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.

One of the things I really like about Aperture is being able to adjust my images while I’m sorting through them. Applying some quick modifications using the Adjustment HUD lets me make better decisions about which images to keep. One adjustment that can be particularly helpful is Highlight/Shadow. Using it can often reveal more detail in the darkest and lightest areas of the picture. Surprisingly quite a few Aperture users aren’t aware of, or using this powerful tool.

Highlight/Shadow is located in the Adjustment HUD right below Levels. By default there are two sliders - one for highlights and one for shadows. These are the Amount sliders and actually I find they often provide a good starting point. However for more control, click the Advanced expansion arrow. Additional sliders for Radius, Color Correction, High and Low Tonal width, and Mid Contrast appear.

Since Highlight/Shadow works by reducing contrast (it makes the darkest darks lighter, and the lightest lights darker) it’s best to apply it only where it’s really needed. So as a matter of habit, I use the minimum tonal width that I can, according to the needs of each image. I often increase the mid tone contrast slightly to compensate for the decrease in contrast at the extremes. The Color Correction slider will increase the saturation of the colors in the tonal values that you are lightening or darkening. I rarely find that I need to adjust the Radius slider, but if the results of the Highlight/Shadow adjustment don’t look natural, try adjusting the Radius slider.

The difference between the original version of this volcano image and the version with a Highlight/Shadow adjustment is pretty impressive. Without being able to see the detail revealed by the Highlight/Shadow adjustment, I probably would have deleted this file.

Even though we can all “rip” our own personally purchased CDs legally and put them on our digital media players for personal use, this has not not necessarily been the case for DVDs.

A high end “DVD Jukebox” product, Kaleidescape, has existed in the market since 2002, and has been in contest with the DVD Copy Control Association since 2004. Kaleidescape allows consumers to copy their own (but potentially, rented) DVDs to the server and allow random access to those DVDs.

Read the full article here…

Technorati Tags: drm, emerging technology, home theatre, InternetTV, television, video

Last week I mentioned different ways in Lightroom to tag pictures. On of these methods is “Keyword sets,” and I’m going to talk about that feature in more detail right now.

Keyword sets are basically a grouping of keyboard shortcuts for different keywords to make tagging quicker and more effective.

Keyword sets can be found in the Library module in the right panel in the Keyword element:

It is a set of 9 keywords (3 rows and 3 columns) which have a corresponding shortcut key from 1-9 (notice how the numbers are laid out exactly like the keyboard numpad for a very effective shortcuts). The combo box above the set matrix shows different keyword sets that come standard with Lightroom and user defined keyword sets.

To define a new set choose Edit above the set dialog appears:

Here different keywords are entered and then press save to save the set.

When the Alt key is pressed a keyboard shortcut numbers appear in front of each keyword in the set and when the number is pressed the selected picture(s) are tagged with that keyword. I find the Keyword set to be especially helpful to tag people on pictures after shoot. The predefined Landscape set is also very helpful.

In my opinion this is one of the best ways to tag pictures that have many different elements like pictures of people. I start with tagging pictures in a shoot with all things that they have in common and then I go over them and tag each picture if needed with keyword shortcuts from the sets.

Next week I will talk about Hierarchical structure of keywords.

I attended a presentation by sports photographer Bill Frakes last night at the Apple Store SoHo in New York City. The event was presented by the Aperture Users Professional Network (AUPN), a user association and advocate group that supports photographers who use Aperture.

Bill presented selections of his work for Sports Illustrated, running the slideshows directly from Aperture. The photos were fantastic, and what was particularly nice was how he had set up custom Slideshow presets with iTunes music picked for each one. This allowed him to select an Album, click on “Slideshow”, and then pick the appropriate preset to start a slideshow with predefined music.

Bill’s inventory list is impressive too: he travels with a 17″ MacBook Pro. In his studio he has four Xserves attached to Xserve RAIDs running Xsan. He uses custom Automator workflows to import from 16 Lexar card readers and burn multiple DVDs. He uses PhotoShelter to archive his images online. Bill said this workflow takes a lot of discipline and it takes a lot of time but it’s worth it. More information about Bill’s workflow is detailed in this podcast and his profile on the Aperture website.

After Bill’s presentation, David Schloss, the Exectutive Director of AUPN, gave a nice introductory demonstration of Aperture, tailoring it to the folks in the crowd who aren’t currently Aperture users. AUPN provides education, training and support for Aperture users; their site offers free access to articles, blogs, and forums, and an optional paid membership provides hardware/software discounts and access to additional resources.

I recently read an interesting post over at AUPN about a company based in New Delhi, India that is doing post-production work for photographers via FTP. The company is called Differential Technologies and you can check them out yourself at their website — http://www.worldofdt.com

At first I thought that outsourcing something as important as the post-production of photographs would be impossible. Normally photographers who send their post-production work out like to maintain a pretty close and in person relationship with their lab, and this just doesn’t seem possible via FTP and email.

However, I went and checked out Diferential’s website anyway, because I was interested to see if they might be able to help me with submitting photos to a micro-stock agency. A while back I wrote about my experiences in trying out the Aperture plugin for the micro-payment stock agency iStockPhoto.com. In the end I found that I really liked the plugin, but just couldn’t justify the amount of time that was necessary to prepare my images for upload.

The trick to iStockPhoto seems to be that one needs to submit as many photos as possible, the photos need to be fairly unique and appealing to a variety of markets, and they need to be well key-worded, and adjusted. They don’t, on the other hand, need to be from big budget photo shoots, shot with ultra-expensive cameras, or have hours and hours of post-production work put into them.

So, I began to consider outsourcing my post-production work for images that I would like to send to iStockPhoto. I sent an email to Differential asking about their services. They replied the next morning telling me about a variety of retouching, image adjustment, and scanning services that they are offering, and asked me if I would like to try them out with a sample image. So, I sent them an image, and described what I would like them to do.

The image I chose was actually one that had been previously rejected by iStockPhoto’s editors. iStock had problems with the dust in certain areas, and thought that I had also probably over adjusted the contrast. The fact is, it was an awful original as you can see from the photo below. The contrast was very flat, underexposed, and littered with sensor dust. I figured if Differential could clean this image up to iStock’s standards, they would probably be getting more of my business.

The original image. Click for a larger version.

The team at Differential set me up with a personal FTP account and I sent them an exported JPEG of the original Master image. I used the new Ubermind FTP plugin for Aperture to transmit the image, and selected a full resolution JPEG with the color space set to sRGB as my Export Preset.

About half an hour later I received an email from Differential explaining to me that the job was done and I could download the image from the same FTP account. The result is below. Differential’s email also explained to me that the charge for such an image would normally be $2.00 (USD) due to the excessive amount of dust on the sensor. The price, they say, ranges from $0.50 to about $2.00, so I guess I hit the max on this one.

Fixed by Differential. Click for a larger version.

On close inspection of the image I have to admit, they did a fine job. They adjusted the contrast and brightness to what I would consider to be reasonable levels. With this image it was really important to watch the noise in the blue sky as the original had been underexposed. The dust cleanup was also superb. I’m still waiting to hear from iStock if the new version met their standards, but even if it doesn’t, it had nothing to do with Differential’s work.

After I looked over the image, I wrote back to Differential inquiring about key-wording services. They said they would be happy to work something out with me. I think this could be the start of really great relationship.

On the Aperture side of things, the whole experience got me thinking about how I could optimize the process so that I would have to do the least amount of work, and keep things nicely organized. I really like the option of just having an “iStock” keyword on hand, perhaps in one of my Keyword Control bars, and a Smart Album set up to search on this keyword. I could continue using the Ubermind FTP plugin to send the images to Differential, and when they were finished, I could just import them into Aperture, and send them to iStock using the plugin.

