O'Reilly Digital Media

One of photography’s all time great tools of the trade has been the contact sheet. The first time I saw a contact sheet was the first time my grandmother helped me make one in her darkroom. I’d just developed my first roll of Black and White film under her tutelage and we wanted to see what kind of shots I made. So, we cut up the long strip of 35mm film into chunks, slipped them into a negative page, and then laid that page on top of a sheet of 8×10 photo paper. The result was magic. In one place I could pick and choose the image I wanted a bigger print of.

In the digital darkroom, contact sheets serve a different purpose. We don’t need them anymore to pick and choose our own photographs. Instead, we have star rankings and stacks to help us with that task. But, they still serve a very useful purpose when we hand over a pile of JPEGs on CD or DVD to a client. In my last few assignments, in addition to handing off a CD or DVD, I’ve been printing out contact sheets and giving them to my clients. This allows the client to navigate through the hundreds of files I might give them. And, my clients love them. It gives them a something tangible to hold and flip through.

Today, while assembling the distribution DVDs for two recent gigs, I had another ah-hah moment. I decided that not only would I print the contact sheets, I’d place a PDF of the contact sheet onto the distribution disk. This will let my clients print out additional copies of the contact sheet if they like, or simply have an electronically navigable index to the JPGs on the disk. They don’t have to have Aperture, Lightroom, Bridge, or iView. All they need is a PDF reader and they’re good to go.

It’s a simple process to save off the contact sheet and put it onto the distribution disk. It’s so simple that I kind of wonder why I didn’t think of it before. But now that I’ve started doing this, I can’t imagine shipping off a distribution disk without one again.

I shoot almost exclusively with a digital SLR. I have a few different point-and-shoot cameras around at one time or another, mostly loaners for book or magazine projects, but I just can’t stand using an LCD screen as a viewfinder. Because they don’t show the full dynamic range in a scene, I find composition to be much more confusing to me, and more and more cameras lack optical viewfinders.

However, I do occasionally use a point-and-shoot when it’s completely impractical to carry an SLR, when I need to shoot something to put on ebay, or when I want to shoot video. The video capabilities found on most quality point-and-shoots these days is astonishing. Offering full-frame, full motion video, with sound - and usually better-quality compression than DV - point-and-shoot cameras are perfectly viable solutions for times when you need to capture something that just won’t work as a still frame.

Because I don’t spend a lot of time working with point-and-shoots, though, I was very surprised recently when I took the card out of a Canon PowerShot S80, stuck it in my card reader, and waited for Aperture’s Import dialog box to appear. As usual, Aperture showed me all of the images on the card. I selected my choices and hit the Import button, and Aperture presented me with the following dialog box:

When you click on Download Additional Files, Aperture will prompt you with a standard Save dialog, allowing you to select a location for the files. I created a new Folder on the desktop, finished the import, and when I was done, my still images had been imported into Aperture, as normal, but my movies had also been copied into my chosen folder, saving me the trouble of performing an additional copy somewhere else, after leaving Aperture.

If you regularly mix it up with your point-and-shoot, moving between stills and movies, Aperture will help you automatically move the files where they need to be when you import.

Having finally recuperated from last month’s visit to Musikmesse, I have created a Flickr set with more photos from the event, complementing the impressions from our Messe Report.

Searching Flickr for the “Musikmesse 2007″ tag will find many more photos from Frankfurt, providing you with quite a much broader view than my admittedly keyboard-centric perspective.

Enjoy!

I’ve recently fielded some questions about XMP sidecar files in Adobe Lightroom and felt that would be a good topic for this weeks blog post. Before we get into XMP sidecar files and Lightroom, let’s first explain why they are needed. Lightroom is a non-destructive image editor, meaning that it does not alter the original RAW image in any way save for renaming the file. Hence Lightroom, as well as Photoshop CS2 and CS3, both use what are called XMP sidecar files that describe the changes and additions applied to a RAW image. These include the addition of metadata, all of the adjustments made in Lightroom or Adobe Camera RAW and any other adjustments or alterations added such as keywords and the like.

Hence, in Lightroom, the XMP sidecar files contain the metadata, keywords and adjustments made to an image. In its default mode, Lightroom does not automatically write these sidecar files into the folder containing your images. You have to go into the preferences and check the “Automatically write changes into XMP” box to turn this feature on as in the image below.

Once you have this box checked, Lightroom will create XMP sidecar files that show up in the same folder along with your images and with the same name as the RAW image file but with an .xmp file extension.

Now, I know many of you are asking why would I want to do this? When you import images into Lightroom all of the changes, metadata and keywords are recorded in the Lightroom cache while working on your images so additionally saving this information into the folder with your images might seem redundant. My reasoning for doing this is partly my archival strategy and partly for convenience as well as how my workflow works.

I want to have the XMP sidecar file next to my RAW image file in the same folder because I want that information to travel with the RAW file wherever it goes. After I have backed up my images to two hard drives I also burn them to DVD’s - my third back up. I have had two occasions where I’ve had to reload images from those DVD’s (my third backup) and I was very glad to have the XMP sidecar files right there so I did not have to redo all of the work I had done before. This is a huge advantage to having the XMP sidecar files in with my RAW images.

