O'Reilly Digital Media

Recent postings in a sound design group point out examples of great sound design in television commercials. Here are some of my favorites:

May 31, 2007 Tom Hogarty, Adobe Lighroom’s product manager said today in his blog “Lightroom will be updated in the near future”. I invite everyone to check out his exact words, and then, to all of you who have been asking me what is holding up the release of my Adobe Lightroom Adventure book, read between the lines.

That’s all for now. My computer is on the blink, one of my external hard drives just crashed, and Sunday is my birthday. Is there a connection? Mostly likely. See you next week!

The folks over at Gizmodo love our Missing Manual series founder, but think the Pogue-man needs a dash of cool. For that, they’re asking readers to wield some Photoshop magic. Says Adam Frucci:

Your challenge is this: make David Pogue as cool as humanly possible. Put him on a Harley with a stogie sticking out of his mouth. Surround him with buxom ladies in a hot tub. You know, cool. Find some pictures of him and use your Photoshop skills and send your best efforts to me at adam@gizmodo.com. Entries are due on Friday, and I’ll post the best results early next week.

Not cool.

P.S. Check out “It’s All Geek to Me” for more ideas.

P.S.S. And David has promised an autographed book to the winner. Check the comments.

I’m quite confident that like me, you probably use the Loupe tool or Z (Zoom to 100 percent) key, to check in on small details as well as check critical sharpness of your photographs.

Here’s a little tip that comes in handy when you have several similar images that you want to check detail or focus, all at the same time.

Choose as many images as you want to compare using the shift key so they all come up in the browser. Generally, four is a much as I can handle. Holding down Space Bar and Z key, zooms all photos big. Hold down Shift plus Spacebar and click the mouse or track pad, then by moving the mouse or finger on the pad, you can move all magnified photos at the same time.

It’s useful to click on the individual photos, press the spacebar and move each shot into position before moving them all– so that moving them all allows you to see the same area of the frame. It’s a cool and useful feature that comes in handy, particularly when stacking similar frames shot split seconds apart.

Global Health Award

I was honored to pick up the Global Health Award for Media Excellence for my book Heroines and Heroes: Hope, HIV and Africa. The book has been out a few months and all royalties will be going to The Stephen Lewis Foundation. My experiences in Africa have been difficult and inspiring at the same time, and I hope to be back there in the Fall working on my next project: The Grandmother Spirit.

I’m sure many of you may already know this trick, but I was thrilled when I heard about it. I’ll call it the F2 trick. Did you know that you can rename virtually any group of files you’ve pre-selected in Lightroom? Suppose you’ve just imported dozens of shots you took a long time ago and they all still have the original camera file names. Pretty useless, eh? I actually believe that the original filenames are useful because they’re relatively unique. If you precede them with a custom name, such as the name of the shoot or the name of the subject, they become completely unique because the chances that you’d shoot that exact same camera file number and add the same custom information would be slim-to-none.

So here’s all you have to do: Just import your files (yes, you can do it on import, but you actually have a little more flexibility if you do this afterward). Now, if you have one name that all shots in the shoot should have, just press G to show all the thumbs in the Library module’s Grid mode (of course, you can skip that step if that’s where you already are), press Cmd/Ctrl + A to Select All, and then press F2. The dialog you see below will pop up.

Choose Custom Name - Original File Number from the File Naming menu. Then type the name you want to assign to the shoot or to the whole category of images that this folder represents in the Custom Text field. As you can see in the example below, I usually place an underline after the name to separate it from the filename. Then just click OK. Every file you’ve selected (in this case, all of them) will have the custom text you just entered added to the beginning of whatever file name you already have.

Now I know that some of you already like to name your files on import. That doesn’t really change the usefulness of this tip, because there will still be groups of files within this folder or import that you want to add a unique name to the beginning of. No problem. Just select the thumbnails for the group that needs to be renamed (Cmd/Ctrl + Click) and then repeat the instructions above.

Sorry I couldn’t stop by last week, but I was busy fearlessly leading my crackerjack team in the final throes of getting the latest edition of my book, Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-on-One, off to the printer. (An excuse or a shameless plug, you decide. Either way, good news!) This week, I reward your patience by giving you a quick look at another Photoshop feature, which, like Brightness/Contrast, has been elevated from its previous status of “Sucks” into something more like “Rocks” in Photoshop CS3.

Given the power of the Auto-Align feature in Photoshop CS3 I showed you a few weeks ago, it’s not surprising that Photoshop CS3 is vastly better when it comes to stitching together seamless panoramas. To prove my point, I have a series of five images I shot without a tripod. Nor did I bother to lock the exposure or aperture in any way. So the images overlap, but they don’t match in terms of alignment or color. Stitching these pieces together will be no problem for the new Photomerge.

With the five original photographs open, choose File→Automate→Photomerge. Click Add Open Files and turn on the Advanced Blending check box. Set the Layout option to Cylindrical to avoid any radical perspective distortion and click OK to run the new-and-improved Photomerge script.