The only work I would have to do would be to set the iStock categories for each image. Later, I could even go as far as to connect them with their corresponding Masters using the Stack tool. I’m currently allowed to upload 15 images a week to iStockPhoto. I have a feeling the Ubermind FTP and iStockPhoto plugins are going to be getting a real workout in the weeks to come!

And speaking of plugins, have you checked out Aperture Plugged In lately? I just added a new article about a plugin I am working on to extend Aperture’s email capabilities. Go read the article and let me know what you think. Is there any functionality you would like to see that I didn’t think of? If so, I want to hear about it!

Aperture flummoxed me for a bit this morning. I have a project with a few hundred images in it. The project also contains several albums, just the regular kind that I have dragged some images into. When I would click on the project, though, I saw only a small selection of images.

I clicked on another project and every image in that project was visible, even ones that were included in albums within that project. When I clicked back on my first project, though, I saw only a smattering of images.

It turns out that the Query field - the one directly above the right side of the browser pane - is specific to every project in your Library. In other words, once you set the query field to something while viewing a project, it stays that way until you change it.

So, my first project had a query set, but my second project didn’t. If you find an odd assortment of images displaying in a project, remember that you may have performed a query at some point, and not reset it when you were finished.

A recent trend in photography is the de-saturated image. You see them everywhere now. With the acceptance of digital photography there seems to be a backlash against the saturated film colors of Velvia - instead of super saturated colors you see highly de-saturated images. And it isn’t just in still photography that you see it. The recent movies “300″ and “Flags of our Fathers” as well as many others are shot entirely with a de-saturated color palette and with good reason - it looks pretty stinking cool.

There are a lot of ways to de-saturate an image and many different looks that can be achieved. Here I will give a few examples of some images I worked up in Lightroom and the details of how I created the final image. Lightroom’s HSL panel gives us a lot of creative options for de-saturating an image without having to go into Photoshop and use complex layer masks or selections. One thing to keep in mind though is that the adjustments made in the HSL panel are global - for local color adjustments we’d have to use Photoshop or another software application like Nikon Capture NX.

In the image below, I thought it might be interesting to isolate the color of the lips and the skin to create a duo-tone image that looks like it was hand painted. The top image is the original and the bottom is the final image created using the Saturation and Luminance sliders in the HSL panel. All other settings were the same.

For the bottom image I adjusted the sliders as pictured below.

Basically I dropped the saturation in the blue jacket and scarf to -100, and then worked with the other colors to drop them out almost completely, leaving a little color in the skin tones and cranking up the red saturation to accentuate the lips. And because the blue colors were fully de-saturated I could use the Luminance slider to adjust the brightness of the now black and white scarf and jacket. This is an example of what I call selective de-saturation.

All in all this is a very simple example but it shows how powerful Lightroom can be for these types of images. Of course, before I started tweaking the image I created a virtual copy of it so I could output both the full color version and the selectively de-saturated version.

In another example, I recently photographed a good friend of mine, ocean explorer and scuba diver, Celine Cousteau. The image as shot is shown below while still being developed in Lightroom. The final image is shown just below it. As you can see the original image is interesting but it doesn’t have much zip to it. I used a similar technique as outlined above to de-saturate the skin tones slightly and then added some vignetting to move the viewers eye toward her face.

Once I exported the image from Lightroom as a 16-bit ProPhoto RGB file, I felt like I could take it a bit farther in Photoshop. I used a very simple Unsharp Mask technique where you reverse the sliders to increase contrast and add a little sharpening as well. For this image the Unsharp mask settings I used to build more contrast were: Amount 20-25, Radius 250, and a Threshold of 0. This is a really powerful technique that is used a lot. You’ll have to play around with the Amount and radius to get it just like you want but it certainly adds a lot of snap to an image.

Once I added the contrast I went back in and did a fine adjustment on the skin color, de-saturating it a little more with Photoshop’s Hue/Saturation tools. And to really make it zing I drew a quick egg shaped selection around her face with the feather set to 50, inverted that selection and darkened the rest of the image with levels to really drive the viewer to look at her eyes.

While the above Photoshop adjustments may seem complex in reality they were very simple adjustments. I would really recommend playing with the HSL sliders in Lightroom and see what is possible. Break the rules, let go of any pre-conceived expectations and see what you can create. It’s a lot of fun!

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

Adios, Michael Clark

All images Copyright © Michael Clark Photography.

Carol Cali–a photography teacher at The Meadows School in Las Vegas, a private college preparatory school–snapped this photo of her students. We donated the photography books to her school at the end of PMA 07 International Convention and Trade Show in March.

“I teach B&W Photography with a wet lab, digital photography using Photoshop on PC computers, and yearbook photography which is also working with digital camera,” says Carol.

“The students loved the iPod books,” Carol adds. “As far as the digital workflow books, they are right up our alley and part of what we have been learning. I have also been teaching them about shooting with Raw formats and there is a great book on Raw and Bridge. We also have the book on retouching, which several of the students couldn’t wait to start using and are already telling me what to do. Also one of the books is about shooting panoramas which all of the students are now in the process of shooting. Over all, the books will definitely improve the student’s awareness and inspire them to work more creatively.”

Want to see a really sharp web site created with Aperture and iWeb? Take a look at Gunnar Blondal’s work. Yes, it helps that the imagery is terrific, but he’s also found a way to display it in a flattering light.

And the best part, Gunnar has authored an article, Aperture and iWeb that shows in detail exactly how he did it. It’s worth a read…

One of the best things about digital photography is that it’s made distributing our photos so much easier. Print at home with no chemicals needed; post on the Web; burn to DVD. How about carrying your entire portfolio with you at all times? It’s not as hard as you might think, especially if you’re like me and you carry your iPod with you whenever you leave the house.

It’s easy to bring your portfolio with you on your iPod and it opens up new possibilities in terms of sharing your work with potential clients. Imagine the possibilities: giving a quick slideshow to a potential client while you’re standing on the sidewalk; showing a few selects to the boss while you’ve got her attention in the elevator; sharing images with friends while you’re out having a drink after work.

Getting your photos on to your iPod is easy. First, let’s talk hardware: for this to work you’ll need an iPod with a color display. This includes iPod photo, iPod color, iPod nano, or iPod with video. Once you’ve got your iPod, connect it to your Mac and launch iTunes. With your iPod selected in the Devices list, choose the Photos tab from the top of the iTunes window. Choose the option to “Sync photos from:” and choose Aperture from the dropdown menu (you can also sync from iPhoto).

Now you’ve got some decisions to make: sync your entire Library or choose selected Albums or Smart Albums. You can drag the Albums to change the order in which they are copied to your iPod; this is useful in the event that the capacity of your iPod isn’t big enough to hold all your photos. You also have the option to copy full-resolution images to your iPod — in this case, the high-quality JPEG previews are copied from Aperture (not the original RAW files). Once you’ve synced your photos, choose Photos from your iPod menu and you’ll see the Albums you synced from iTunes. You can also setup a slideshow with music and transitions. But how to play that slideshow??? I have to admit I was stumped here. Simply choosing an image displays it but does not present a slideshow. A quick trip to the Apple Support site turned up a deceptively simple answer: select an image and instead of pressing the center Select button, press the Play button. Aha! A photo slideshow with music and transitions.

One more possibility to consider: if you have an iPod photo, iPod color, or iPod with video (not a nano) you can connect to a television to present your slideshow. You need an Apple iPod AV Cable and once you’re connected you’ll be able to present your photos on a large screen - no Mac needed.

I like to browse a number of different photography forums on the internet to see what kind of real world problems photographers are having, learning how to use and adjusting to the Lightroom workflow.

A few days ago I saw a question repeated on two different forums and at first I thought it must be the same person but when I checked, I found that it was indeed two separate people who had difficulty finding a solution to the same problem.

The problem was how do you create duplicates of a large number of files in the Lightroom Library and both assign them new values and be able to access them individually or as a new group with the new values.