Another convenient reason for using the XMP sidecar files is transferring images I have partially worked up on my laptop to my office computer for final prep. I can just copy a group of images along with the Lightroom XMP sidecar files onto a hard drive, dump them onto my main imaging computer, then import them into Lightroom and voila, all of my settings and everything are read by Lightroom and I can continue working without missing a beat because Lightroom reads those settings from the XMP sidecar files.

And finally, my workflow is such that I don’t import all of my folders into Lightroom and leave them there indefinitely. I bring folders in that I am working on, then after a month or two, I delete those folders out of Lightroom so that it stays snappy and fast. Hopefully soon, Lightroom will also become the end-all-be-all image cataloging and archiving software of choice but as of yet it is not. When it is, then I’ll leave all of my folders and images in Lightroom.

That’s it for this week.

Adios, Michael Clark

This post was supposed to be all about how I am finally getting into making HDR (High Dynamic Range) images and how easy it is to do with Lightroom. Well I have plenty of RAW image files and I downloaded all the presets from Richard Earney’s Inside Lightroom website - http://inside-lightroom.co.uk/hdr.html - but then the rain and lightning storms blew into town.

For the last 48 hours or so I have had lightning and thunder all around me, water leaking through the roof in every room and to top it all off, no electricity and of course no internet.

The HDR-7 file in the Lightroom Develop module (this is not the HDR end result, just one of the exposure settings, this one is created by the HDR-7 preset in Lightroom)

I did manage to make a set of 7 images and struggled through the blending process in Photoshop CS3 on my portable, but I have to admit that I ran into some problems and although I did get an HDR image out of the process, I am not too happy with it yet (the dynamic range is there but the colors are not very good).

As soon as I get some results I can be proud of (hopefully some time tomorrow) I will make another post and show you what I have learned about the not so easy process of making HDR images with Lightroom.

April 30 - I am continuing my HDR experiments at my own website - http://dpmac.com - because you can not really see the effect unless you show images at a larger size than possible here. The first in a series of articles on HDR can be found at - http://dpmac.com/adobe/01-hdr-v1.html.

If you’re an Aperture user, there’s a good chance that you haven’t taken a look at iPhoto in a while. Why go back to iPhoto when Aperture’s tool set is so powerful? Three reasons in particular: books, cards, and calendars. Aperture doesn’t allow you to design greeting cards and calendars, but since you can see your Aperture library in iPhoto, you can access all these creation tools. Plus, iPhoto is designed for consumers so its built-in templates are professionally designed and look great. As an example, let’s take a look at how to get your Aperture photos into an iPhoto calendar.

Start by putting the photos for your calendar into an album in Aperture; let’s name the album “2007 Calendar”. This will make it easier to find what you’re looking for once we head into iPhoto. Now, launch iPhoto, click on the File menu, and choose Show Aperture Library… You’ll get a floating palette showing your Aperture library and albums.

In order to use your Aperture photos in iPhoto you first have to copy the JPEG previews into iPhoto’s library. A tip here: first, create an iPhoto album with the same name as your Aperture album (2007 Calendar). Now, from the Aperture Photos palette, drag the album for your calendar into the iPhoto album you just created. iPhoto will import the high-resolution JPEG preview images into its library and put the images into the new album.

Creating the calendar is easy. Select your “2007 Calendar” album in iPhoto’s sidebar and click the Calendar icon at the bottom of the window. Pick a calendar theme, decide which months the calendar should include, and click Okay. Customize your calendar by dragging photos from the left side of the iPhoto window onto the gray dropzones in the calendar pages. When you’re done, you can purchase calendars through Apple’s Book and Print ordering service.

For more information and tips on book, calendar, and card ordering in both Aperture and iPhoto, be sure to check out Derrick Story’s interview with Greg Scallon, Apple’s manager of online printing and books for Aperture and iPhoto.

O’Reilly recently snuck a wacky speech synthesizer into our blogs: Clicking the “listen” link above will play back these words with a robotic voice. As a speech synth enthusiast, I immediately started looking for phrases that would produce funny rhythms. I found the first in Peter Drescher’s recent blog about the Game Developers Conference:

I love the Game Developer’s Conference! the lights, the cameras, the action, all the best and brightest coming together for meets and greets and foods and drinks, it’s exciting, exhilirating, and completely exhausting!

(Robot photo by AZAdam.)

I captured the synth’s output with Ambrosia Wiretap, imported it into Ableton Live, and cooked up the following ditty:

I have maintained that Aperture can make you a better photographer in many ways. Not only can you organize your photographic life, getting rid of the cyber-clutter (duplicate images) and ultimately have more time to shoot; but it also lets you recognize connections in your work, which can be expanded into strong collections of photographs.

This has been quite a revelation for me, and since versions add only tiny files to each album, I can experiment with endless ideas, grouping them into albums, which can blossom into full-fledged projects.

When I’m out on a shoot and I see a good picture unrelated to my current assignment, I shoot it. With Aperture, there is a place for this image; it doesn’t get filed away and forgotten.

