous. Check out her interview on NPR’s On the Media.)

I just finished testing the SanDisk 4GB Extreme IV CompactFlash Card with FireWire reader against my previous favorite, the Belkin 15-in-1 USB 2.0 reader, and the SanDisk uploaded 386MBs of data in 29 seconds compared to 49 seconds for the Belkin. And it seemed even faster as I watched the upload indicator on the screen of my Mac.

The reader itself is a pricey $79 retail, but there are some very affordable bundles that include the new Extreme IV cards. Readers have posted some of the best deals in the Comments area of my original review.

For the third year, sound designer Gary Garritan has released a free collection of Christmas songs recorded by musicians who use his software instruments. This edition features arrangers and composers from as far away as Iceland, Italy, and Slovenia. And interestingly, it showcases Garritan’s new big-band instruments as well as his earlier orchestral ones.

In a friendly touch, there’s even a downloadable cover, CD label, and liner notes. I snagged the lot with DownThemAll, imported them into iTunes, applied the JPEG cover image, and streamed them to my living room over my twitchy AirPort Express—instant holiday ambience. I don’t think my family even suspected the sounds were from software instruments; we simply enjoyed the music.

For more on Garritan, see our interview “Gary Garritan: A Personal Orchestra for Everyone” and “Public Domain Scores Again,” my blog about his free online orchestration course.

This December, I’m taking some time to work on a few fundamentals before heading into a busy schedule of event shooting next year. One of the things I’m working on is a way to let other people “tap” into the stream of photographs I’m shooting in a form that they can use. I’ve been hesitant to do this for a while as I’ve always wanted to put my best foot forward. But, at the Web 2.0 Summit, various news outlets were wanting images now and it simply took too long to get them usable images with a pure RAW workflow. To give you an idea of the problem, the Web 2.0 Summit is a single track conference where there is always something going on. Every speaker is important to capture. And there were lots of “must get” shots around the conference. It was hard enough being in three places at once to shoot, not to mention download cards, edit, and upload selects.

As good as Aperture is, it’s not fast enough to handle an event like this as a single shooter. Editing 12.8 megapixel images on a MacBook Pro still takes time, up to a few seconds a pop to do the decode. And exporting JPGs of several hundred images takes even more time. Of course, you can quite honestly question my sanity for trying to do an event like this as a single shooter, and you’d have a point. Next year, I’ll be looking at bringing assistants and maybe even second shooters to the job. But, that doesn’t change the fact there are some outlets who will want to have fast—almost realtime—access to the images being shot. And the my client will want me to enable that access. On the other hand, there’s no way I’m not using a RAW based workflow to process my work, expecially to hand off final images to the client for later use.

Have you ever driven past your favorite arena or club in town, and noticed that somehow you missed one of your favorite groups who just performed there a couple of nights earlier? Or maybe you heard about the show around the watercooler - the next day. Frustrating right? Well say goodbye to that challenge.

A new widget has become available, OnTour, courtesy of PassAlong Networks, that when deployed ensures you’ll never miss one of your favorite bands when they come through town. OnTour is available both for the Mac and the PC (in fact it was #1 on Apple.com not long after it launched in September). Once loaded onto your system, it notices what songs you’ve downloaded onto your hard drive (which artists) & then matches that info with the Pollstar touring database to alert you when one of your favorite artists will be performing in your area. It’s really pretty cool! (Full disclosure: PassAlong is one of my clients, and I’ve been working in support of OnTour directly myself).

OnTour launched with Barenaked Ladies in September of this year; in fact, OnTour just won the Billboard DEMXX award for Best Use of Technology in Service of Artists two weeks ago in LA. Other touring artists and labels will soon be making use of OnTour, and encouraging their fans to download it too.

Today, Connected Flow released FlickrExport for Aperture 1.0. Yay! I’ve been watching the development of this for a while, and am happy to see it go 1.0 and get out of beta.