The result is a stitched panorama. Because it was a script, you can also bring up the History palette and track every single operation that was applied. If you’re not completely satisfied, you can adjust the layers or layer masks by hand. Then use the Ctrl+E shortcut (Command+E on the Mac) to merge the layers together. You can remove the effects of the cylindrical distortion by pressing Ctrl+T (or Command+T) and clicking on the Warp icon on the right side of the options bar. Drag the handles until the image fills the canvas, more or less free of barrel distortion. Press the Enter key (or Return on the Mac) to invoke the warp.

Then kick back and admire the finished result. A little cropping to fix the edges and voila. I won’t go so far as to claim Photomerge is perfect, but it’s a heck of an improvement over its counterpart in Photoshop CS2 and earlier.

One of the first features that I played with in Lightroom was the “Lights Out” feature. Press the L key once and the interface around the photograph you are looking at fades out. Press again and the interface fades completely to black. Press again and the interface comes back. For a while, I used it now and then at its intermediate setting to look at photographs without so much clutter. Advancing back and forth through images was easy enough as the film strip was just viewable, but otherwise the interface was just a bit too dark to use for me to use this mode to perform image adjustments in. So I didn’t use it much at all after the initial wow factor wore off.

One of my goals when I photograph is to go beyond the obvious and I’m sure that’s true for most of you as well. I’m always seeking ways to do something just a little different. I’ll twist into all sorts of convoluted positions when taking a picture, and try new approaches and techniques. And as you might expect I experiment with all sorts of effects in my digital software.

Aperture helps me to be more creative in a variety of ways. Obviously the ability to generate a number of different versions of an image and compare them side by side is incredibly helpful. I find that I experiment with different crops regularly, and sometimes with monochromatic versions of the images. But the feature that has been unexpectedly beneficial is the Straighten tool.

When I first began using Aperture I was lukewarm about this tool. It took awhile before I discovered that the results were far more predictable if I used my cursor near the edge of the image rather than towards the center. Since I remain horizonally challenged (that is to say that despite all sorts of tricks such as matching the focusing sensors in my camera to the horizon or using a leveling device on camera or on my tripod, my horizons are often crooked), I became proficient at using the Straighten tool in the intended manner.

But one day I began experimenting with it to deliberately tilt my subject matter. And a number of times I discovered new compositions that I hadn’t seen previously. For example rotating this shot of a cat yielded an endearing close up. I’ve used this approach with a variety of subject matter particularly flowers and animals, with great success. Sometimes just a slight rotation removes unavoidable background clutter. Other times it improves the compositional balance. While I’d like to claim that I carefully craft all my shots so that they are compositionally perfect, in reality that’s just not possible at times … particularly with unpredictable subject matter such as animals. The beauty of using the Straighten tool is that the rotation effect is immediate so you can judge how far to go based upon what you’re seeing rather than a guess. Give it a try!

Here’s the wackiest warning sticker I’ve ever seen on a musical instrument. What’s stranger is it was from a keyboard designed for little kids! The image below is a scan of the sticker laid on top of a photo from the company’s website.

Insert your punchline here….

A couple of people have written me asking for more information about the interaction between Aperture and the “iApps.” So, I thought I would try and explain how it all works.

With Aperture 1.5 and above, you now have the ability to share your library with all of the iLife applications. These include iWeb, iMovie HD, iDVD, iPhoto and GarageBand. In addition to the iLife apps, you can easily gain access to your Aperture images in the iWork apps, which currently include Pages and Keynote. You can also drag and drop images directly from Aperture to your desktop or even right into an iChat window.

If you have been following along with Inside Aperture for a while now, you probably already know that Aperture achieves this inter-application image sharing by utilizing Aperture’s Preview files. But if you don’t already know, Preview files are smaller, compressed Jpeg versions of your Aperture images that can be created automatically or at will.

To better explain how the sharing of images from Aperture to your iLife applications takes place, I will walk you through an example.

Let’s say for instance you are writing up a blog post in Pages. This happens to be exactly what I am doing right now, so you are getting a real behind-the-scenes look at how a “Micah Walter, Inside Aperture” post gets produced. I love using Pages because it makes it possible for me to easily lay out images and other artwork as I type. Of course, this will all get converted to plain text and HTML when I put it up on Inside Aperture, but I like using Pages because I can easily pre-visualize the look of my post.

If I want to add an image to my Pages document, I have a number of options. First, I can easily drag any image right from my Desktop into the Pages document. This could be an image I exported from Aperture, or a screen-shot I did using one of my favorite tricks; Shift-Command-4 and then the Spacebar.

I can also add an image to my Pages document using the Media Browser button at the top of my document. If I have Aperture set to “Share Image Previews With iLife Apps,” I will see a selection for both iPhoto and Aperture in the Media Browser window.

One thing to note here before we move on is that Aperture only makes available the images that are the top pick in a stack. For this example, I have a black and white version of a color original. I made the black and white version the top pick, and now I can see it available in my Pages Media Browser.

All I need to do now is drag the image from the Media Browser to the Pages document. But what really happens when I do this?