I’ve been shooting for so long now, that I begin to see similarities in photographs I take, even if they are continents or decades apart, or even further apart in terms of subject matter. It may be the composition is similar, the light or gesture. Or maybe it’s the subject matter; shapes, faces or emotions evoked. Regardless, I sometimes get curious to see how images will play together, and from there, ideas and new bodies of work are born.

This is more than just categorizing images and putting them in a specific drawer for future consideration. This is about using Aperture to inspire you to develop ideas you can run with.

It’s so easy to create albums and experiment with these connections and ideas, it’s actually fun. And when something is fun, you don’t mind doing it. And when you start to see results, well that just feeds the fire.

The kissing couples were all taken at different times in different places, while shooting something else. But with Aperture I can now create a “kissing” album and drag all my similar pictures inside. I can play with them, move them around, seeing how the album evolves over time and find inspiration to shoot more images about love or lust. It’s a collection that eventually will grow into a new project for exhibition, or even a book someday.

I might want to toss them onto an Aperture Light table and play with sizes and order, looking for a narrative, or print them as an essay. When I’m ready, I can create a web page and email trusted mentors for advice. Or even put a book together to take around to show people.

This is one of the reasons I embraced Aperture from the start. I saw its potential for organizing my photographic life and ultimately inspiring me to become a better photographer.

Next week: Aperture as teacher.

The other day I was going over the galleys for my Lightroom book, and I came to a comment by Doug Nelson, my technical editor. He highlighted a step in a step-by-step procedure created by the photographer Maggie Hallahan. In Lightroom’s Develop module Maggie had both boosted the Vibrance slider and decreased the Saturation slider. The procedure seemed totally non-intuitive, but Doug was impressed at how well it worked.

I just finished checking out a few samples from Apple’s new online seminar, Aperture for iPhoto Users. In the samples, Joe Schorr walked me through a few techniques that iPhoto users already know how to do, such as create a slideshow, then demonstrates how to achieve the same task in Aperture.

The production value was good, as you’d expect, and the information was spot on. The seminar is free. If you know an iPhoto user who is thinking about trying Aperture, you might want to point them this way.

Last week, I talked about how long I’d been waiting the arrival of Smart Filters. In this installment of dekeBytes, I’ll give you a sense for how this new feature in Photoshop CS3 works by applying some detail sharpening and high-key softening to an image. Along the way, you’ll learn the basics, including how to apply a Smart Filter, modify it, and change its blend settings.

This terrific image, “Autumn Blonde,” is from iStockphoto photographer Joey Nelson

This week, I wanted to take a few minutes to decipher some of the alphabet soup that we lovingly call metadata. Metadata refers to extra bits of information about an image ranging from what shutter speed you took the image at to where did you take the image. To see an image’s metadata in Aperture, select an image and make sure the Inspector on the right is visible (choose Window > Show Inspector if it’s not). By clicking on the Metadata View menu within the Inspector, you can switch between different built-in and custom views showing different metadata fields.

Most images automatically have EXIF (which stands for “Exchangeable Image File Format”) metadata embedded within them. EXIF information is primarily information that the camera knows automatically and can embed into the image for you, such as aperture, iso speed, and focal length. By clicking the EXIF button at the bottom of the metadata inspector, you will see a list of all possible EXIF fields that you can add or remove from a metadata view. As an example of when you’d want to customize a metadata view, if your camera writes GPS information into its images, it’s useful to either add the GPS EXIF fields to an existing view or to make a custom GPS metadata view to quickly see GPS information.

On the other hand, IPTC (short for the “International Press Telecommunications Council” and referring to a set of standards that group defined) metadata is metadata that you, the photographer, know and need to enter about the image. Some IPTC metadata, such as location, will always be the same for a group of images and can easily be entered in bulk. Other fields, like Caption, usually vary per image. Clicking the IPTC button at the bottom of the metadata inspector will let you define what IPTC fields are visible (and to see ones you might not have known existed!).

I’m sure you’ve heard a lot about keywords already, and although keywords are actually part of the IPTC spec, Aperture treats them differently from other IPTC metadata. In addition to the keywords HUD, where you can browse your entire keywords library, clicking the keywords button on the metadata inspector will let you add and remove keywords from an image (there are a variety of other ways discussed elsewhere to manage keywords).

One very cool feature in Aperture is custom metadata fields. Sometimes, you want to add your own fields, like Stock Code, to an image. To do so, select an image, click the Other button in the metadata inspector, and in the two fields with the placeholder values “New Custom Metadata” and “Metadata Value,” type your custom key (”Stock Code”) and value (”ABC123″), respectively. You’ve now defined a custom field that you can search through and inspect.

Aperture also has metadata presets. You might notice yourself typing certain values, such as credit and copyright, over and over. Presets provide a way of saving a set of values so that you can apply the values with two clicks instead of typing in each value. To set a preset up, switch the metadata view to a view with all of the fields you’ll want to save and reuse (I’d recommend using the All IPTC view), type the values you wish to save into the fields, click on the action menu (it has the small gear icon, and you can see the menu in the screenshot) and choose Save as Preset. Enter a unique name. Now, let’s try applying this preset to another image. Select another image, click the action menu, and choose Append with Preset (append will combine the preset with the existing metadata, and replace will overwrite). The values you entered into the previous image are automatically applied to the new image. The other commands in the action menu, such as manage presets, help you organize and work with metadata presets–try playing with the different commands!