It was interesting to me too because I did not see this particular issue as being a problem, but I was solving it in a completely different way than either of these photographers was willing to accept. My solution was simple and old school (import the images twice and give them distinct names on import) and they wanted a new school virtual reality solution.

On both forums the posters mentioned the problem of having access to color and grayscale versions of images. I imagine that this is probably very useful for portrait and wedding photographers who constantly are asked for and sell both color and grayscale versions of the same image.

The answer in one of the forums was making a virtual copy and or snapshots of all images, but to be aware that these images only exist in the Lightroom Library, not in the permanent XMP files. The second forum also suggested making virtual copies and suggested assigning the copies either a new Keyword Tag or a color label so they can be sorted out of the Library by using their metatags.

What I don’t like about these solutions (although I have and will continue to use them at times) is that they do not build a permanent record that can be used outside of Lightroom. What I did learn from this little exercise is that to take full advantage of Lightroom’s virtual capabilities, I have to be more open to thinking in virtual terms when looking for solutions to a problem.

UPDATE, 2007-09-14: Our massive H2 review is now online, and it’s packed with answers to the questions you asked here. Thanks again for making this such a collaborative process. We also have a new discussion area at the end of the review, so please feel free to continue this conversation over there.

Zoom finally started production of its latest handheld digital recorder, the intriguing H2, and we hope to get our review unit next month. Details had been sketchy until today, but now there’s a webpage with specs and diagrams.

The upcoming H2 Handy Recorder includes everything but this creepy hand: multipattern mics, time-stamped Broadcast WAV Format support, and even a guitar tuner. UPDATE, 2007-08-29: The interface has changed since the prototype shown above. Here’s a photo of the shipping version.

The most unusual feature of the H2 is its triple quadruple mic capsule, which enables various types of surround recording, including a matrixed format that stores 360° information into four tracks for later extraction into 5.1; see the diagrams on the site.

And the street price? $199.

While you’re waiting for the review, check out what we thought of the H4, and let us know what features you’d especially like us to scrutinize.

One of the most fun chapters to write for my Lightroom Adventure book is titled, “Develop Recipes from Iceland”. The chapter includes step-by-step procedures that anyone can apply to their own images. “Chefs” include Michael Reichmann, Maggie Hallahan, Martin Sundberg, Richard Morgenstein, and fellow blogger, Jóhann Guðbjargarson. But one person stands out above all, and she is Angela Drury, whom I call the Lightroom Recipe Queen. She shares three of her favorite recipes in the book and here is one of them.

In today’s O’Reilly Digital Media feature, Jochen Wolters talks about a transformative music technology experience—watching singer Don Lewis play a Roland VP-550 vocoder keyboard. “It was the most uplifting start into a trade show day I ever had,” Jochen told me.

Jochen put a link to a YouTube video of Lewis in the article, but I’ve embedded it here for convenience. Even in cruddy YouTube quality, the performance shines.

Notice how Lewis plays pitch sweeps with the instrument’s D-Beam infrared controller about two minutes in and again at the end. But what really impressed me was another type of gestural control. As Peter Drescher said in our last Digital Media Insider podcast, vocoders offer an exceptionally expressive interface to technology:

I just love the whole concept of using the formants of my voice to control a synthesized waveform. Sound designers are always complaining about the clumsiness of digital audio interfaces, and with good reason. I have never used a program that gives me the kind of emotional control over a sound that musical instruments do. But the vocoder lets me control a sound with by far the most expressive instrument of all.

Jochen has several other YouTube music links in the article; I’m heading over to explore them right now.

When you want a really clean, smooth, commercially professional-looking slideshow, Lightroom is a good place to turn. Unfortunately, narration, jazzy transitions, and Ken Burns zoom and pan effects aren’t in the plan. Not that you want to do all those things all the time anyway. In fact, most of the time, those restrictions just contribute to cleaner and more professional-looking slideshow. I’d just like to have them available when I want them. End of sermon. Let me give you a better idea of what Lightroom can do and how.

The image below shows you how a Lightroom slidshow can look. What you see in the center of the screen give you a good idea of the elegant simplicity you get from a Lightroom Slideshow

I’m sure many Inside Aperture viewers have already taken advantage of the Web Gallery features in Aperture. I finally decided to take the time (three minutes) to create one, and it reinforces for me, the value of this amazing program.

How can you make more money with Aperture? One way is to get your work out there to people who pay to use it. Outputting images to the web is a great way to communicate privately or publicly; with you in control.

From my recent trip to Rwanda, I wanted to get some work from a memorial I visited there, out to some editors I thought would be interested. The heart wrenching Murambi Memorial contains the mummified bones of hundreds of the almost one million victims of the Genocide in 1994.

It could not have been easier for me to place these images into a Web Gallery, and I had the selects up and online in minutes.

I just selected the images I wanted to post, and clicked the New Web Gallery button. Then I added some words, quickly changed the order a bit by dragging and dropping, changed the theme to “Stock Black” and was ready to click “Publish to .Mac” and that’s it. Photos are up and on the web and ready for editors to choose images they are interested in. I just email the URL, or link it from a web page.

If you want to make a gallery from scratch, make sure nothing is selected, then click the New Web Gallery button and Aperture creates an empty gallery that you simply drag images into from any project or album.

I chose quality over load speed, so I used the “High Quality Setting” when prompted, since I know the people viewing my work will have high-speed connections. You can easily customize how the page(s) will look, number of columns and rows, shape and size of the images as well.

As many ways as you edit your selects, using ratings, albums and smart albums, you can also use these functions to create Web Galleries.

In future posts I will delve deeper into the possibilities. But in the meantime, if you’ve yet to use this powerful feature in Aperture, you now know how easy it can be. It’s a fast and professional way to query editors with new work.

I like the themes it provides and inevitably, the feature set and customizability will improve with future versions.

When I interviewed Robert Leslie about how he handled his shoot at TED, we discussed how Martin Gisborne organized Robert’s Project pane in Aperture. I’ve received a few requests on how those files were organized. So Robert has been kind enough to send me a screenshot of his Aperture library.

So here it is folks… The entire TED shoot in Aperture. Enjoy.

Jessica Dolcourt posted a great article on the One Laptop Per Child initiative in Nigeria on CNET news. We are finally seeing the beginning of the first deployments of the laptop. I think we’re going to be impressed with what these young children do with this technology. Photos and Video of the 3-day event also available.

Nice overview of the laptop:

First off, a request: if you’re so inclined, go straight to the comments and say whether you watch online technical interview videos, and if so, which.

Over the next few posts, I’m going to talk about some topics that might appear simple but can be a little bit confusing. Today’s post will be about how to get to your image files, both converted and RAW, outside of Aperture. Before we dive in, I wanted to take a minute to mention a new export plug-in that I released last week, called Lightbox XMP. It allows you to export embedded or sidecar XMP metadata with your master and exported versions. We’ll discuss why XMP is useful when we talk about metadata, but for now, check out Lightbox XMP here.

Getting back to files, the absolute simplest way to access your image file outside of Aperture is to select the image (or images) and choose Images > Open with External Editor. Assuming you’ve set an external editor in your preferences, Aperture will convert the image and open it in your external editor. Under Aperture’s preferences, you can specify what format (TIFF or PSD) and what resolution to convert the master to. Unlike Adobe Camera RAW, there is no way to specify a different size (e.g. open an 8MP file at 11MP) to convert to directly. Your converted file will automatically appear in your Aperture library, stacked with the source.

Another way to create a converted file is to select an image (or images) and choose File > Export Version. By changing the Export Presets, or adding new ones, you have the ability to convert your image to everything from a 16 x 16 pixel jpeg to a 16-bit TIFF file at the original resolution. This file will not appear in your library, but you can import it.