FlickrExport’s sublime feature is that pulls the Title and Description data from the IPTC Headline and Caption metadata associated with each photo. Other tools, including Flickr itself, have used the IPTC Object field which is just so wrong. Of course it also picks up keywords and pushes those as Flickr tags. By fitting in seamlessly with the Aperture workflow, and translating information properly between Aperture and Flickr, FlickrExport makes tossing a picture or three or ten to Flickr an almost effortless task.

Go Fraser!

Beginning podcasters quickly find out that a bad mic makes for bad audio. Period. There’s no undo button on the microphone. Or as you have no doubt heard, garbage in equals garbage out.

I always advocate improving your sound by improving your mic first. Everything else should be secondary in my opinion. But for many podcasters, especially those new to audio recording, adding a professional mic can be a daunting task. It usually means adding a digital to analog converter (via USB or Firewire interface) and/or a mixer. It might also mean adding a microphone pre-amplifier if you use a condenser mic.

Now if it weren’t enough to face the learning curve of adding all those new components, there’s the issue of money. All those extra goodies cost extra cash.

Enter the USB microphone. USB mics just plug right into any Windows or Mac computer and without much fuss, you have audio. There’s no need for an interface, separate pre-amp or mixer. You may have to set some preferences or load a driver, but otherwise, it’s a painless process.

Building on Frederic Vavrille’s Liveplasm site (a visual search engine he created 3 years ago), Mr. Vavrille has created a visually-entertaining web radio where listeners select music from a mood-energy matrix or from a genre selection box. Manuel Lima states that Mr. Vavrille combined sound from Pandora and Last.FM with Liveplasm to create a dynamic mind-map of related music. He calls it Musicovery

Some have reported that it doesn’t work quite right - songs won’t stop and the classification needs work. But I think it’s a whole lot of fun! And, you have to admit it’s a great looking piece of human-computer engineering.

links: Inside Pandora
Technorati tags: musicovery pandora Last.FM

I think most of us agree: digital photography is where we need it to be, and it’s getting better. Issues of quality, speed, storage, ease of use and affordability are all working. And now Aperture fills in the one missing link in my workflow. With this new version, I have a tool that can manage my entire photographic life, from ingest to archive to print and publish.

For whatever the reason or excuse, I have resisted using a cataloging software until now. Lucky for me, Aperture has come along to put my image affairs in order. Like many busy photographers, cataloging and archiving was something I knew I would confront sometime soon, but the task seemed overwhelming. So in the meantime, I have kept a simple system of storing files in a logical hierarchy of folders I could access. But my system has holes and there is a lot of redundancy in my archive. Aperture is about to fix all that.

Now that I’ve been using Aperture and loving it, coupled with the fact that in 1.5.1–the Aperture library can access my images from a variety of sources; (and in his last post, Ben Long has assured us that there is no down side to embracing Aperture; nothing to be afraid of) I’m planning the transfer of my entire archive on several hard drives as referenced files into Aperture, which will serve as the electronic brain for my warehouse of imagery. I’m really excited about this and I’m formulating archiving strategies.

BIG PICTURE ARCHIVE STRATEGIES

In the big picture, my work is divided into two distinct categories, Commercial and Personal Projects. In planning my import strategies, I am trying to jump ahead and see what my archive will look like in the future. All I know for sure is: it’s going to get much bigger.

So I’m planning a computer house cleaning to rid myself of redundancy before I take the forklift to my thousands of photographs and bring them into the Aperture warehouse. I expect this “purging all duplicate and unnecessary data” process to be liberating– and once things are organized and imported into Aperture, I pledge to keep my archive clean and neat, clutter free and backed up religiously. Really.

Because my operating system drive is only 160gbs, I will choose to reference my Aperture files to larger external firewire drives but maybe keep one smaller Retrospective Project with only 5-Star images in the library itself. My plan is to keep my master images on two separate drives for now, one for commercial work and the other for my personal projects. This will be backed up to one larger off-site drive.