Well, let’s take a closer look. When I drag an image to Pages from the Media Browser I am actually copying the Aperture Preview file into my Pages document. Pages, like many of Apple’s apps, utilize a package document architecture. In other words, the document file that Pages produces is actually more like a folder. If I right-click my Pages document I can select Show Package Contents to see what’s happening under the hood.

In my Pages document I can see the imported Preview file, and a second version that says “filtered” in the filename. This filtered image is the result of my using the Adjust tool in Pages to add some contrast to my image.

So what does this all mean? Well, the most important thing to take from all of this is that once you add an image to an iLife app via the Media Browser, you are leaving Aperture behind. Any adjustments you make in your document’s version of your image will only be present in that particular document. Likewise, if you make any changes within Aperture to that same image version, you would have to re-drag the changed image from the Pages Media Browser to your Pages document in order to see your changes.

Preview files in Aperture make working from the road really pleasant. I can leave all of my Master image files back at home on a FireWire drive, and simply generate Preview files for the images I might want to have access to while I’m away. Currently my typical routine is to generate Preview files for my 1st selects, or the images I rate with 3 stars or higher. This way, if I’m out and about, I can easily send the preview image in an email, add it to a Pages document, or post it on a web page.

One of my jobs as a book editor is to advocate for the reader, making sure the information is accessible independently of whatever inside knowledge I might already possess. So when Derrick sent out an announcement to O’Reilly team that the new Digital Media Newsletter was ready for viewing, rather than just have him send me a copy, I thought I’d sign up to receive it in my inbox like a normal person.

OK, so I already know it’s a nice-looking HTML-liscious round up of the cool stuff our Digital Media group is creating. What I apparently don’t know is how to sign up for an O’Reilly newsletter. So, I cheated and used an inside source. (I asked Derrick how to do it.) But, in my never-ceasing mission of reader advocacy, I share this link to the O’Reilly newsletter subscription management page with the world. Not only can you sign up for the DM missive, but you can click the boxes to have us send you info on O’Reilly conference newsletters, CRAFT or MAKE tidbits, or even that super geek stuff (yeah, you know what I’m talking about).

Arguably the biggest concert company in the US (if not the globe), Live Nation, recently announced that they’ve launched a new online service called Live Nation TV. This new initiative features a vast collection of performances from a large number of venues, including the more intimate House of Blues clubs (which Live Nation purchased last Fall). Hundreds of performance clips and artist interviews are part of the offering, a repository that will grow over time.

The plan is to bring fans a richer concert experience on the Live Nation web site, which with this latest addition will include: concert listings, ticketing purchase opportunities, and premium upgrade options (like VIP pricing — for preferred seating, parking, artist meet & greets, etc). The hope is, with Live Nation TV as a part of this suite of services, that excitement will increase among concert-going fans — encouraging them to purchase more tickets and to be part of the action of the ‘live’ show themselves.

The whole video angle is part of a growing concert industry trend to ‘verticalize’ the concert experience across multiple platforms (i.e. the Internet, mobile devices, the television, satellite radio, and more). We’ve seen companies like Control Room (formerly Network Live) break the mold in this context, and the Knitting Factory also recently annouced plans to move into this general area more broadly themselves. The goal is to generate more excitement for the ‘live’ show experience, sell more tickets, and of course to monetize the concert experience through this wider range of distribution platforms at the same time.

I haven’t upgraded my slow but reliable running PowerBook G4 (yet!), but because I can run Aperture on it, I have a very useful marketing tool for my wedding and event shoots.

As we all know, digital photography provides an amazing opportunity to take photos and share them almost instantly with the subjects we photograph. So every since I started building my photography business, I’ve been using iPhoto and now Aperture to create slide shows during the events I shoot. If everything is going smoothly during a wedding shoot, for example, I or my assistant will import the first few media cards into the Aperture (where the client folder is already set up before the shoot begins), and while my clients and their quests are eating and enjoying themselves, I go through and select photos for an on-sight slide show. 

By selecting well done photos that need little adjustment, I can provide an impressive slide show in under 30 minutes (which includes the time it takes to import one or two 2gig media cards.) I try to include only photos of the bride and groom, and maybe a few select family members if need be. Keeping the focus on the couple insures that others don’t feel left out because not everyone is included. And if possible, it’s important to choose and lay out photos as if you’re laying out a wedding album. Try to tell a story; try to have some continuity between photos; and try to of course select photos that reflect the happiest and most emotional moments of the ceremony.

Aperture’s Slide Show Feature

I use the 4-Up or 2 column preset for my slide shows simply because they show more photos in less time, and the  sheer design and flow of those setups are  clean and professional. Photos showing side-by-side is also just another good story telling strategy. There’s no need for Ken Burns effects or other fancy transitions. I simply seek to display my work for the joy of my clients and their guests. The focus is kept on photos and not the medium in which they are presented.

Up to now, I don’t charge extra for these slide shows. Perhaps I should. (What do you think?) I don’t even promise clients that they will get a show, for I’ve shot a few weddings where there was simply not enough time to put a show together and stay focused on covering the event. 