Yet often, accessing a converted image isn’t very interesting. Especially now that Photoshop CS 3 lets you quickly open RAW files as smart objects (see the upcoming Photoshop CS 3 for Nature Photographers by Anon and Grey, Wiley 2007 for more detail), it’s often useful to access your RAW file outside of Aperture. The simplest way to do so is to select the image (or images) in Aperture and choose File > Export Master. The downside to Export Master is that you end up with two (or more) copies of the master file. What we often want to do is to access the same RAW file from within Aperture and an external program.

Aperture 1.5 provides a new feature that makes accessing your RAW files outside of Aperture easy–referenced masters. Before 1.5, whenever you imported an image, it was automatically copied into the Aperture Library and hidden from direct access because the Aperture Library is a bundle. A bundle is a special type of folder the appears as a file. For example, if you were to browse to where your Aperture library is in Photoshop’s open panel (unless you switched to the older Adobe open panel within Photoshop) there is no way to browse into your library and to find your RAW file. However, referenced masters provide a way to say “put my master images in this directory and link them into Aperture–don’t move them into the Aperture Library.” Referenced masters also allow you to have offline images, but that’s beyond the scope of this post.

When importing files, switch to using referenced masters by changing the “Store Images In” popup to not be the Aperture Library. Note that you will have to backup your images folder manually, as vaults don’t pick up referenced files, and if you export a project, you’ll want to check the “Consolidate Images” button so that your exported project contains your referenced images. Should you decide after the fact to that you want to use referenced masters, select the images you wish to reference, choose File > Relocate Masters, and select what folder Aperture should move the master files to.

Under the File menu, you’ll find two other commands to help you manage referenced masters, Consolidate Master (which lets you move your masters back into the Aperture library) and Manage Referenced Files (which shows you lots of detail about where the referenced masters are). At any point in time, choosing File > Show in Finder will open a Finder window to where your selected images’ master files are located.

However, once in a while, you will find it more convenient not to use referenced masters (perhaps you use vaults to backup your library), but you still want to access to your master file directly within the Aperture library, e.g. to drag and drop it into Photoshop. Here’s how to do so:

1. Take note of your master file name or what you’re searching for (e.g. all files that end in .dng). An easy way to find a file name is by looking at the File Info metadata view within Aperture
2. Switch to the Finder and browse to your Aperture Library
3. Control-click on the library and choose Show Package Contents. If you have a small library or want to search across your entire library (e.g. you want to find all .dng files), skip to step 5.
4. Find the project containing your image, control-click on it, and choose Show Package Contents
5. In the search field in the top right, type in the file name or whatever you’re looking for (e.g. “.dng”) and make sure that the find window which appears is set to “Folder” and not “Computers,” “Home, or “Servers.”
6. The file (or files) that appears in the window is the real file that Aperture is referencing. If you get multiple results that appear to be the same image, look at the individual image sizes–the smaller ones will most likely be preview images and thumbnails

One final warning–if you use this last method to locate your files, do not delete, rename, move, etc. them yourself outside of Aperture. If you do so, bad things might happen to your Aperture library that could cause you to lose data!

Hopefully this has helped you understand how to access your image files outside of Aperture!

One of the more surprising new features of Photoshop CS3 is the Brightness/Contrast command, which has gone from being one of the worst features to one that is actually quite useful. I’ll show you what I mean with this example. Let’s start with an image that’s a little bit washed out.

Image by David Politi courtesy of iStockphoto

Notice how the face appears a bit flat, presumably a function of straight-on lightening as opposed to the fellow having no depth to his nose. Let’s see what the new non-sucking Brightness/Contrast control in Photoshop CS3 can do to improve things.

Aperture comes packaged with a handful of very useful file and folder naming presets. These presets come in handy anytime you are exporting images, but they can also be helpful during import or if you are in the process of organizing a large archive of images.

To create your own custom file and folder naming presets simply go to the Aperture menu and select Presets and then select either File or Folder Naming. You will see a dialog box like the one in the image below.

Simply click the Plus sign to create a new preset and use the available variables to customize your naming convention. You can add additional text to the string, or a custom name field that will allow you to add the text on the fly just before you export your images.

The File Naming presets come in handy for me any time I want to send images to a client. My clients tend to each have their own standardized naming conventions, so having a set of custom presets for file naming can really save me time and help make sure I always get it right.

For instance, I created a custom file naming preset called “Client A” using the following string:

MJW_[CUSTOM NAME]_[COUNTER]

The first three letters are simply text that I added to the string to indicate my initials for my client. I use the Custom Name variable so that when I am about to export a set of images I can easily type in the shoot’s title. Finally, I use the counter to number each shot. The resulting exported file name would look something like this:

MJW_PressConf_001.jpg

With a custom preset I can easily save naming conventions for just about all of my individual client’s needs.

I also like to use Folder Naming presets to help manage my library of over 80,000 master images. With Aperture’s ability to store my files as referenced masters, I now have a responsibility to keep my master images neatly stored in folders outside the Aperture Library. To do this, my typical workflow is as follows:

I usually import the images from my camera’s memory card into Aperture’s managed library. Later, when I am at my desk, I use the Relocate Masters function to move my files from the managed Aperture library on my laptop to an external disk. When I do this, I select a preset to make sure that the files get organized into a meaningful folder structure on my disk.

Up until now I have been using the Year/Month/Day preset that came with Aperture. If I always use this preset, I can simply select the top level folder on my external drive and I can continue to add images as time goes on. Aperture simply creates new folders for each new month and day as needed.

However, on occasion I get asked to shoot more than one assignment in a day, and so I decided to create a new preset to give me the following folder structure:

Year/Month/Day/Project Name

By adding the Project Name variable I can differentiate between the two assignments and make sure that their master files get stored in separate subfolders.

For more information about renaming files check out Ben Long’s blog post here. Ben points out a neat trick that will save you time if you are trying to rename a large batch of files that already exist in your Aperture library.

The fact is, with Aperture you really don’t need to worry too much about how your referenced masters get organized on your disk. Aperture will certainly keep tabs on where each file physically exists. However, if you are using additional software to make backups of your referenced masters, or if you want to burn your files to DVD with a separate program like Toast, having them neatly organized can come in really handy. Especially if you are handing these files off to a client or friend who hasn’t yet realized the power of Aperture!

As keywords are a very important feature to manage pictures in Lightroom, it is essential to come up with a workflow one is comfortable with to register keywords for images. It takes time and effort to record keywords for all pictures, but I think it’s worth it in the long run.

Assigning keywords in Lightroom

Lightroom offers a few methods of making this work smoothly, and here I will try to list them:

1. Import Photos dialogue: The Import Photos dialogue has a keywords field which is very helpful to register keywords to all the pictures at the same time as they are imported . This applies to pictures that share the same characteristics and can have the same keyword(s).
2. Add keyword: Click the plus sign in the Keyword Tags panel on the left part of the screen. A Create keyword Tag dialogue pops up where a new keyword is entered and if Include selected photos is checked all selected photos in the library are tagged with the new keyword.
3. Drag keyword to picture(s): A keyword can be dragged from the Keyword Tags list to a picture and if multiple images are selected then all of them will be tagged with that keyword.
4. Drag picture(s) to keyword: The same method as in three but the other way around; pictures are dragged to a keyword in the Keyword Tags list to tag them.
5. Right clicking a keyword: Right clicking a keyword in the Keyword Tags list and clicking Assign this keyword to selected photos.
6. Keyword stamper: Keyword stamper is located in the toolbar in Library module when in Grid mode (press G to go to grid mode and press T if toolbar is not visible). If the stamp tool is not in the toolbar then select the pull down menu on the rightmost site of the toolbar and select Keyword. Now write in Keyword(s) in the keyword stamp field (separate keywords with comma) and press the Keyword Stamper to enable the stamp tool. Now, when pictures in the grid are clicked with the stamp the keywords entered in the stamp field are tagged to the photo. It is also possible to use the Menu|Metadata to assign the keywords and go into stamp mode with the Set keyword shortcut … and Enable keyword stamping menu elements.
7. Write keywords: This is probably the most flexible method of tagging pictures with keywords: Select one or more pictures and write in the Keywording field (on the right side panel) the keywords separated by commas. If you enter a new keyword it is automatically registered in the keyword list.
8. Keyword sets: A keyword sets is a convenient way to group relevant keyword tags for quick access. I will talk more about keywords sets next week.
9. Use external program: As keywords are stored in a standard way in the pictures themselves or sidecar files with the pictures it is possible to register the keywords outside Lightroom with other programs like Bridge, iView Media Pro etc. and when the pictures are imported in Lightroom the keywords from the other programs will be populated there.