Of course, once files are safely within Aperture, I can move them around, but there’s a lot to be said for organizing everything right from the start.

I was curious what strategies you have employed to keep and maintain your ever-growing archive of images in Aperture. Do you keep everything you shoot or are you selective on import? Where do you store things? How do CDs and DVDs fit into your archiving plan? By seeing how others are doing things, I’m thinking we can find easier and more efficient ways to work with our own growing storehouse of visuals; and plan for a future body of work that will only grow bigger and better.

A new book: Heroines & Heroes: Hope, HIV and Africa by Steve Simon
(Designed in Aperture)
time.com

Until yesterday, I was completely unaware that Amazon even offered free MP3 downloads. I have no idea how often these change or how often they update their site. This is a first and very experimental post. Let me know whether the links work for you or not.

“Today is the Day” by Apollo Sunshine
Eyes by by Apollo Sunshine
Apollo Sunshine’s new CD, Apollo Sunshine is likely unlike anything else you’re listening to right now. While the record fuses together familiar sounds, it’s a genre-crossing earful that sounds all-new. Try one track exclusively on Amazon.com, then grab another.

“Why Bother It All” from Koufax’s Hard Times Are in Fashion
“Shame and Scandal” from Madness’s The Dangermen Sessions, Vol. 1
’80s favorite Madness is back with a funky bunch of cool covers on The Dangermen Sessions, Vol. 1 and indie rockers Koufax hit their stride with Hard Times Are in Fashion. Download [a] free track from each new release.

“Plasti-Queens” from Shrinking Violets
“Before Kings” from Geoff Byrd’s Shrinking Violets
Great pop songs with catchy hooks that invite you to sing along? Check. Melodies and a great voice? Check. If you’re a fan of Gavin DeGraw or Rob Thomas types, but still love classic pop songs, check out Geoff Byrd’s music. Trust us: You can say you heard him first after he becomes a well-known star. Download two free tracks from Geoff’s CD, Shrinking Violets.

Do you live somewhere without an iTunes store? Or even somewhere with an iTunes store but without any freebies? Feeling a little bit left out and ignored as all those marvelous free items pass you by? Want to get in on the action?

Well, it seems like there may be a slight loophole in the Napster Freebies system. Several international readers (from Australia, France, Germany and the UK) report they’ve been able to download tracks from my O’Reilly Friday Napster posts but not from the Napster site itself.

Do these freebies work for you? Do they play back in iTunes and on your iPod? Let me know in the comments.

“American Me” by C.L. Smooth
Pete Rock & C.L. Smooth made some of the most memorable tracks of hip hop’s Golden Era. Now on a solo mission sans his super-producer partner, C.L. delivers the title track to his solo debut, picking up where he left off. [Dec 8]

“The Land of Pure Imagination” by Roger Joseph Manning, Jr.
His early, insatiable hunger for music led this veteran keyboardist/arranger/singer to gigs with Jellyfish, Moog Cookbook, Air, and Beck.Those influences are reflected in this track’s wild synths, tempo shifts and ’70s-style guitar riffs. [Dec 7]

“The Mating Game” by Bitter:Sweet
Take one founding member of the Supreme Beings of Leisure, mix with the daughter of a founding member of Blood, Sweat & Tears, and you get this cool duo. Listen and be swept away on a sultry yet zany Las Vegas/James Bondish excursion. [Dec 6]

“Fall Away (State I’m In)” by Chris Ayer
This well-traveled bard has been described as “Bright Eyes mixed with James Taylor in the form of James Dean.” Hear it for yourself with this track from his debut full-length album, This Is the Place. [Dec 5]

“Turn” by Socratic
After years of marching with the emo pack, this Garden State foursome has come into its own with the help of producer John Goodmanson of Hot Hot Heat fame. Get it first on Napster. [Dec 4]