But typically toward the end or a lull in the wedding reception, I’ll place my laptop out with the slide show running for people to view. Even if I’m not the best photographer in the world, it takes very little time for these shows to capture the attention of on-lookers. Not only do the bride and groom get a sneak preview of their wedding photos, I also get an opportunity to show off my work. And if you’ve probably guessed by now, right beside my Aperture slide show are about 10 of my business cards. I don’t put out a box or a stack of cards, but just a few so that my clients’ wedding won’t become a commercial for my business. Plus, when or if the few cards I set out are all picked up, I just lay out a few more. 

I use this same idea for sometimes displaying engagement photos as well. Since I take quite a few photos during an engagement shoot, why keep them hidden away on my computer. A simple quick slide show displayed as guests arrive at the reception is nice professional gift to clients. And it doesn’t take that much post-production time.

I do take extra precaution to not allow the slide show productions to keep me from covering the event effectively. Clients are not always good about informing you about when they’re finished eating or when they are about to walk around and greet guests. So it’s always good to have an assistant keep an eye on things or prep the slide show for your final selections.

Slide Shows Online

Slide show selections also become a good start for an online display, which is another good marketing tool as well as a benefit for clients.

I’ve been using the SoundSlides plug-in for Aperture to produce Flash slide shows. SoundSlides is easy to set up and works very well with Aperture. You can select the photos and the music and export the photos using the export plug-in, and have a show up and running in under 20 minutes. 

David Jay’s Showit Web is also a good choice, though it doesn’t have an Aperture plug-in. 

In my most recent Newsletter - sent out just a couple of weeks ago I wrote an article about digital and color. Mostly the article spoke about how my sense of color has changed in the last few years, since I started shooting with a digital camera. My sense of color a few years ago had been anchored in film - I saw colors as my film saw them and I felt comfortable with that color palette. I shot a lot of Fuji Velvia, which was a supersaturated and very contrasty film. Hence, when digital started to gain a foothold, and with a different color palette, I think there was a strange discomfort with the images.

Now after two years of seeing so many of my own and many other photographers digital images printed in magazines and having worked up an enormous number of my own digital images I have become more comfortable with the digital color palette than with the old film palette. I find myself trying to make my film scans look digital. The deep indigo blue color that Velvia rendered for high altitude skies was the first hint that I preferred a digital color palette. I found myself tweaking the hue, saturation and luminance of the skies in all of my film scans because they looked too dark, too saturated and not “real”. On the other hand, it is only recently that I have really felt I can get colors that are “Velvia-like” from my digital camera, albeit, with a much wider exposure latitude and not so blocked up in the shadows. And I think my comfort with Lightroom and all of the new controls have been a big part of that.

This brings up a side note here - I have found Lightroom to be a perfect tool for working up film scans! Because it can handle a Tiff or Jpeg file just as it does a RAW file, Lightroom gives me amazing freedom when adjusting 14-bit film scans. Especially with negative films which don’t seem to scan so well and often have strange color casts to them. Having the ability to adjust the white balance and hue, saturation and Luminance saves me a lot of time from doing complex adjustments in Photoshop. I remember telling Lightroom evangelist George Jardine about how I had been working up my film scans in Lightroom and he was surprised. I suppose the engineers never thought of it being used for that purpose but it works all the same.

I do still shoot some film with my Hasselblad and I love that camera. Medium Format has a completely different feel than 35mm, plus the viewfinder is so huge it feels like I am inside the camera almost. The Hassey is also a much slower camera, hence it doesn’t get pulled out too often for the action stuff, rather it is reserved for the landscape, lifestyle and portrait images. I still prefer shooting medium format film for landscape photography because I can much more easily get the colors I want with film (for landscape photography I still prefer the rich exaggerated color palette of film somehow) and the medium format slows me down and makes me concentrate more on composition.

But back to the point, a few years ago I worked on my digital images and tried to make them look like the images I shot on Velvia. Now, two years later, I am doing just the opposite, taking my film, shot on Fuji Velvia or Provia 100F, scanning it and tweaking the colors so that they have a more “digital” color palette. I would have never thought I would be doing that. And the revelation that I have accepted and even prefer the color palette of digital for a lot of my work was very interesting.

So, what is the point of all this? Going forward, it has become clear to me that we have so many new and old tools to do our job with and I should always evaluate which tool best fits the job. I can still use film and get a certain look or I can shoot digital and get a different look - or I can shoot with both. Or I can shoot film; scan it and using Lightroom take the film scan far beyond where it started out. Photography has never been more exciting that it is now - for everyone.

I realize I have been rambling to some degree here but I hope that you have garnered a little insight in spite of my rambling. This is the beauty of the blog. Ramble on I say! That’s it for this week. If you’d like to download the issue of the newsletter referenced in this post you can do so at:

http://www.michaelclarkphoto.com/spring_2007.pdf

If you’d like to sign up to receive the Newsletter just drop me an email at mjcphoto@comcast.net.