It is obvious that the Lightroom engineers have put a lot of effort in making Keywords as flexible as possible with many different ways to tag pictures. Using some of the methods above should enable most photographers to come up with a good workflow in registering keywords for images.

Next week I will talk about Keyword sets.

Earlier this evening, I sat in on a presentation by Robert Houser at the Apple Store in downtown San Francisco. Robert talked a lot of about the value of a personal project. In fact, for him, his personal project has become a source of stock as well as a big source of portfolio images. It’s also a source of personal creative rejuvenation. It keeps him sharp and fresh. It’s something that he loves doing.

It’s a concept that every photographer should embrace. Find a personal project and work on it over time. Mingle it in with your assignments and other work.

Using Aperture, it’s easy to work on a personal project over time. All you need to do is create a project that sits along side all your other work. Whenever you take a bit of time to work on your project—say you find a new texture of rusted metal while working on something totally different—you can snap away, then move your personal project images over into your project and keep them together. Then, when you’ve got the time to edit them down, or even if you don’t and just need to steal a few minutes away from editing down a set of headshots, you can dive in and work with them.

How do you start with a personal project? Well, Robert started his fatherhood project by shooting flowers of all things. During a review of his work, he was advised to start working on something artistic. So he started shooting flowers and while he was clicking away, he came to the realization that he wanted to shoot fathers with their kids. Like any writer with a block, sometimes the best way to figure out what to work on is to start working on anything and see where it takes you.

You need to be very careful when deleting images in Aperture to avoid accidentally deleting an entire project rather than a selection of pictures.

To delete an image, or a series of images, you first select them, and then choose File > Delete Version. Alternately, you can choose Delete Master Image and All Versions to automatically take out all files related to the ones you have selected. Finally, you can also use the keyboard shortcut, Command-Delete to delete the images.

If you’re about to delete a master file, Aperture will warn you with a dialog box. If you’re deleting referenced files, it will give you the choice to move the original referenced files to the trash.

The potential for trouble stems from the fact that it can be difficult to overlook which pane in the Aperture window actually has focus at the time that you delete, and it’s easy to not pay attention to Aperture’s warning dialogs.

For example, consider this Aperture window:

It’s very easy to assume here that what is selected here is the sunset image. It’s being show in the Viewer pane, it has a selection rectangle around it in the Browser pane. However, what’s actually selected is the Project. You can tell because the project entry is slightly brighter than it would be if the Browser pane had focus.

In this figure, the lower project is selected, the upper one isn’t.

So, if you hit Command-Delete thinking that the images in the Viewer pane are about to be deleted, make sure to check to see if it’s actually the current Project that has focus.

Aperture tries to protect you from this mistake by presenting you with a dialog box that says “You’re about to delete a project.” However, this box looks a lot like the usual “you’re deleting an image” box, so it’s very easy to not pay close attention to it, and inadvertantly delete an entire project.

Remember, though, that when you delete an image - or a project full of images - Aperture moves those images into an Aperture folder inside the normal Finder trash can, so you can always fish them back out. You’ll lose all of your metadata and edits if you have to do this, but you’ll at least be able to get your images back.

And do I know all of this because I made this stupid mistake? Of COURSE not! Well, not on an especially large project…

Editing my images, especially sports images, has always been a time consuming task with my prior workflows. When I photograph rock climbers, mountain bikers or kayakers for example I am always shooting at high framing rates - at 5 frames per second (fps) with a Nikon D2x or perhaps even at 8 fps depending on the sport. I shoot at high fps because when the action gets going, blasting away at 5 or 8 fps helps me get those in between moments that I can’t see or react to quick enough. The problem is I then end up with 300 images of a climber on one route. With film it was easy to see which image was the AAA select, but with digital it has become harder.

Thankfully, Adobe added a comparison mode to Lightroom for Version 1.0. The compare mode in the Library Module allows one to compare two images side by side and zoom both, either together or separately, to 100% loupe view as in the images below.

To enter Compare Mode, select the first image you’d like to compare and the image you’d like to compare it to - then click on the Compare Mode icon in the tool bar (which looks like the before and after mode in Develop) and voila, the images show up next to each other in separate windows as above. I like to have the left, right and top panels clicked off while I am in Compare Mode so that I can concentrate on the images and have them as big as possible. Like I wrote in an earlier post, it’s all about the images.

One image, the left one, is the select and the right image is the candidate. By using the icons in the tool bar and the keyboard shortcuts one can swap the select out and keep moving through a group of similars very quickly. And while I don’t use stacking that often, it really makes sense when used in conjunction with the Compare Mode. You can also zoom into both images simultaneously or individually by clicking the lock off or on which greatly aids in seeing which is the sharper image. The Compare Mode may seem a little complex at first but once you get used to it, you’ll marvel at how you ever got on without it.

While it may seem like a small feature, for me the Compare Mode is a huge time saver and it allows me to narrow the selects down to the absolute best images which means less images to develop and hence, less time in front of the computer. And it works so well that I’d say the time it takes me to edit a group of images has been cut to 30% of what it used to take.

I only wish that Lightroom would compare five images simultaneously in the Compare Mode at 100% loupe view, then I could find the real gems even faster - maybe in Version 2.0 we’ll have this option.

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

Adios, Michael Clark

You’ve no doubt heard that EMI announced this past week that they’ll be releasing higher quality DRM-free songs at a premium price per download, starting with a limited term exclusive on iTunes. There’s a lot of buzz about the implications of this announcement. One important question is whether the other three major labels will follow suit (all the labels renew with iTunes at the end of April each year, so we ought to find out reasonably soon). Another key question is whether this move benefits consumers; at the surface it appears to, but do most consumers really value higher fidelity enough to pay a premium for a track (with or without DRM) — some may, but it won’t be the vast majority. Many industry pundits are suggesting that download track prices will drop below 99 cents, and this is a move in the other direction. The real winners appear to be the other iPod + iTunes competitors who are looking forward to leveraging DRM-free tracks to allow consumers to move tracks among a range of devices.

NPR did a clever demonstration on Morning Edition this week. To illustrate how much money the 2008 presidential candidates raised last quarter, the announcer played a music clip—one beat of a song for each million dollars. Of course, NPR can’t show graphs on radio, but for me, the audio “visualization” was much more visceral than seeing a bar graph. One reason could be the innate drive to want to complete the musical phrase.

I grabbed this chart from another NPR story and created a bar for Brownback by dividing the width of the other bars by the corresponding dollar amounts to get pixels per dollar.

We hear “billions and billions” of statistics on radio and TV, but they rarely come alive unless wrapped in a metaphor. Usually that’s an image or a conceptual equivalency, but I think the audio approach bypasses the analytical part of the brain and goes straight to the heart.

The folks over at CameraArts magazine run a cool weekly photo contest. Readers vote the winners in–American Idol style. Editor and publisher Tim Anderson explains:

The contest is designed to be fun, easy to enter, and to enable photographers much needed exposure, through the aid of such services as Blogger and Flickr. Out of the entries we receive, five finalists are chosen every week of the month, then all 20 are voted upon by our readers.

Find rules, monthly subjects, and other considerations at www.cameraarts.com/photocontestrules.php

Today let’s look at a workflow that enables fast and easy authoring of photo slideshow DVDs. We’ll access our Aperture library from iDVD and create an interactive DVD project that we can burn to disc and distribute as a rich media portfolio.