The last bit of metadata alphabet soup you’ve probably heard is “XMP.” XMP actually isn’t metadata, but rather it’s a general-purpose container for metadata. EXIF and IPTC metadata are written differently into a file, and custom metadata formats are written in, well, custom ways. XMP provides a generic system for specifying a metadata spec (e.g. the list of fields and information about possible values) and storing values for that spec within a file. Plus, an XMP block can contain multiple metadata groups, such as EXIF, IPTC, and custom metadata. Adobe even uses XMP to store its camera RAW adjustments in addition to EXIF and IPTC information.

XMP can be embedded into an image or written to a separate, sidecar file. Sidecar files are useful with RAW images because you often don’t want to (or can’t) modify a RAW file, and by storing the data in a separate file, you get to leave the RAW file alone while still adding metadata to it. By default, when you export a master in Aperture, you have the option to also export an XMP sidecar file. A donation-ware 3rd party plugin, called Lightbox XMP (which I wrote), gives you the ability to embed XMP or write sidecar files when exporting a version, too. Plus, it has a mode to just write sidecar files for referenced masters so that other applications, such as Adobe Bridge, can gain access to the metadata for your referenced masters, from EXIF to keywords, that you entered in Aperture.

Hopefully this post has given you a better understanding of what metadata is and how to work with it within Aperture!

In many programs, keyword structure can be a flat, one dimensional list of words that are hard to manage as their numbers grow. In the program that I used previously, I had a keyword list of around 300, and that is not very usable for searching for an example. Lightroom, on the other hand, is capable of organizing your keywords in hierarchical structure. Let’s see an example of how that would work. I’ll choose the topic “animals”:

In a flat one dimensional list, if there was a picture of an Eagle, I would tag the image with Animals, Birds, Eagle and whatever other keywords that are appropriate. The easiest way to tag an image is to write the wanted keywords in the Keyword tag box on the right panel.

In Lightroom, with the above hierarchical structure for keywords defined, we can tag the image with just Eagle and automatically “Bird” and “Animal” are tagged as the program knows the hierarchical structure. With all our images tagged, it is possible to select i.e. “Birds” in the keyword list (Library module on the left panel) and all pictures with that keyword and any “child-keyword will be displayed, i.e. “Eagle” and “Seagull”. But if the “lowest” (youngest child) keyword is selected, only pictures with that keyword will be displayed. This is a very powerful feature to manage multiple keywords and is much more flexible than a flat list.

When building up keyword list, simply start tagging images. Given that the first image is of a falcon, then simply enter: Animals, Birds, Falcon in the Keyword Tags box (in the right panel), and they will all show up in the Keyword List on the left panel at one dimensional level. Then you can go to the list on the left panel and drag the “Birds” into “Animals” and “Falcon” into “Birds” to have it in the correct hierarchy. The other option is to enter the keyword string: Falcon>Birds>Animals and the keywords will appear in that hierarchically order in the list on the left so you don’t have to drag the keywords back and forth the list.
If a keyword you are typing in the keyword tab box already exists in the list, then the program will suggest endings for the first few letters that are typed, i.e. next time you type the first letters of Falcon: Falc… the program suggests Falcon.

Next week I’ll talk about synonyms.

Today’s post isn’t going to be a tip or a trick, or even a story about how Aperture helped to improve my workflow. No, today I would like to talk about something a little more personal. I want to talk about revitalizing your creativity.

I have always thought of myself as a creative person. In fact, these days, more and more, I am seeing myself defined less a just a photographer, and more as a “creative professional.” Either way, I have, since birth, been an observer, and a dreamer, and one of those people who at first glance might seem to have their head in the clouds.

The thing about photography is that it involves both sides of the brain. This is true in all forms of art, but it is especially true in photography. We photographers have the added duty of understanding our craft on a more scientific level. We need to be aware of how light interacts with matter, and how a certain concoction of chemicals can cause a latent image to appear visible on a piece of paper. Well, we used to have to know that. Now, we need to understand computers, and things like image compression and color management.

When I was in college, I spent a good deal of time in the lab. Week after week I would go out and shoot an assignment and come back and spend the rest of my time developing negatives, sorting through slides, mixing chemicals, and toning prints. One summer I traveled through the four corners region of the United States, and spent about a month photographing what I saw. This was all for a class I took and the only requirement was to produce a portfolio of 32 finished images. It was a monumental task for me at the time, and upon my return to upstate New York, I was faced with spending the rest of my summer in the darkroom.

By the end of the summer I had produced what I thought was my best work to date. But, I was exhausted. I smelled like fixer, and my eyes were tired. I didn’t tell anyone at the time but I dreaded ever having to return to the darkroom again. This of course can be a scary predicament for a student of photography.

Luckily for me, my portfolio was met with praise and I received an A for the class. But I didn’t know what was going to happen next. I wasn’t ready to get back into the darkroom. Right around this time digital photography had begun to take off at our school. We had a small assortment of digital point and shoots, and one or two digital SLRs. We had been working with Photoshop and scanning our negatives, but the school was still very much a darkroom-oriented type of place. Creatively, I was down on my luck. I was done with the darkroom, and so I decided to explore digital photography.