“Showbiz” by Lyrycyst
After surviving childhood abuse, this Kansas City, Missouri phenom embarked on a musical mission. This edgy hip-hop grinder from the diverse American Dream presents his positive message while showcasing his substantial skills. [Dec 3]

“What’s Wrong with Me (Nouvelle Vague Remix)” by Skye
Time in the limelight has taught this former Morcheeba singer about inner strength, which she says has helped her writing. “This record is more personal,” she says. “This is my own journey.” This remix lends the track an even more organic feel. [Dec 2]

It’s been said that the most sound investment is Real Estate … the same seems to be true when using Apple’s Aperture. A little extra screen real estate can make your experience even more pleasurable.

How do I know? Well, I just took delivery of a 30″ Apple Cinema Display a few days ago. I bought this monitor in anticipation of receiving my new MacPro, which I’ll probably have by the time you read this.

I’ve been using a 23″ Apple Cinema Display for about 4 years now and I really thought 23″ was enough. That was till I tried a 30″ running Aperture. I had actually intended to leave the 30″ in the box till the MacPro arrived … but I just couldn’t wait (like a kid on Christmas morning).

So after two days of using the 30″ monitor I can say that it makes a HUGE difference, even when compared to a reasonably large monitor like the 23″. It is so nice to have everything on the screen at once with nothing overlapping or hiding next to scroll bars.

When you are making your Aperture shopping list you need to start with a nice graphics card, enough RAM and a fast/large hard drive but don’t forget to invest in some screen real estate. You can work in Aperture on a 15″ monitor, but it is so much sweeter on a big screen!

Next week I’m sure I’ll be blogging about running Aperture on a MacPro :)

Until next time,

Keep shooting.

Allen Rockwell
Allen Rockwell Photography

I don’t actually think you should stop using Aperture. In fact, in my own work, I’ve pretty much abandoned all of my other workflow tools and am using Aperture exclusively. However, people keep asking me questions about renaming master files, or organizational questions about how to keep files arranged in the Finder. I try to explain that, very often, these issues are irrelevant because Aperture will handle them for you and, very often, the would-be Aperture user fesses up: “yeah, but what if I stop using Aperture one day?”

The Aperture library still scares a lot of people. In my talks, It’s apparent from the questions that people ask that many still think that committing to Aperture will invariably set them up for some terrible problem in the future, should they ever need to abandon Aperture for another workflow solution.

So, in an effort to ease the minds of those who are hesitating to completely embrace Aperture, I’d like to explain exactly how you can stop using Aperture, should you ever decide to. Hopefully, once you see that you can easily extricate yourself from an Aperture-based workflow, you’ll be more willing to completely throw yourself into Aperture.

Should you ever decide to stop using Aperture, your first goal will be to extract all of your images from the Aperture libary. Aperture’s non-destructive editing architecture means that you need to take care to copy out both your master images, and any edited versions that you may have created. If you take only your masters, you’ll lose all edits, ratings, and metadata that you’ve assigned. If you’ve been saving copies of your master images before you import them into Aperture, then you may be able to skip this step. However, to be safe, you might want to export all your masters anyway. After all, you can always sort through them later.

To export masters, first select a project, then select all of the images in that project and choose File > Export > Export Masters. Select a location and Aperture will write out copies of your master files. Then move on to the next project. Since you’re exporting on a project-by-project basis, you can easily export your master files into separate folders, allowing you to build up an organizational scheme in the Finder as you go.

Next you’ll want to create copies of the edited versions that you’ve created. You can choose to do this for every version in a project, or selectively export only the images that have been edited. Select the versions you want to export and choose File > Export > Export Versions. Pick a destination and an export preset and your files will be exported. Again, because you’re going project-by-project, it’s easy to keep your exported images organized.

For these export steps to work, you need enough disk space to hold all of your masters and versions. If space is tight, there’s another approach you can take.

First, export your versions as described above. Then, in the Finder, navigate to the location of your Aperture library. By default, the Aperture library is kept in the Pictures folder of your Home directory. If you don’t find it there, check your Aperture preferences to find out where it is.