The tool that will ease our trip from Aperture to iDVD is the iLife Media Browser. If you read my last post on iWeb you’ll remember that the Media Browser makes our entire Aperture library available as high-resolution JPEGs that can be dropped into other applications on our Macs. So let’s start by launching iDVD, creating a new project, and picking a theme. Select the Media tab at the lower right of the window and choose the Photos tab from the top. You’ll see that you have access to your entire Aperture library for drag and drop into the iDVD project. Before you start dropping images into iDVD, one thing I recommend is to select the Menu tab and click the Edit Drop Zones button. This gives you a handy floating palette that shows all the available Drop Zones for your project. Go ahead and drag some photos from the Media pane onto the Drop Zones to begin customizing your DVD — you can also personalize the title text by double-clicking on it.

The next step is to create your slideshow. Click the “+” button at the lower left and choose Add Slideshow. Double-click on the “My Slideshow” text in your project window and iDVD will take you into the slideshow editor. Drag your images into the window and arrange them into your desired play order. Choose a slide duration and transition — I’m partial to the Fade Through Black transition. Be sure to click the Settings button to turn on or off the “Show titles and comments” setting. Another useful setting here is that you have the option to “Add image files to DVD-ROM”. This will add the full-quality JPEG previews to the DVD-ROM portion of the disc. You should consider the pros and cons of this option, weighing any concerns about rights management.

When you’ve finished personalizing your DVD, you can preview it in simulation mode by pressing the Preview DVD Playback button, or burn it to disc by pressing Command-R.

iDVD is one of the easiest ways to author interactive slideshows, but keep in mind that this is only a quick overview. Once you’ve created a project it can be customized and personalized as much or as little as you choose. For an online tutorial on iDVD, check out Apple’s iLife Multimedia Tutorials.

I had seen these Lightroom Develop Presets by Jack Davis earlier last month but only got around to installing them today and I have to say, wow why did I wait so long?

It isn’t that these presets can do anything that you can’t do on your own (time permitting). It is the way they are organized to follow a normal Lightroom Develop module workflow and the sheer logical common sense nature of them (and the time they will save you) that makes them so brilliant.

Whenever I learn something new I am always pleased to come across information that just makes perfect sense right away and every once in a while really surprises me. This way I know that I am working with something that will help me improve my own skills, not being asked to start over once again with someone else’s ideas on how to do things.

The worst teachers are those who say, “forget everything you have learned from all other teachers, now I will teach you the right way.” A good teacher should help you to develop further the knowledge that you already have.

There are seven main groups of around eighty WOW presets for:

1. White Balance Adjustments
2. Tone & Curve Adjustments
3. Vibrance Adjustments
4. Hue, Saturation & Lightness Adjustments
5. Black & White Conversions
6. Color Tints
7. Vignettes

It is suggested that you follow the normal Lightroom Develop workflow, starting with the White Balance Adjustments and working your way down the list of presets, but in the video tutorial that is available on the onOne website Jack Davis shows us that just like working directly in the Develop panel, you can jump around freely among the WOW presets until you get the desired results.

I should also mention that these presets are of course not hard and fast rules, you can always tweak or improve on a preset by manipulating the image from the Develop panel (and don’t forget to save the new improved presets).

I would like to thank Jack Davis and onOne Software for putting together this set of incredibly amazing Lightroom presets and providing them free on the onOne website - http://ononesoftware.com.

There will be times when you want to browse through multiple libraries in order to find a certain category of photos to be used for a specific purpose. For instance, I often place on-line ads for some of my photographic services. Lately, I’ve been suspecting that these ads would attract more attention if replaced the photos that illustrate these ads more often. Lightroom’s Collections feature makes this really easy. It just gives you a very handy way to work with any number of images that were taken at different times for different reasons, and stored in different folders.

There are two kinds of Collections, namely Collections and Quick Collections. Collections can be thought of as virtual Folders. Putting a photo into a Collection doesn’t actually duplicate the file or move it from its original location. There is no actual image in the Collection, only a pointer, in the form of a thumbnail, to the image that’s stored in Lightroom’s Folders or Libraries. But this is only a technical difference. You still see thumbnails in the Grid View, can Loupe them just by pressing Return and can develop them any way you like. You can even create a virtual copy that doesn’t create a duplicate file, only a duplicate set of Lightroom instructions. Nothing you do to a Virtual Copy actually changes the original file. It just acts as a duplicate set of instructions that shows a different set of Develop instructions applied to that same file.

Canyon de Chelly: It’s spring break for my two daughters, Ana (6) and Miranda (10) and I’m blogging from a 23-foot rented RV parked in a campground near Canyon de Chelly. This is not an Iceland-style adventure, but it’s shedding some light for me on using Lightroom in the field.

It is very easy these days to find information on the net with search engines such as Google. Useful data can be retrieved by searching for a word or phrase, given by the user, in a database that includes almost all accessible pages on the net - this is a revolution in information access and one of the things that makes the Internet of what it is today.

Search is based upon the fact that the information on the net is in the form of text… but photographs, music and movies are a different challenge because computers can’t interpret the contents of those kind of files. Tagging enables media files to be included in search results.

It is for example impossible for a computer to search your collection of pictures of girls in a ballet show without the picture being tagged with a text describing the content. Computers do not “understand” other type of media - yet.

It is therefore very helpful (or even necessary) for photographers to tag their pictures with keywords to make them searchable (other methods are grouping in collections etc.). Keywords have to describe the picture in the best way possible but with single word; content (girl, ballet, dancing, show, Maria, Sarah, Lisa), location (City theatre, Reykjavik, Iceland), photographer etc. Although regarding location there are other dedicated fields more suitable for that then keywords.

Keywords are a form of metadata that are written in the picture (or XMP sidecar files if the format don’t support it), exported with the picture and are therefore usable for others, like client, family or friends. I don’t think Google and other search engines are using those meta data yet, but they probably will in the future. Many stock agencies use keywords to search their database so the metadata is utilized today in some ways.

Lightroom supports keywords and in my opinion it’s the heart of it’s DAM implementation with its multiple ways of recording keywords and hierarchical groupings. I will therefore spend the next few installments talking about using keywords in the program in more detail. Next week I will discuss the different ways of tagging pictures with keywords in Lightroom.

Electronic Musician has an article up called Twelve under a Hundred on inexpensive VST synthesizers: lo and behold, my Neumixtutrautonium plugin made it! (The list is not an absolute top 12 just a list of the free synths they tried and liked the best.)

This is despite all my best efforts: after someone complained about some minor detail in the beta user interface I got ticked off and created one based on bananas and surfboards which several people, to my enormous pride, have claimed is the ugliest interface ever. (The website has the picture transposed with another synth.) I also put most of the labels in real or fake German, had no manual, and gave it really difficult name. But even my marketing genius has not stopped the indefatigable Leo Sasso: thanks Leo!

Neumixtrautonium is based on the late, great Oskar Sala’s instrument the Mixtur-trautonium, which used his subharmonic synthesis method. Playing up and down the keyboard, some notes are notes but others are more like chords. So you have to make the tones to suit the lines you are playing, or vice versa.

There is actually a family of synthesizer techniques which are all emulatable with a set of oscillators in parallel, sometimes with AM from the master signal (such as VOSIM method), or sometimes with resonant filters (such as the Mixtur-trautonium uses. I have been playing with VOSIM recently: very nice filter sweep sounds, vocals and clavs: the difficulty is figuring out how to control the parameters.

The article gives the price of $29-95, but actually I don’t have a mechanism for paying, so it is nominally donationware but effectively free.

Diane Arbus once said that the more personal you get, the more universal and interesting the photographs become.

After years in the business and years more teaching and leading workshops, I know how difficult it sometimes is for photographers to share their work. I also now that good, constructive criticism is golden, and can make you see or understand something about your work that you never knew.