After a random encounter with a mutual friend I had somehow been given the opportunity to show off my southwest portfolio in an art exhibit. It was to be a joint show with another friend from the trip. This friend and I decided that instead of showing off the work we had printed in the darkroom, we would try and do something a little different. We borrowed a block of time on a high-end drum scanner and scanned all of our negatives and slides. He made giant prints on an Iris printer, and I made smaller color prints on an Epson 2000P. The results were stunning and we framed the prints and hung the show.

We invited everyone we knew from our university. Faculty, students and friends and family all showed up for the opening, and we made sure to leave out the fact that we had made the prints digitally. Eventually the rumor got around that the artwork was made from scanned film, and the teachers began to talk. It was really amazing to watch. We felt like we had convinced a group of very traditional thinkers that digital photography had arrived and was ready for professional consumption.

Digital photography revitalized my creativity. When I got my first digital SLR, I was off and running. I didn’t have to go back in that darkroom anymore (although I do miss it sometimes) and I could complete my creative vision from anywhere. It was just me, my camera and my laptop–my favorite creative package.

Aperture has once again recharged my creativity. Now that I no longer need to really worry very much about losing images, or keeping versions and masters connected, I am freed. I can allow my creative juices to flow, and my camera, my laptop, and my mind’s eye are are working together as one. With Aperture, I just import my files and I am off and running. My digital darkroom is a fun place to be. I look forward to working on my images in Aperture every time I take a picture and I am comforted by knowing that all the tools I need are sitting there waiting for me anytime I need them. It is really an exciting time to be a photographer, or in my case, a creative professional.

In late March, Derrick interviewed Robert Leslie about shooting TED and later was able to share Robert’s folder organization in Aperture. I saw this and immediately fine tuned some of my own practices when shooting big intensive events, such as last week’s Web 2.0 Expo and this week’s MySQL Conference & Expo. Creating buckets for the photos to go into while shooting an event is not only helpful for when you are pulling images off of cards, but it’s also a form of pre-planning. It helps you structure what kinds of shots you want to get from an event.

Of course, no matter how well you plan a shoot, one of the big chores in post-production is the act of captioning and keywording image. For shots where there is a single subject, this is pretty straight forward. You can just apply the same metadata to a big group of photos. But, for shots where there are several subjects, such as a panel, things get harder. There are more people to identify and, if you work the shoot back and forth with various angles, not all the same people appear in each shot. If you’re not careful, you can end up with one shot of Bill, Tom, and Jane; then another with Bill and Tom; then another with Jane and Tom; then back to Bill, Tom, and Jane; and so forth and so on. After a while, you can really start to go cross-eyed in captioning.

To help smooth out this bump in post-production, you can rearrange a shoot after importing it so that similar photos are grouped together. Once done, this helps out a lot with the process of captioning and keywording, but even the act of grouping can drag things down a bit. To address this, I’ve started thinking a bit more when I go into a shoot about grouping my shots as I take them. For example, when I walk into a panel, I might first do the wide shots. Then I’ll do a set for each of the speakers that I’m interested in capturing. And then, I’ll move on. By structuring my shoot into logical blocks, the photographs can be imported pre-sorted, saving just a bit of time.

It’s not always possible to adhere strictly to a sorted shot order. Sometimes somebody tells a joke and there’s a wonderful opportunity to catch a panel with everyone laughing. For the most part, however, if you can shoot in logical blocks, the random exceptions that will occur can be quickly sorted out into the right place and you can get through post-production that much faster. It’s yet another form of pre-planning that can give you back valuable time behind the camera to do what is most important: Capturing more photographs.

In the intro to my last podcast, I listed six popular songs that use the notorious E-mu Emulator II shakuhachi sound. For fun, here are two I couldn’t fit into the show itself.

• Tangerine Dream: Yellowstone Park (540KB MP3)
• Sade: Stronger Than Pride (432KB MP3)

Coincidentally, I came across a bucket of real shakuhachis last week at a camping lodge. As you can see in the photo composite above, the shakuhachi is a Japanese vertical flute made of bamboo. It’s also fiendishly difficult to play. When I studied it in Japan, one of the first things my teacher told me was the ancient proverb, “You have to shake your head for three years before you can play shakuhachi.”

Indeed, I couldn’t even get a sound out of one of the flutes in the bucket. With another, though, I quickly produced that amazing, soulful, wind-through-the-pines sound that enamored so many Western musicians when it came out in digital form. It’s just funny so many musicians adopted it as a signature sound.

I’ve been in the middle of an archiving project where I’m organizing all of my early digital images into Aperture. Yesterday, I found myself staring at a stack of Kodak Photo CDs from the early 1990s wondering what to do with them. The problem is, Kodak encoded these pictures in a proprietary format that Aperture can’t read.

But fear not… in the back of my mind I remembered that iPhoto could import files from Kodak Photo CDs. After a quick test, I learned that it still could, and the imported images were a healthy 3072 x 2048 with a file size around 7 MBs. Not bad!