Control-click on the Library document and choose Show Package Contents. A Finder window will open showing the contents of the Library. In the window’s Spotlight field enter the file extension of one of your master file types (NEF, PSD, CR2, CRW, JPG, TIFF, ORF, etc.). All of the images in your library that have that file extension will appear in the Spotlight window. You can then drag them to a new location. You’ll need to do a separate search for every file type that you’ve used in your library. If you use this technique, your Aperture library will be very messed up when you’re done, so make sure that this is the very last step that you perform in your process. This procedure will also work if you one day find yourself with an Aperture library, but no usable copy of Aperture.

While the versions that you export will include any metadata that you’ve assigned, you can also export metadata as a tab-delimited text file. Select the images that contain the metadata you want to export, then choose File > Export > Export Metadata. Aperture will prompt you for a location and a filename and will then write a text file to that location.

As you can see, using the tools that are built in to Aperture, you can easily extract all of your master files, edited images, and metadata. If you don’t have Aperture you can still access all of your master files directly from the Finder.

So, for those of you who are still worried about how to one day leave Aperture behind, post your fears here and we’ll see if there’s a solution.

With the latest version of Aperture, Apple has given us more sharpening options. The new adjustment called EDGE SHARPEN gives photographers significantly more control than was available using the standard SHARPEN adjustment.

With Edge Sharpen, only the edges are impacted. This is important because there are times when sharpening an entire image just isn’t required. Who needs a sharp sky?

The main value of Edge Sharpen is that if applied properly, you can sharpen without creating noise.

The path from song idea to polished master recording is long and complex, so it’s good to see more companies producing tutorial DVDs. Keyfax NewMedia has been in the business for a long time, driven by founder Julian Colbeck’s wit and music-technology expertise. (One of Keyfax’s first DVDs, for the Yamaha Motif keyboard, actually outsold the Motif itself.)

I’ve known Colbeck since the mid-’90s, when I snagged him to write several entertaining features for Music & Computers magazine, so I’m always interested to see what Keyfax comes up with. The latest endeavor is a DVD collaboration with Universal Audio called UA Studio Onscreen, Vol. 1.

The disc is designed to take you inside the entire recording process from pre-production to mastering, and is targeted to beginning to intermediate audio engineers. Universal Audio gear such as mic preamps and the UAD-1 DSP card have starring roles, but Colbeck assured me the overall goal was to give “a ton of practical advice.”

“Obviously the techniques shown do relate to specific UA kit," he said, "but this is going to be invaluable to general recording people to see what compressors, limiters, EQ, reverbs, digital recording, mixes, and mastering are all about and how they’re used in real-life settings. The sections on mixing and mastering are really excellent because you get to sit in on a mix and a mastering session, and really see—and of course hear—what’s going on. Even having made 30 albums myself I learned a bunch of stuff.”

I grabbed these screenshots from an excerpt of the video on the Keyfax site. The preview reveals little and promises a lot, but I’m confident the rest of the disc will live up to Keyfax and UA’s engaging attitude and high standards.

Two weeks ago, I wrote that Color Management is Essential. The resulting comments, as well as personal discussions, I’ve had since then have been interesting indeed. One of the biggest questions that I’ve gotten has been: “So, what exactly makes a more expensive calibrator better? Why does it make better profiles?”

There are two parts to answering this question. The first is that you’d expect that the more expensive calibration units, such as the Gretag Macbeth Eye One Display 2 would have better hardware than the lower end units, such as the huey. It’s not necessarily the case, but you’d at least expect it.

The second part of the question is on the software side. When the heuy profiles a display, it samples fewer colors than when the Eye One Display 2 does its profiling. I’ve not compiled a list of the color swatches being used as they go by, but from casual observation the heuy seems to spend most of its time profiling luminance values by using grey swatches and then uses a few red, blue, and green samples to catch the color information. By contrast, the Eye One Match software for the Display 2 calibrator seems to roll through an entire Pantone swatch book. Well, not really, but its sampling a lot more colors than the heuy does. By definition, more samples should equal a better profile.