Adios, Michael Clark

I saw a bunch of wacky MIDI controllers at the recent Technology in Music and Related Arts (TIMARA) festival, but none as creepily expressive as the Sonic Banana:

According to the inventor’s site,

The Sonic Banana consists of four bend sensors in a row, running the length of a rubber tube, with a pushbutton switch at the end. Software in Max converts this data into musical functions, turning the Sonic Banana into a versatile performance instrument.

Check out the videos; after seeing the Sonic Banana, even wiggling a Wii doesn’t measure up.

When I came back to photography in early 2005, I confronted a world gone digital and virtual. On the whole, I thought this was a good thing, and I was pretty clear that digital photographs are different from film photographs. One thing I didn’t get yet: that physical prints had a place in this new virtual world.

View this image larger. Read the back story featuring this image.

Certainly, I was aware that great traditional print makers like John Sexton were still producing their luminous silver halide masterpieces. But it seemed to me that the place for a digital photo was in the virtual world: to illustrate a blog, to attach to an email, to save a screen, or to join a community like Flickr.

There’s something in this viewpoint, of course. But as time went by, I discovered both that there was some interest in collecting prints made from my digital images, and that the printing technology available to digital photographers was beyond anything I could even have dreamed of in my first career as a photographer.

Color inks like the Epson K3 are truly archival, there’s an astounding array of wonderful paper that you can use, and if you have the right software with good calibration you can accurately control the printmaking process. I’m someone who made my own color prints when this was a messy, unpredictable process. From this viewpoint, my Epson 4800 printer is a dream come true.

Aye, but there’s a virtual and physical rub. Creating great prints today takes working with technology. I prepare my image for printing in Photoshop and print them to the Colorburst RIP. The RIP actually communicates with my printer.

Turns out that Adobe changed the way page size info is written to the Postscript file in the Intel Mac version of PS3. So no matter what size print you make, the RIP thinks it is 8.5X11. Very frustrating, and wasteful of expensive paper, until you realize the problem. (The workarounds, if you run into this, are either to revert to CS2 for printing purposes, or to save your file out as a TIFF and import it directly into the RIP.)

That’s a digital rub. I hit another rub when I started printing on a wonderful new paper, Crane’s Museo Portfolio Rag. Whoops. No Colorburst RIP profile for this paper (actually, not to pick on Colorburst, no one seems to have profiled it). Workaround: I used the Epson Enhanced Matte profile. This is a pretty similar paper, both have some texture and take the matte black ink rather than the more photographic gloss black ink, and the results came out pretty well.

Here’s a physical rub: my Portfolio Rag prints were coming out slightly uncentered. It turns out that this paper is really thick, and the 4800 grippers seem to move it down .125 of an inch, so you’ve got to uncenter the paper, and set the software to manually over correct the left margin to get it actually centered.

My point here? Well, if you try to print on Portfolio Rag on an Epson 4800, or use an Intel Mac with CS3 and Colorburst RIP, reading this story will save you time and stop you from wasting alot of expensive paper.

More generally, even in the digital era there’s still an impressive amount of craft involved in creating a great photographic print. It’s just that the tools, methods, and techniques have changed. This is a situation that calls for experimentation, practice, and training.

Related story: a vanished pre-digital world, the World Trade Towers photo composed in camera without a computer.

Today I want to follow Derrick’s lead and share a few tips about emailing from Aperture. I was working with a photographer recently who had been struggling to figure out how to take control of emailing photos from Aperture using Apple Mail.

Aperture’s default toolbar icon set includes a Email icon and even a handy keyboard shortcut, Option-E, that will export an image and automatically attach it to a new Mail message. However it’s not immediately obvious how to control the size, quality, and file format of the exported file. You click the icon and your image is exported and attached as a JPEG with 1024px as the maximum dimension.

The icon tooltip (and the associated command under the File menu) is actually misleading: the command is listed as “Email…”, the ellipsis implying that you will be given some options before the command is executed. From Apple’s own Human Interface Guidelines: “When it appears in the name of a button or a menu item, an ellipsis character (…) indicates to the user that additional information is required before the associated operation can be performed.” (I suppose that the ellipsis could imply that the email will not be sent until you click Send, but it still strikes me as inconsistent.)

So interface guidelines aside, let’s talk about how to customize Aperture’s email export options. It all takes place in the Export Presets dialog: click on the Aperture application menu and choose Presets -> Image Export…

Listed here are all of Aperture’s image export presets, including three email presets at the bottom. You can create a custom preset by clicking the “+” button at the bottom of the dialog. Or you can use one of the existing presets: go to Aperture’s preferences (Command-,) and near the bottom of the dialog you’ll see a drop-down menu for Email Export Preset.

Pick your custom preset or one of the existing ones and you’re good to go. And for all of you Entourage users out there, as an added bonus you can pick an alternate email client here too.

Happy emailing!

Not all photographers are dependent on printing their images or having their image files reproduced in magazines and books (at least not all the time). And all current indicators say that in the future more and more photography will remain digital throughout it’s entire lifespan. In other words I believe that the Internet and other forms of digital media are just as important now and probably will be more important than print production in the future.