I’ve detailed the workflow in the article, Importing Kodak Photo CDs into Your iPhoto or Aperture Library. In just a few hours, I’ve managed to bring all those images into my 1990s Aperture Library, changed the file names, added metadata, and moved on to the next stack of mysterious discs stashed in the corner of my studio.

In my recent private workshops and tutorials with fellow photographers, I have noticed that organization is a key issue. This not only relates to Lightroom but also to an overall Digital Asset Management system that you should institute right away if you haven’t already. In this post, I’ll share with you my methods and recommendations for naming folders and files.

Before we get into it, one thing I will mention is that when a folder is imported into Lightroom the name of the folder as it is on the referenced hard drive will be the name Lightroom uses when it is imported - i.e. in the Folders panel. This is important to understand for those of you who drag and drop the camera generated folders out of the DCIM folder without stripping out the images from the folder structure. [E.G. - For Nikon users it would be dragging the 100NCD2X folder and copying the entire folder and it’s contents - the images - versus opening the 100NCD2X folder, selecting all of the images and copying those files to a new folder with a name relevant to the images.] If the images are downloaded as in the former example, you’ll end up with very generic non-descriptive folder names that are the same as other folder names for different shoots.

I realize this may just be semantics but when you start loading several shoots into Lightroom it can become very difficult to figure out which file is which shoot. Confused yet?

So, to keep everything organized here is my downloading workflow, file and folder naming conventions. First, when I download images I always create a brand new folder on my desktop or external hard drive and name it with the following convention:

State and or country_location name_ monthyear (Example: newmexico_vallescaldera_0207)

Because of the nature of my work using a combination of geographic locations and dates seems to make the most sense for me. Notice I have picked a folder naming structure that is unique. I’ll never again be in x location at xxyy date. If I do happen to shoot at the same location in the same month I can either create another folder with the day added in or I can just add those new images to the already existing folder. Most of my shoots are multi-day adventures and I lump all of the images into the same folder, then edit and rename the images.

You’ll notice that for my work, in general the date and time the image was shot is of very little importance. For those of you that are photojournalists this isn’t the case and you can modify my naming conventions to suit your needs.

Now, once I have downloaded all of my RAW files into a folder - with no sub folders - I do a quick edit, delete any out of focus or obviously unusable images and do a batch rename in Lightroom. My file naming convention is as follows:

myname_four letter geographic code_monthyear_sequential number. file extension
(Example: mclark_utmb_0406_0001.tif)

I use my name because most photo editors have hundreds of digital files on their computers and it makes it easier for them to see that they are working with my image. I’ve had mix ups in the past and I never got paid for usages until I caught the error - so that is why my name is at the beginning. Next comes a four letter code I’ve been using forever with all of my digital files. In the example above “utmb” translates to ut = Utah and mb = Moab. The month and the year follow that and create a unique filename, then the sequential number for each image. One word of caution, when you create your file naming convention keep the entire length to less than 32 characters including periods and file extensions. Less than 28 is even better. If you go over 32 then Bridge has difficulty reading the file and all kinds of problems arise.

So that is it. Both my folder and file names are completely unique and I don’t have to worry about over writing files because I’ll never again have an image from Moab, Utah shot in April 2006. The other nice feature of this file naming convention is that when I look at the file name of any image I know when it was shot and the location without having to delve into the metadata.

When I output tiffs or jpegs they go into a folder inside the main folder along with the RAW images and the XMP files as in the image below.

There are a million ways to name your folders and images - they all work well. Just be sure both your file and folder names are unique and you stick with whatever convention you create. Some forethought will go a long way towards organizing your image collection and allow you to find the image you need quickly.

And one last note - Lightroom’s rename feature works great but the dialog box to rename your files is the most confusing thing in all of Lightroom. It used to be a very simple dialog in Beta 4.1 but it somehow got “fanicified” (a new word ) in Version 1.0 - and for the life of me every time I use it I get more confused on how exactly it is supposed to work. I hope Adobe can radically simplify this feature because it should not be a complicated matter and I don’t see any reason it should be as complex as it is - just my opinion.

That’s it for this Monday. I look forward to hearing your comments…

Adios, Michael Clark

This last week, I was busy shooting at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco, along with my shooting partner, Pinar Ozger. It was a crazy busy conference and the result was 50GB of RAW image data. As you can imagine, even when using software like Aperture to dig through everything, it’s been a daunting task. For the most part, Pinar and I have been sitting in front of the screen for hours and hours talking about the photos, ranking them, and editing them. Having two people makes the process go better in many ways, but there was one place where it was getting in the way: When the person that wasn’t driving would want to try one little tweak or crop and tried to indicate to the other person what they wanted.

After doing this for a few days, I suddenly had a flash of inspiration from my other career as a programmer: Pair Programming. For those of you that aren’t familiar with this idea, pair programming is where you place two programmers in front of a screen and slide the keyboard and mouse back and forth as needed. One person programs while the other person helps out by thinking strategically about what’s being worked on or simply looks for ways to do things better. It sounds really awkward, and it is at first, but it’s used by many programmers effectively.