In a recent MacDevCenter article, I discussed how to build interactive iPod experiences using the iPod’s “museum mode”. As a supplement to that article, here are a number of museum podcasts that you might enjoy listening to.

SFMOMA Artcasts
An insider’s take on the museum and its exhibits. More than mere museum tours, SFMOMA Artcasts paint vivid audio portraits of artists and their works. Listen to Chuck Close describe his style and process as he walks through the gallery. Hear Kiki Smith recall her inspiration for the works in a 2005 retrospective. Or discover what guest curators and fellow audiences have to say about exhibits at SFMOMA.

Miami Metro Zoo
Complete guided tours of the zoo from the comfort of your iPod. Peruse audio information on animal diet, habitat, range, and more. Hear lions roar even when they’re sleeping, courtesy of animal sounds that accompany each exhibit. Take a musical tour of every geographic region represented in the zoo with song selections chosen by a noted ethnomusicologist. Miami Metrozoo podcasts also feature animal folklore from around the world, so you can learn more about the relationship between animals and humans in different cultures. The zoo podcast: It’s one wild idea whose time has come.

Chateau de Versailles
Bringing a nearly 400-year-old palace into the iPod age sounds like a daunting task, but that’s exactly what the Digital Grand Versailles Project has set out to do with Louis XIV’s magnificent Versailles chateau and gardens. With an aim to “reposition Versailles as the main place for culture and technical capability, as it once was under Louis XIV,” the project kicks off with audio and video podcasts featuring the Gardens of Versailles and Marie Antoinette’s Trianon.

NYMOMA
101 episodes, providing a wide range of lectures about MOMA exhibits.

de Young Museum (San Francisco)
Presenting news, features and hidden treasures from San Francisco’s new de Young museum. Each episode includes information about current and upcoming exhibitions ad public programs, as well as interviews with artists, museum visitors, curators, conservators, and educators

I’m slogging through these terms, trying to figure out what you can and cannot do with your Zune and stumbled across a few What-the-Heck?! moments. Here is one of my favorites:

“In using the service, you may not…create a Zunetag or motto that other users may be offended by, including words that sound like, stand for, hint at, abbreviate, or insinuate any of the following: profane words/phrases, sexually explicit language, sexual innuendo, hate speech (including but not limited to racial, ethnic, or religious slurs), illegal drugs/controlled substances, or illegal activities”

And another. Who thought “I’m going to buy a music player, but first let me get ready to insult the victims of crimes against humanity. Oh no. Wait. It’s aginst the TOS.”?

“In using the service, you may not…publish, distribute or disseminate any topic, name, material, file or information that incites discrimination, hate or violence towards one person or a group because of their race, religion, nationality, transgender status, homosexual status or HIV/AIDS status, or that insults the victims of crimes against humanity by contesting the existence of those crimes”

36 RULES FOR BANDS
(source unknown)

….this isn’t ‘digital’ per se, but it was forwarded to me & I got a kick out of it; hoped you might too. Spinal Tap anyone?

1. Never start a trio with a married couple.

2. Your manager’s not helping you. Fire him/her.
(KR - not always true; but there are war stories)

3. Before you sign a record deal, look up the word
“recoupable” in the dictionary.

4. No one cares who you’ve opened for.

5. A string section does not make your songs sound any
more “important”.

6. If your band has gone through more than 4 bass
players, it’s time to break up.

7. When you talk on stage you are never funny.

8. If you sound like another band, don’t act like you’re unfamiliar
with their music (”Oh, does Rage against the Machine also do rap-rock
with political lyrics?”)

