After wrapping up my last day of shooting at MacWorld on Friday, it was time to sit down and sift through photographs. And, boy, there were quite a few to go through. I shot 943 frames for my assignment. During the first cut, I flat out rejected 290 as unusable for any purpose and left 478 unrated. The unrated images are the ones that won’t make it to the client for this assignment, but which might have other uses at some point in the future. Or maybe they won’t. But they won’t get unceremoniously erased off the hard drive at this point like the rejects will. On the other hand, 175 images got one star or better, which means that there’s a possibility of them being used.
The next step that I usually take after the first cut is a second detailed pass. It’s on this pass that I do critical examination of photographs to rank them against each other. It’s at this point that I’ll start figuring out what some of the best images of the shoot are, especially for the immediate purpose of fulfilling my assignment. It’s at this point that my photographs will end up with their final star ranking for a while.
I’ve been somewhat vague, on purpose, as to the details of my assignment. Because projects change or get cancelled midway through, it’s not always appropriate to spill all the details. But, to give you an idea of the magnitude of what I had to accomplish in the second cut, I will say that I needed around 10 good portraits and 10 good environment shots. That’s 20 selected images out of 175. It’s not a hard task, but one that I needed to finish out quickly.
To help me do this part of the job, I leaned heavily on Aperture’s stack and compare features. I’d go into detail about how I used these tools, but Ben Long already hit the nail on the head with two blog posts:
These are where the real sorting power of Aperture comes into play. Using the compare mode, you can just rip through a set of similar images and narrow down to just the ones you want. It did take me a few hours to get through my second edit, but these tools made it much faster—and made my edit much more precise—than it otherwise would be.
So, now that I have the images I need, what’s next? Well, the next part of my assignment involves taking my photographs and building a set of web pages that will be part of the final deliverable. This won’t be a simple web gallery. Instead, these are going to be very photo rich web pages that will be part of a bigger project. Some of the images will be composited with text over them. Others will be standalone floating on a web page. The right tool for the job is now Photoshop. So, I’ve exported out my 20 or so final pictures out of Aperture and am now furiously finishing my assignment using Photoshop for the image work, TextMate for HTML and CSS, and Safari to view things as I go.
Things are looking really good. I’m super happy. And Aperture has been a vital part of the entire process. Hopefully in a few weeks I’ll be able to provide a pointer to the results. There’s also one more blog post I want to write about this shoot. One that will wrap things up and point out some of the things I’ve learned from the shoot, from the excellent comments to these posts, and from conversations with other photographers while working at the event. But, it’ll be a few days before I do. I’ve got some things to finish up first….
Bernt: Interesting find there with the LaCie drives you mentioned. I hadn't seen that one before and it looks like a possibly good solution. I'm curious to hear how it works.
KG: You're welcome! As far as the name goes, either one. Duncan works James works. :) But, most of my friends call me Duncan these days. You should definitly try blogging a shoot. It's a good experience that makes you very aware of the things you do. I'm looking forward to finding a few hours later this week to wrap this series up.
Paul: In this case, I meant "export the files out from Aperture to a folder on my Desktop and use them from there". I probably should be doing what Micah says, but for some reason when I switch into "compositing" mode, I pull from my library and just work with the files as is.
Micah: Thanks for chiming in. :) And you're right. This would be a good way to keep the cropped and modified versions in my main library instead of having them managed out in my Subversion tree with the HTML and the other files I have pulled together for the website.
Paul,
Just thought I would chime in here... When you hit Edit in External Editor in Aperture (assuming you have PS set as your editor) Aperture makes a new file from the version you have selected. It then opens that new file in PShop. The file itself (can be either a PSD or TIFF) is stored in the Managed library in Aperture, unless you move it using the Relocate Masters function.
It would essentialy be the same as exporting a PSD and then opening that file in PShop, but this way, Aperture manages the file in its database. I think this is a critical thing to understand about the Aperture way of doing things. You can take full advantage of the Aperture RAW converter, make any crops, edits, and add metadata, and THEN send it to PShop, very easily. Once you hit save in PShop, and close the file, you can go back in Aperture and see the thumbnail update with your PShop edits.
When you said you exported the images to Photoshop, do you really mean "export", or did you use the edit in external editor command? Just wondering, as I'm trying to figure out the best workflow in this area as well.
Nice work, JDD (do you prefer James or Duncan or other?). Thanks once again for sharing your insights. I'd love for more photographers to do this. You have me thinking I should blog one of my shoots. Although, I'm not the writer you are, that's for sure. And, my shoots aren't nearly as exciting as MacWorld Expo. LOL Still, I may give it a shot. Anyway, I'm looking forward to the last post of this series.
Hello Duncan,
if you look for portable performance, why don't you have a closer look at the LaCie Little big Disk? 160 GB and more, FireWire 800 and stripped RAID, some running with 7200. As I always had the feeling the images don't want to get in or out of my drive in my MBP 17, (same as you have) and I'm so fed up to see the spinning wheel... Will get the 200 GBs in the next days...
Cheers