So, as tough as it is, it’s ultimately a good thing to put your guts on the table (or posted to the web) and listen to how people react to your work and what they have to say. Sites like Flickr are a great way to get feedback on what you are doing and suggestions for making it better. It’s a great opportunity for honest, constructive criticism you can use.

Of course not all comments or feedback will necessarily be helpful. It may just be a complement, but if you put it out there that you’re looking for suggestions and reactions, that might get you the most useful feedback.

So if you want to start hearing what people have to say, here’s an easy way to start. Sign up for your free Flickr account.

To upload images from Aperture to Flickr, it’s simple. First I made a quick album with the images I wanted to upload. Then I selected them all, went to file> export to Flickr (I already have an account) added photos to a new photoset (chose email-medium) and voila, the images are placed on my Flickr page, ready to say to the world. “Critique Me!”

Once uploaded on the Flickr site, you have the chance to put new titles and descriptions if you want. Getting feedback on your work is about personal growth, and we all have the capacity to improve from where we are now. Last week’s post about the prolific Gary Winogrand was a good example of how a photographer learns by doing.

Sometimes I hear from aspiring photographers how they envy the professional, shooting fulltime. But I know as a professional, the envy goes both ways. Those who don’t depend on photography for their income, can pursue it purely for the joy of it, shooting what they like, when they like.

And so much of the professional photographers’ time is spent doing non-shooting tasks that many part time photographers end up shooting more than full time professionals anyway! The grass is often greener…

I read recently how the amazing Josef Koudelka, now 70, plans on shooting as much as he can, because he can. Later, when he’s older and it’s time to slow down, he will spend time editing, printing, creating books and exhibitions, etc. I found this pearl, from a 20-year-old interview with the master and Frank Horvat.

“I don’t know what’s important to the people who look at my photos. What’s important to me is to make them. I work all the time, but there are only a few of my photos that I find really good. I am not even sure that I am really a good photographer. I think that anyone working as I do could do the same. But my purpose is not to prove my talent. I photograph almost every day, except when it’s too cold for traveling the way I do - as in this time of winter. Sometimes my photos are OK, other times they are not, but I think that eventually something will come out of my work. I don’t worry about it.

I have done what I wanted, now I have to make good use of the time and energy that are left. Look: all these files contain my contact sheets - which doesn’t mean that they contain many good photos, only that I have done a lot of work. It will take years to really look at all that. Even if I fall ill, or if I am immobilized for some other reason, there is plenty of work to be done.”

Photographers like Winogrand and Koudelka inspire me with their work, and their work ethic. I need to get shooting more! How about you?

New Plug-in

Lightbox XMP is an export plug-in for Aperture, allowing you to export additional XMP info with your images, beyond what Aperture will do automatically. It is donationware. Get it here.

Last week Josh introduced us both and gave three great tips. This week I’m going to be describing some of the ways I use Aperture in my everyday workflow. I thought I’d describe one way that I use Smart Albums and keywords. One of the features that I like about Adobe Bridge is that it allows you to both rate and/or label your pictures. The utility of ratings is obvious - I think picture A is better than picture B, which is better than C, but all are worth keeping. Aperture allows you to rate images too. But labels are equally useful in that they allow you to designate which pictures to use for specific purposes. For instance, I might look at a group of five star images and decide that I want to enter some in a contest or submit certain ones to a stock agency or make prints of some for a gallery show, etc. Unfortunately Aperture doesn’t have a labeling feature.

When working in Aperture, I substitute keywords and Smart Albums for labels. For example, last week I was preparing a submission to Nature’s Best magazine. The images needed to come from a number of different projects. So I created a new keyword “Natures Best.” Then as I went through my projects I applied the keyword to all the images that had potential

After applying the keywords, I created a new Smart Album based on the keyword “Natures Best.” With all the potential images in one place, it was easy to compare and quickly choose the images to send.

Of course you can apply this same basic concept to finding images for any submission, assuming that you regularly apply keywords to your images. For example, if someone needs pictures of trees, if you’ve keyworded your images reasonably, you can create a Smart Album using the keyword “trees.” Within seconds you’ll be looking at all the images you might submit. That speed means you can submit your pictures quickly and sometimes makes the difference in getting the sale.

Bridge CS3 (already in dot-release, 2.1, as I write this) is the new version of the Adobe Bridge that ships with Photoshop CS3, the other individual CS3 applications, and the six, count them six, skews of Creative Suite 3. While I imagine lots of folks will be confused by Adobe’s marketing strategy, the Bridge itself is as much of an improvement over the first version as the first version was over Photoshop’s built-in file browser. Here’s a brief tour of the program to get you acclimated.

You’ll start by noticing that the new Bridge has a different color and interface assigned to it. More importantly, everything is now divided into panels that are docked together, similar to the docked palettes in the new Photoshop CS3 interface.

Images in interface are courtesy of Chris Orwig

Adventure could be Mikkel Aaland’s middle name. In 1982, the O’Reilly author and organizer of the Lightroom Iceland Adventure talked to David Letterman about his adventures taking portraits of folks visiting county fairs. The portraits were snapped in a portable studio that was hauled from fair to fair in California and Arizona between 1976 and 1980. The studio included a darkroom and a shooting stage. Three people ran it: a shooter (Mikkel), a front person to handle customers, and a darkroom person to develop and print the 4×5 inch negative. The entire process, when going smoothly, took about fifteen minutes. On YouTube here.

In the last couple of weeks, I’ve changed something very important about my photo library strategy. Previously, when hitting the road, I’ve been leaving behind my primary library and just focusing on the images I take while on the road. I had to change that approach recently, however, because I’ve been home maybe 3 weeks since January 1st. The thought of all of my images being so far away from me wasn’t appealing at all. I knew that I would need some of those images at some point while on the road.

To address this, the last time I was home, I duplicated out my entire image archive onto a 750GB Seagate external hard drive. This drive isn’t nearly as small as my LaCie Rugged drives that I’m really fond of and it requires external power, which is a drag. But, it means that my entire archive is close at hand should the need arise.

Photoshop World is one of my favorite conferences of the year in terms of actually sitting down in sessions and learning something. In fact, there’s learning to be had all over the Hynes Center next week, much of it brought to you by O’Reilly authors:

• Deke McClelland will be giving his orientation to Photoshop CS3 live and in color. This will be the fully animated version of the great material you can find in the dekeBytes posts here at O’Reilly Digital Media. You can also catch Deke at the O’Reilly booth covering a couple of specific new CS3 features: Camera Raw 4 and Smart Objects and Filters.
• Speaking of new, Lightroom has its own track in the Photoshop World sessions this year, and our own Derrick Story will be sharing his explorations and insights into the photo management application that was the focus of the Photoshop World keynote last September.
• O’Reilly DAM Guru Peter Krogh will be teaching Digital Asset Management in the O’Reilly booth as well as showing off his favorite cataloging tool, iView Media Pro, in the Microsoft booth.
• Eddie Tapp, a Photoshop Hall of Fame inductee at the last PSWorld, will be unlocking color mysteries, with insights from his Practical Color Management and upcoming Controlling Digital Color and Tone in Photoshop books.
• Katrin Eismann, another Hall of Famer (we got plenty, we should build our own wing here), will treat us to some of her creative insights for working in the digital darkroom that is Photoshop.

By the way, the show is sold out, but you can still get a free expo pass here which will get you access to most of the above. So if you’re in Boston, there’s no excuse not to stop by booth #203 and check out the O’Reilly All Stars. See you there.

Downloading and importing images is one of the major bottlenecks in any digital workflow. Luckily, Lightroom has a few options that can help speed up and simplify the downloading, importing and backing up process.