Just as an example go to your local news stand and see how many Macintosh magazines you can find (there used to be quite a few), then go online and see how many Macintosh websites there are.

Unfortunately in Lightroom you have to trust the numbers and have no visual means of controling an image for digital output. Fortunately Adobe Photoshop CS does have a Save to Web function that allows you to see exactly (or pretty much exactly) what you are going to get before you post your image to your website or other digital application.

The beauty of the Save For Web tool is that it allows you to see up to four images at one time that all have various degrees of JPEG compression applied to them. Rather than just guessing that Quality 60 will make an OK image at a reasonable size, you can actually see that a TIFF image that was 991K will go down to 83.8K at 60 Quality JPEG and that it will take 31 sec @ 28.8 Kbps to download on the Internet.

If the resulting image looks OK but is too large and too slow, you can try 55 Quality JPEG and see if that still works for you. Go too far down in the compression and you can see the image fall apart right on the screen.

In this variation of the 4-Up screen you can see a comparison between the same image in TIFF, JPEG, GIF, and PNG-8 formats.

In order to use the Save for Web function on images I have developed in Lightroom, I export the image in TIFF or the highest resolution and size JPEG, open up in Photoshop CS, resize that image, apply an unsharp mask filter, and choose Save for Web.

In my last TDS podcast, I discussed some of my favorite plug-ins for Aperture. One of them, Aperture2Gmail, enables me to send images directly from my Aperture library using my Gmail account. It’s so convenient. I never leave the Aperture environment as I shoot off pictures to clients and friends.

Right after I published that show, Gmail upped the ante by increasing its attachment size to a whopping 20 MBs. Now I can send any file, and sometimes even more, directly from Aperture. Very nice…

Mikkel’s wonderful book titled, Photoshop Lightroom Adventure is nearing completion. What makes this effort so unique is that it combines an expert guide with gorgeous images from Iceland, all captured by the Iceland Adventure Team. It’s coffee table meets workstation. Brains and beauty.

As I was digging around for some tidbits for the project, I ran across a slideshow that we used as an introduction for our talks about the Adventure. I decided to re-master the video and publish it for Inside Lightroom readers.

You can see a preview of Mikkel’s upcoming book by watching the Iceland Lightroom Adventure Slideshow. It’s only a 7.6MB download that runs 4:39. And you can order the book today.

Many digital camera manufacturers offer custom image effects that are sometimes quite compelling. The Canon 5D, for example, offers you a choice of electronic filters and toning effects to create a specific black and white look. But if you are using Lightroom and shooting RAW, don’t waste your time fiddling with these settings; they won’t be recognized.

As artists, we all have a perfect right to re-interpret the world to match our fondest dreams or wildest ideas…as long as we don’t misrepresent the final result as the truth (my opinion, anyway).

Lightroom’s amazing adjustment tools can make it extremely easy to do such a thing. Supposing, for instance, that we want to take a fairly ordinary photo and turn it into a dream. So that you can get the idea more easily, here’s the photo I started with on the left and the result of the process I’ll describe when you rest “the rest of the story…”

When making adjustments in Aperture, like most image-editing software, there is usually more than one way to arrive at the desired result.

To make sure your images are within the tolerances of the final print, it’s good to check yours histogram to see that information is not being “clipped”.

Pie eating without utensils. Copyright Steve Simon

If a histogram represents all the pixels in your digital capture, you can see when the shadows or highlights get pushed to the edge of the graph. This tells you that some areas of the scene in shadow on the left side, or highlights on the right, won’t be reproduced with any detail.

The wonder of raw is that you can often bring back this lost information, particularly in the highlights that would otherwise reproduce as pure white; but it helps to know where these extreme highlights or hot spots are in your image.

In Aperture, the shortcut for “Highlight Hot Areas” is Option>Shift>H. Once activated, you will see a red mask over areas that are off the map so to speak, clipped on the histogram and won’t reproduce with any detail.

Image masked with red indicating “Hot Spots” where there is highlight clipping.

With minor clipping, the Highlights Slider alone can bring back detail to the hot areas, and you will see the red masked areas disappear as you move the slider to the right.

For more severe clipping, a combination of reducing the exposure with the exposure slider and highlight recovery slider can do magic. You may have to play with brightness and contrast to get the image looking like you want, but in the end, like the superhero you are, you can save the highlights and save the day.

After Adjustments Pie Boy. Copyright Steve Simon

There is no such thing as an ideal histogram since every image is different and high Key (mostly light toned) and Low Key (mostly dark toned) images will have histograms weighted to one side, but if you can avoid clipping to retain detail, it’s often a good thing. This histogram shows no clipping.

Since this is my first blog entry for Inside Aperture, I thought I’d use a couple of paragraphs to introduce myself to readers of this site, and to also share a little about how I’m using Aperture’s Smart Album feature.

I was elated when Derrick Story invited me to blog for Inside Apertue–after he read and accepted an Aperture product review I wrote. Though I’ve been blogging and writing reviews for MyMac.com for the last couple of years, I especially look forward to writing for Inside Aperture mainly because of what I’m learning as a digital wedding photographer who is developing his workflow using Aperture.