9. Asking a crowd how they’re doing is just amplified
small talk. Don’t do it.

10. Don’t say your video’s being played if it’s only
on the Austin Music Network.

11. When you sign to a major label, claim to have
inked the best contract ever. Mention “artistic
freedom” and “a guaranteed 3 record deal”.

12. When you get dropped, insist that it was the worst
contract ever and that you asked to be released.

13. Never name a song after your band.

14. Never name your band after a song.

15. When a drummer brings in his own songs and asks to
perform one of them, begin looking for a new drummer
IMMEDIATELY.

16. Never enter a “battle of the bands” contest. If
you do you’re already a loser.

17. Learn to recognize scary word pairings: “rock
opera”, “white rapper”, “blues jam”, “swing band”,
“open mike”, etc.

18. Drummers can take off their shirts or they can
wear gloves, but not both.

19. Listen, either break it to your parents or we
will: its rock ‘n’ roll, not a soccer game. They’ve
gotta stop coming to your shows.

20. It’s not a “showcase”. It’s a gig that doesn’t
pay.

21. No one cares that you have a web site.

22. Getting a tattoo is like sewing platform shoes to
your feet.

23. Don’t hire a publicist.

24. Playing in Portsmouth and Nashua doesn’t mean
you’re on tour.

25. Don’t join a cover band that plays Bush songs. In
fact, don’t join a cover band.

26. Although they come in different styles and
colors, electric guitars all sound the same. Why do
you keep changing them between songs?

27. Don’t stop your set to ask that beers be brought
up. That’s what girlfriends/boyfriends are for.

28. If you use a smoke machine, your music stinks.

29. We can tell the difference between a
professionally produced album cover and one you
made with the iMac your mom got for Christmas.

30. Remember: if blues solos are so difficult, why can
so many 16 year olds play them?

31. If you ever take a publicity photo, destroy it.
You may never know where or w hen it will turn up.

32. Cut your hair, but do not shave your head.

33. Pierce your nose, but not your eyebrow.

34. Do not wear shorts onstage. Or a suit. Or a hat.

35. Rock oxymorons: “major label interest”, “demo
deal”,” blues genius”, “$500 guarantee”, “artist development”
and “Fastball’s second hit”.

36. Three things that are never coming back:
a) gongs, b)headbands, and c) playing slide guitar with
a beer bottle.

Last year I tested the Logitech Z-3000 speakers and was quite taken with their full-bodied, boomy performance. I decided to give the new Z-10 Interactive Speaker System a spin based on the Logitech track record for good sound, stylish looks, and this model’s innovative approach to tabletop speakers for your computer.

When I first unpacked the Z-10s, I was duly impressed with their design. These speakers look great. I was curious to see how the backlit display looked that featured the audio controls and ID3 music tags. I checked the system requirements, however, and was disappointed to see that the bundled software was for Windows only. Did that mean I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the Z-10s connected to my Mac?

In my last two entries I outlined a few strategies for renaming master files during import into Aperture. However, if you’ve already got files in your Aperture library and didn’t rename the masters on import, and now find that you need to export renamed master files, you’ll want to use the technique described here.

Why would you ever need to export renamed masters? Last week I worked with a photographer who shoots raw, but needs to deliver both raw files and JPEGs to the magazines she shoots for. She doesn’t do any actual image editing - she simply selects the images that she likes, and sends the batch in both formats. The publisher uses the JPEG files for browsing (for the sake of speed) and then finds the corresponding raw file for editing. However, her publisher also expects a very particular naming format.

Aperture’s Relocate Masters command enables you to change the location of your master files, whether they’re stored inside the Aperture library, or stored as references. During the move, it can also rename the file using any of the usual Aperture naming presets.

To rename a master file that’s already in your library:

1. Select the images you want to rename.

2. Choose File > Relocate Master.

3. In the resulting dialog box, choose a location where you want to store the new files. You can relocate the images to a different folder on the same drive, but the relocation will go faster if you move them to a different drive.