Lightroom can automatically download images from a compact flash card via a card reader, back them up to two places as they are being downloaded and import those images into Lightroom with full metadata and keywords all at the same time. If you didn’t know this it might be the best news you’ve heard in a while. Of course, Lightroom isn’t unique, Photo Mechanic has led the way with even more options for speeding up the downloading and backing up process but it is very nice to see some of these processes used in Lightroom.

To set Lightroom up to download from a card reader and back up images at the same time you’ll first have to adjust a few of your preferences. In the File Management section of the Lightroom Preferences panel (as in the image below) change the “When a memory card is detected” toggle to Show Import Dialog and also check the box below it that says “Ignore camera-generated folder names when naming folders” if you want Lightroom to do that, especially for you Canon users out there.

Now, when you plug in your card reader and insert a card you will get an import dialog box that opens right away once the card reader is mounted on the desktop. I have been told this will open whether or not Lightroom is actually open but I have not seen that in practice. Once Lightroom is opened up, you’ll see a dialog something like the one below. This import dialog is a bit different than the normal one that opens when you import images that are already on a hard drive attached to your computer.

In the same manner as always, you can choose to reference images from their current location. Just below that though, with this new dialog, you can choose where you would like the images being downloaded to be saved as they are imported into Lightroom. Just click the choose button and select the destination and folder you’d like to download the images to. I suggest creating a new folder and making sure you have a logical folder naming convention. Note that the folder name you create is also going to be the name that Lightroom uses in its folder structure.

Below the Copy To section you can control how the images are organized and under that section you’ll find another check box where you can back up the images you are downloading to a second location. And as usual you can enter keywords and create a metadata preset to be applied to your images as they are imported into Lightroom. Everything is pretty self-explanatory when you see the import dialog box, so if it feels like I just rolled through that quickly you will understand when you start doing it yourself.

That is a lot of work done for you automatically. I love that Adobe has included this feature in Lightroom as I can now with a few clicks have my images downloaded, backed up, and imported with metadata and keywords all in one step!

I haven’t tried this with multiple card readers to further speed up the process. That would really speed up the download process if it works. I tend to go one card at a time or download images from my Epson P2000 portable hard drive directly if I have shot a lot of gigabytes.

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

Adios, Michael Clark

There are a number of digital photography processes that involve shooting multiple frames of a subject. High Dynamic Range imaging allows you to combine and merge a series of images to create a final result that has extremely high dynamic range. Panoramic stitching lets you create wide panoramic vistas by merging multiple tiled images, with automatic perspective and exposure correction along the way. Using Helicon Focus, you can create images with extremely deep depth of field by combining multiple frames shot with different focus points.

If you do a lot of this type of work, then you’ll frequently come back from a shoot with gobs of images that need to be sorted into groups for whatever type of multi-image processing you intended when shooting. For example, you’ll need to determine which particular set of images gets stitched into a panorama, or merged into an HDR image.

Aperture can’t do stitching or HDR merging on its own, so if you’re using an Aperture-based workflow, you’ll have some extra thinking to do to figure out exactly how you want to organize your images. You can, of course, skip Aperture altogether. Copy the images to your drive, use your favorite browser to organize them, then pass them on to the relevant processing software. Finally, when you’re done you can import the finished result into Aperture and back up the source files as you choose. In other words, you can continue to work with these types of images just as you did before there was Aperture.

The thing is, Aperture’s Stack feature lends itself so well to this type of work, that it’s hard not to use it to organize these types of processes. So, here’s the workflow that I’ve finally settled on:

1. Import your images into Aperture. It doesn’t matter whether you import as embedded or referenced images.

2. Sort through the images and group them into stacks. So, all of the component frames in a panorama go into one stack. Or, all of the frames in an HDR merge go into a stack, and so on.

3. Evaluate your stacks to decide which images you want to process. You might find that some of your images are out of focus, or plainly out of registration, or simply not that interesting.

4. Select all of the images in the first stack that you want to process, then export those images. How to export depends on the needs of your external processing software. For example, most panoramic stitching programs can’t accept raw files, so you’ll need to export raw files as JPEGs or TIFFs, depending on your stitching software’s needs. HDR programs like Photoshop and PhotoMatix can accept raw files, so you should choose to Export Masters. I export all files into a special work folder on my desktop.

5. Process the images that you exported, and then save the resulting file back into your work folder.

6. Import the resulting image into Aperture and add it to the stack that contains the original source images. Make the result the pick and now you have a stack with your final image on top, and all of the components below.

7. Delete the work files that you exported, and move on to the next stack.

Of course, if you import as references, you don’t have to hassle with the Export step. However, after organizing your images in Aperture, you then have to figure out file names and try to find those files in the Finder. Depending on your folder structure, this can be more or less complicated. Ideally, it would be nice if Aperture had a way to conform Finder organization to stack organization, or even just to rename files. Since it doesn’t, I find it’s easiest to just go through an export step. Exporting files is speedy, and disk space is cheap, so this works well for me.

If anyone else has a different method for working with these types of processes, I’d love to hear it.

Fox news reports that the sons of the Beatles (specifically, Julian Lennon, Dhani Harrison, Zak Starkey, and James McCartney) are recording a new CD together that will kick-off a global tour in early 2008. Music featured on the tour will be a combination of their own new music as a group, and of course lots of Beatles tunes. The name of the group has not yet been announced, and news about the CD and the tour remains sketchy at this point. The Beatles broke up 37 years ago this month. As expected, Beatle-related sites and blogs are abuzz with excitement.

In a related story, Apple Corps & EMI have announced they will be making the Beatles catalog available exclusively on iTunes for a limited period. Apple, Inc. will mount an extensive cross-media marketing campaign to celebrate having secured this most coveted content never before made available digitally (officially). No other terms of the deal have been disclosed.

(NOTE: Neither of these stories is actually true as of today; my way of honoring April Fools Day. Wish they WERE however, and at least in the case of the latter story — it may actually prove accurate soon!).

Ever since I started my podcast, I’ve been searching for ways to improve the quality of the voiceover, and today I finally made a breakthrough. Realizing that every show has been slightly better, I analyzed the changes I’d made along the way.

1. Changing mics made a big difference; the Rode Podcaster I’m using now puts out better highs and lows than the cheaper mics I started with, and its built-in headphone jack lets me hear the effect of positioning. (As a dynamic mic, it boosts the lows as you move closer.)
2. Experimenting with compression and EQ settings in Izotope Ozone is improving the punchiness.
3. Recording in the closet instead of at my desktop helps prevent slapback echo and that "small room" sound.
4. Recording during the day instead of late at night lets me add more volume and intensity to the delivery.
5. Reading through the script out loud several times helps me find and fix awkward phrases.
6. Recording multiple takes helps me warm up and get comfortable with the words. It also gives me an alternative phrase to paste in if a line isn’t quite right. I usually find the second or third runthrough is the best.
7. Being conscious of microphone-overloading sounds like P’s and T’s helps me remember to enunciate more carefully and move back from the mic when I say words with those sounds. (If thumps do get through, I’ve found the best way to remove them is to snip off a tiny bit of the beginning in my audio editor.)
8. Deleting some of the inhalation sounds and pauses (but not all, as I was doing) helps move the narration along.
9. Sipping water helps avoid tongue clacks that the microphone loves to pick up.
10. Purposely clucking my tongue generates spikes in the waveform that make it easy to identify sections of the narration. When I make a mistake and want to redo a line, I’ll cluck twice, creating a visual indicator for the improved version.

In short, I’ve been building up experience, and so I decided to encode those discoveries into algorithms that could run on a small DSP box. Here’s the happy result, the Elvitron 401, named after the first before-and-after example that popped into my head.

The Elvitron 401 receives underripe vocals over USB and returns them to the computer with a more confident, mature sound. Internal DSP algorithms heighten intensity, punch, and even microphrasing.

Here’s a before-and-after audio example:

• The Elvitron Experience (516KB MP3)

I’ll add more background on the project soon. In the meantime, here’s a high-res photo of the inside of the box.