Over time, people that were really pair programming advocates started hooking up two keyboards and two mice to the computer being used to eliminate the overhead of sliding a single keyboard back and forth. With this setup, all one person has to do is say, “No, hang on. Let me do this little part” and go to town.

Anyway, after remembering this little tidbit, Pinar and I pulled out an extra keyboard and mouse that we had laying around and plugged them in. We then set forth editing again, now with the ability to let either person drive at any particular point it in time. It worked really well and I think we’re going to continue to work like this on our joint projects. That way one of us can drive, rate, rank, and process but when the other sees something that needs to be tweaked just so, they can jump right in and do it.

The Split Toning tool in the Develop pallet of Adobe Lightroom 1.0 allows you to set separate Hue and Saturation values for Highlights and Shadows in a digital image. I will use a closeup of the Quoddy West Lighthouse (the furthest most eastern point in the US), to illustrate the effect Split Toning can have on an image with pronounced shadows and highlights.

More subtle effects can of course also be generated with this set of tools, but I am going to go overboard on these examples to illustrate the results possible more easily.

The default image with no values in the settings.

A value of 111 (a strong green) in the highlights and a value of 0 (a strong red) in the Shadows, with Saturation for both being set at maximum to better illustrate the effect. The Balance has been set at -11 to give a little more prominence to the red Hue values.

A value of 0 (a strong red) in the highlights and a value of 111 (a strong green) in the Shadows, with Saturation for both again being set at maximum to better illustrate the effect. This time the Balance has been tipped towards the green Hue values.

The Highlights and Shadows have been given the same Hue value in the last image, but they have been assigned different Saturation values. Just a little warmth has been added to the highlights to keep them relatively clean and believable, but the Shadows area has been given a much larger amount of Saturation to make them appear as warm as the highlights.

Apple has released a version update of Aperture. It weighs in at a respectable 129.5 megabytes. Get it through “Software Update” under the Apple Menu or click here.

From Apple:

What’s New in this Version
Aperture 1.5.3 addresses issues related to overall reliability and performance in a number of areas, including:
- Generation of thumbnails for adjusted images
- Entering and exiting Full Screen mode
- Working with large sets of keywords in the Keywords HUD
- Restoring from a vault

Among the specific issues that have been addressed:
- Previews now update properly when images are sent to an external editor.
- Leaf Aptus 22 and Aptus 75 images are now imported with the correct orientation.
- When folders are imported as projects, the folder structure is now correctly preserved when identically named subfolders are included in the hierarchy.
- Reconnecting referenced images that have been externally edited now works more reliably.
- Setting the ColorSync profile in the Aperture Print dialog now correctly suppresses color management settings in the Mac OS X Print dialog.

Black and White photography has become popular all over again. In my opinion, that’s happening for two reasons: (1) Digital photography has made color the de-facto standard, so we’re now seeing more color images than black and white. (2) That which is rare tends to be more eye-catching. Not only are we seeing more black and white, but more de-saturated color. The latter has already been covered in Michael Clark’s DeSaturating Lightroom blog.

There are lots of tools in traditional image-editing software that help to convert images to black and white. Nevertheless, I’m convinced that Lightroom can do most of the job better and faster. Once you’ve covered the basics, you can always tweak the regional areas in Photoshop or any other standard image editor. The rest of this blog will demonstrate the tools you can use and the results they produce.

After listening to Derrick Story’s podcast interview with Aperture wedding shooter Joe Buissink, I got to thinking. Joe mentioned he uses a technique to train himself to be a better photographer. Basically, when he’s out in his life and he sees something that would be a good picture but he’s not shooting, he will say the word “Click” out loud, or snap his fingers. This physical act he says, helps to train him for capturing moments when he’s working, which makes him a sharper, better photographer.

The idea of mental exercises to make us better photographers or warming up before shooting is intriguing. I have to admit, I’m skeptical, but open to the idea and may give it a try to see if it works for me.

Are you getting warmer? These Montreal fire-breathers go from cool to hot in a split second, but photographers may need a little more time to warm-up to make great work. Copyright: Steve Simon

I don’t know about you, but I have to be fully engaged and concentrating when I shoot. I can’t have the distraction of being with someone; I need to be a lone wolf to do my best work, without distraction.

I used to take a camera everywhere, and I still try and have a little digi with me at all times, but I realized a long time ago, that for me to do my work, I can’t just be out for a casual stroll, I need to be in all-out shoot mode. This means, the switch to shooting mode is on, I’m concentrating, in the moment and thinking and feeling my way around with my camera.

My best shooting experiences meld the physical act of shooting (which becomes second nature with experience), with the mental and the emotional to get to a place where you’re in that zone. And I agree, it takes a bit of warming up.

When I was a newspaper photographer and we had to go find a picture on slow news days, it helped to start shooting right away. So as I looked for potential photographs, if I came across something that was not as exciting as I had hoped, I would still stop and shoot to break the ice; loosen up by taking a few pictures right from the start.

There were times when I didn’t do this, and I regretted not stopping to photograph something I didn’t deem worthy, when in hindsight, it was the most interesting opportunity I had all afternoon.