I just started my wedding and event photography business last Summer. Getting into this business at this time seems just about right simply because of the ways digital photography has enhanced and seems to be reshaping the entire direction of the professional photography industry. I’m no where near where I would like to be as a photographer, but I’m so inspired and jazzed about all that I’m learning in this era of digital photography.

Like some of you, I’ve been working with both Adobe’s Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture, but choosing to make Aperture my primary digital photo management and processing work horse was easy. For one, I’ve been a die hard Mac user for over 20 years; and two, I just find Aperture’s features and interface so much better for wedding photography.

Using Smart Albums in Wedding Photography
Being an avid user of Apple’s iPhoto since it was introduced (I still have my dog eared copy of the first edition of Derrick Stories Missing Manual book for iPhoto which introduced me to digital photo management) is where I first started using the Smart Albums feature. I now make the same Smart Album feature the center of my workflow in Aperture. Lightroom lacks this feature, and to me it’s one of several reasons I mostly use Aperture.

I set up Smart Albums primarily based on the keywords I use for my wedding projects. Apple had wedding photographers in mind when it built the program because a full list of keywords for wedding projects comes installed with the software. So it was simple for me to add and delete what I needed to the list and get rolling.

Duplicating Smart Albums
Using keywords to set up Smart Albums can take a little time, but the trick to creating several of them is to control click on the first Smart Album you make and set up for a project and select Duplicate Smart Album. From there, you just change the parameters for each duplicated Smart Album and give each of them a title.

It would be useful to me if the next version of Aperture included a way to configure a set of prefigured Smart Albums for each project so they don’t have to be newly created each time.

But nevertheless, Smart Albums are big time savers. In my workflow, I can change the keywords and ratings for various digital files, and the Smart Albums automatically update based on those changes. So my 5 star Smart Album for each project constantly gets updated without me having to drag new files into it.

With Smart Albums, I can make sure I don’t have a bunch of duplicate files being exported out the program. Additionally, I can use the Smart Albums to study the types of photos I’m taking. If want to see, for example, what kinds of photos I’m getting with my favorite Canon 85mm lens, I just check the Smart Album I created to reflect photos taken with that lens. I can also study how my photos are looking based on say that ISO I was using.

Tucking away a project collection of Smart Albums in a folder keeps my Project Panel less crowded and easier to access.

In future entries I will share more from what I’m learning, but I’m also looking forward to exchanges with other photographers and hearing about your workflow and challenges with Aperture.

Quite a few people I know are using external drives to hold their Lightroom databases and images on. I’m one of them. With many of my shoots pushing the 50GB of data mark, and with over half a TB of imagery that’s survived at least a few passes of culling, being able to use external drives to transport and work on my images has become de rigor. The best part about using external drives is that you can start your edits on your laptop, then plug into a more powerful desktop machine and do color corrections or print out contact sheets on a large display with 4 or more CPU cores to help out.

However, there’s a dark side to using external hard drives. The cables. Firewire and USB cables are easy to connect and disconnect, and that’s the rub. They’re quick to set up, but they are also somewhat sensitive to being knocked around and accidently coming undone. You don’t typically notice this much when you are using a desktop or using a portable drive with a laptop for a few minutes. But when you sit down for a few hours with your laptop and a portable drive hooked up, its so very easy to jiggle the cable loose as you move the laptop around, especially when you move it off of your laptop and onto a table so you can take a break.

Inevitably, as you move the connections around, the plugs loosen up and then all it takes is one bump and your hard drive comes unplugged. At that point, at least on my Mac, you’ll get a dialog box letting you know that a volume was not properly ejected. That’s not the bad part however. In a minute or two, maybe less, Lightroom will try to access the database and then put up a warning saying that the database is corrupted or the like. At that point, the old PacMan game over jingle might as well be playing.

If it sounds like I’m speaking from personal experience, that’s because I am. It’s happened to me a couple of times. The first time, I was mad at the computer. The second time, I was mad at the cable. The third time, which actually just happened earlier today, I was mad with myself. Luckilly, I’ve got Lightroom set up to make a backup of its database every time I start it up. So, I haven’t lost much in the way of work. But, I always worry about the time when I’ve been working for five hours straight and something like this happens. And, I worry about the majority of people out there that don’t have the SQLite mojo to attempt a manual database recovery.

Be careful with those cords. It’s a bumpy world out there.

If you’re a frequent user of the free Pandora music service, as I am, you’ve noticed their powerful web interface has been updated. Along with the update are two new announcements providing users access to Pandora’s large music database, and your musical preferences, on the road and in the home.

Take a peek at Missing Manual founder David Pogue’s new TV show, “It’s All Geek to Me.” Each Friday, they’ll air one new episode and one re-run, on two channels: Discovery HD and The Science Channel.Click here to see the complete schedule of episodes!