4. In the same dialog box, specify the name format that you want applied to the masters as they’re moved.

5. Click Relocate Masters to move the files.

The master files will be placed in the location you specified, using the naming convention you defined. You can now do whatever you need to do with them.

Now that they’re renamed, if you want the files back in your internal Aperture library:

1. Leave the files selected and choose File > Consolidate Masters.

2. In the resulting dialog box, choose Move Files.

3. Click the Continue button.

The master files will be relocated to your internal library.

Granted, this scheme is a little bit of a hack - it would be better if Aperture simply let you rename the files in their current location - but on small to medium-sized batches, it goes fairly quickly.

US only. Napster Freebies Page.

“There’s a Riot Goin’ Off” by Paradise Boys
This San Francisco DJ collective turned electro/punk/disco band has been touted as a mash-up of the Postal Service, Prince, the Sex Pistols, and the Neptunes. That may sound like a tall order, but there’s no denying the appeal of this party-starter. [Dec 1]

“Fire” by The Goldstars
These notorious Chicago road dogs have honed their skills over years of serious dues-paying, both in and out of their present collective. This full-tilt blast from Purple Girlfriend is happy proof good-time riff rock lives on. [Nov 30]

“Novotel” by Adam Green
Formerly of the Moldy Peaches, Adam Green’s offbeat but gripping way of putting words together sets him apart from most singer/songwriters. His gifts are on full display on this semi-surreal tale from Jacket Full of Danger. [Nov 29]

“Yellow Rose in Me” by Robin English
This harmonica-totin’, guitar-playin’ Texas siren has had Nashville’s attention since way back in 2000. Now with a new album and a new label, she’s on tour to promote a new set of tunes, including this hard-stompin’ single. [Nov 28]

“Ready and Willing” by Self Against City
This Sacramento indie outfit took their name from their singer’s misunderstanding of the lyrics to David Bowie’s “Suffragette City,” but there’ll be no mistaking the high-intensity, emotionally charged rock of this first single from Telling Secrets to Strangers. [Nov 27]

“Boy Soprano” by Xiu Xiu
Named after a late-’90s Chinese movie, these Northern California indie experimentalists continue to craft seriously offbeat but surprisingly accessible music, including this track from their new album, The Air Force. [Nov 26]

“Don’t Believe Everything” by Shane Bartell
Rereleased in 2006, this track from Bartell’s 2004 debut album, Too Soon to Say, pairs Cardigans collaborator Lars Göransson’s production with the singer’s moody yet sensitive lyrics. [Nov 25]

A lot of people struggle with the decision to buy Aperture because they believe that even if they own aperture they will still need to do some editing to their images that Aperture cannot do and therefore they’ll need to buy a program like Photoshop. Buying Photoshop at $699.00 and Aperture at $299.00 together is a bit much for many amateurs and digital photography enthusiasts. So often people end up making a choice to buy one or the other. Quite often it seems to these people that Photoshop is the logical choice because it is true that Photoshop has many advanced editing features that Aperture does not have.

One of the great things about working for O’Reilly is that I get to check out the latest books. Yesterday I got a PDF copy of iPod: The Missing Manual, 5th Edition, by New York Times Circuits writer J.D. Biersdorfer. My mission: to extract some of the tips and present them in HTML so you can see them too.

On the surface, that seemed like a simple cut-and-paste exercise, but as soon as I cracked open the PDF, I was struck by the book’s elegant layout. It was colorful, concise, and clear. This is a manual?! I ended up reading quite a bit of it instead of just trawling along with the text-selector. I was particularly impressed that some of the screenshots seemed to have been taken this week; it really felt up-to-date.

Biersdorfer says she wrote the book for “beginner to intermediate iPodders of all ages,” but it has extensive coverage of iTunes tricks as well, quite a few of which were new to me.

As background before I began the tip extraction, O’Reilly’s Sara Peyton forwarded this recent interview with Biersdorfer. It’s not often that you get to see the humanity behind a manual, so I thought I’d share it here.