I also tend to pre-visualize the potential of upcoming shoots as a form of warming up, but I am conscious of being open to the reality when I’m actually there, letting go of my pre-conceived ideas and reacting to the situation in front of me. Sadly, my fantasies of what the shoot might be is rarely as good in reality.

Photographer Ben Long uses warm up techniques he has learned in improvisation classes. Ben was inspired by the poet and screenwriter Al Young, (now California Poet Laureate) who spoke at a workshop he attended almost 20 years ago.

“Mr. Young didn’t understand why most people didn’t warm up before writing, or performing other mental pursuits,” said Ben.

“He told us he would write something other than what he was working on, to warm up; to get in the space of writing.”

Ben says that in improv, you just can’t get to a higher level of creativity without warming up. “Warming up helps you to react in split seconds, being physically present and tuned into your environment in a very profound way”.

Sounds like photography to me.

CHAIR!

One of the exercises he recommends before going out to shoot is to walk around the room pointing at objects and naming them the wrong name, out loud!

Don’t think he says, just free associate, concentrating on looking at the object and giving it a different name. After a few minutes, stop and look around the room. You may perceive like he and others who perform this warm up ritual, “a brightening of colors, a greater sense of depth or strong outlines around subjects”, he says.

It sounds a little wacky, but the power of great photography cannot be fully understood or articulated; yet we see, feel and believe its magic. I’m going to give it a try.

If you have some warm-up techniques that work for you, please share them here.

Quick Tip: Mastery

When I’m making adjustments to a new version of an image, I like to repeatedly press the M key to toggle from the new version to the master raw image. This way I can quickly see and compare the differences in the version I’ve been correcting and the raw image. You will see the master image tag on the master, so there is no confusion as to which is which.

In Focus

Remember the days when an out of focus picture was an out of focus picture? Mitsubishi Electric has developed a new camera that refocuses out of focus pictures.

“The heterodyne light field camera makes refocusing after capture possible. Using coded aperture that can increase depth of field by 10 times, the camera essentially deblurs an image after it is captured, according to the researchers.”

Edge Sharpening is so 2007. Looking forward to the Refocus command in Aperture.

Maybe you noticed that regardless of what digital camera you use, as long as you shot RAW, the number 25 always appears by default in Lightroom 1.0’s Develop Module’s Detail pane Sharpening slider.

I’m aware that the topic of image sharpening makes many people hyperventilate and get really opinionated. It’s important then to point out that Lightroom isn’t applying a generic, all-in-one sharpening setting to every RAW file, even though it looks that way at first.

In 2002, I wrote a preview of Adobe Photoshop 7 for a popular computer magazine. Although I praised the program for its file browser, expanded Brushes palette, and healing tools, I lamented its lack of ambition in the parametric department. After four back-to-back upgrades in which Photoshop blazed new trails in non-destructive image editing, Version 7 abruptly dropped the ball and focused its energies on static pixel modifications. Among my concerns was the following:

“Photoshop’s wealth of effects filters remains unchanged and static, despite the introduction of equivalent dynamic filters in other programs–including Adobe’s own Illustrator and After Effects–several years ago.”

I mention this for two reasons:

• This is the first time that particular text has appeared as I wrote it. At the time, my editor pronounced my conclusion “depressing,” diluted my concerns, and inserted her own conclusion that began, and I quote: “But these are quibbles for the hard-core Photoshop geek.” Nice.

• Photoshop 7 turned out to be the exception that proves the rule. After the program’s release, Adobe immediately got back on non-destructive course with Camera Raw, layer comps, program-wide support for 16-bit/channel images, Bridge-based metadata edits, and smart objects. And in Photoshop CS3, Adobe puts to rest the last of my “quibbles” by adding editable, non-destructive filters. The only difference is the name. What I called dynamic filters, Adobe calls Smart Filters.

Once upon a time, I would’ve hardly dared believe that non-destructive sharpening and blurring would be possible. But progress and experience encourage heightened expectations, so naturally I’ve had time to dream up a new list of wishes unfulfilled. In a perfect Photoshop (okay, probably not CS4, but one day), all edits would be 16-bit and non-destructive. Filters and color adjustments would be streamlined and prioritized. Automated masking functions would produce credible results and I might even have access to layers when building alpha channels. Actions would be conditional, color management would always work, and the program in general would make a lot more sense. (The interface needs to be overhauled in a way that might very well infuriate a large and vocal group of existing users but ensure the long term health and viability of the program.)

And lest you mistake my latest list for depressing, it’s actually a message of faith and hope. Adobe has managed to address virtually every complaint I had five years ago, not to mention throw in a hundred or so features that never occurred to me. There’s no reason to think that five years from now the picture won’t look equally rosy. Who knows, even a hard-core Photoshop geek like me stop quibbling. In the meantime, bless you Smart Filters–you inspire me to wish for more.

Next week’s dekeBytes installation will feature a hands-on demonstration of the afore-blessed Smart Filters. For a whole book-load of hands-on Deke tutorials complete with accompanying video, look for his new book Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-on-One coming next month from O’Reilly. (Sneak peek of the new cover here for intrepid blog readers; you saw it here first, folks.) You can also check out Deke’s videos at online training center lynda.com.