Preview “It’s All Geek to Me”

Often when I go out shooting, I end up shooting a ton of images in a short period of time. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of kiteboarding photography, and it’s common for me to end up shooting 1,000 or more images within a couple hours (the “before” picture has over 1,000 images in it). Once upon a time, it took me longer to edit shoots like these than it did to do the shoot! Thankfully, Aperture has simplified the process. Although everyone’s editing workflow consists of a lot of personal preference, I wanted to share mine in hopes that it’ll make yours smoother!

Personally, I prefer to make a project for each shoot (although if it’s a multi-day shoot, I’ll also create albums for each day), and I’ll use folders to group related projects. My MacBook Pro is my primary machine, and when working on its internal hard drive (which has my working set of images), I prefer to import the images directly into the project and not use referenced files. For me, it’s easier to just remember that all of my images are in one place. When I import the images, I tag them with basic metadata (copyright, location, basic keywords, etc.) right away by setting those values in the importer.

After they’re imported, if I want to start editing right away, I’ll cancel preview generation (Window > Show Task List, select preview generation, and click Cancel) so that Aperture runs a bit faster. Plus, since I end up deleting a lot of images, I’d rather avoid generating more previews than I need. However, if I don’t need to edit right away, I’ll let Aperture finish generating previews so that I don’t need to generate them later.

To start editing, I switch into full-screen mode (with the film strip on the left to maximize my working screen space). On my first pass, I sort my images into three categories: delete (out of focus, awful composition, not worth keeping, etc.), keep, and definitely keep. I mark images that I want to delete as rejects, “keep” images I leave alone, and I rate “definitely keep” images with three stars. Once in a while, I’ll also do basic tweaks (primarily straightening horizons) to some images as I edit. The point of this first pass is to reduce the number of images that I really need to look at while getting an overview to the images I shot. Plus, by marking images that I really like, if needed, I am able to quickly show the best results of the shoot.

The second pass is where I spend time with each image. I’ll first do any needed cleanup (exposure adjustments, crops, etc.), and then I rate the cleaned-up image. On my rating system, five stars means “near perfect,” four means “really great,” three means “worth showing,” two means “not worth showing but worth keeping for some reason,” and one means “not worth showing, and I’m only keeping for some small reason such as a unique subject.” I’ll also assign more specific keywords as I edit my images on the second pass, although sometimes I do wait until I’m completely done editing a related group of images so that I can assign keywords in bulk.

As I go through, I’ll also mark different images that I want to work on more in Photoshop. For images that I want to combine, I’ll stack them. Otherwise, I’ll either make a mental note of the images (if I’m feeling lazy) or copy them into their own album.

Once I have my edit done, I’ll generate previews for my images if I cancelled preview generation earlier. At this point, as you can see in the second screenshot, the project looks a lot more sane–there are fewer images, and every image is adjusted, rated, keyworded, and ready to sell.

The last part of my process involves backing up my images. I have an external firewire RAID array for my images, and I keep a master Aperture library on that drive. From the library on my internal hard drive, I export the project to my RAID array. Then, to avoid having to duplicate my project by using Aperture’s import command, I do something sneaky:

1. Quit Aperture
2. Control-click on the Aperture library on my RAID array and select “Show Package Contents”
3. Drag the exported project into the window from step 2, into the Aperture library on my RAID array
4. Double-click the Aperture library on my RAID, and when Aperture prompts me about the unknown images, I tell it to recover those images

If I were to use Aperture’s import project command instead of the above steps, Aperture would duplicate my project and images (which can be slow), and I’d need to delete the original project from my RAID array to avoid having two copies of it.

Lastly, I will make a folder on my RAID array to hold my images, and I’ll use the Relocate Masters command to move my master files out of the project package and into the folder so that I can browse them outside of Aperture, too.

I love learning things in the books I’m editing that even the uber-gurus around me didn’t know yet. Here’s one I got to spring on Derrick, who was contemplating his new-found respect for Bridge 2.0 and wishing out loud that you could drag and drop single images from Bridge into Lightroom. Well, having just done finishing touches on page 3 of Mikkel’s book, I could enthusiastically announce that you can. Couldn’t be simpler, drag the image from Bridge and drop it on the Lightroom icon. Lightroom launches and imports the file in question with the standard Import Photos dialog box. It works from the Finder or the desktop, as well. Score one for the rookie who at least knows which books to read. Photoshop Lightroom Adventure, proven to make you look smart.

My five-year-old son Nicky likes to ask me, “When is a door not a door?” Before I can answer, he tells me, “When it’s a jar,” and cackles wildly. In the same general spirit, I’d like to ask, when is a photograph not a photograph? My answer, and imagine me cackling wildly, is that a photograph is not just a photograph when it is a digital photograph.

View this image larger. Read the back story featuring this image.

How can this be? Literally, to photograph means to write with light. Off hand, we should be just as able to “write with light” whether the resulting images are saved to digital media or saved using silver halide chemistry.

But wait!

Each of the three images that illustrates this story depicts some kind of spiral. Each was created as a photo composite. The top image places a photo of a nautilus shell inside a photo of a spiral stair. The middle image combines several views of a nautilus shell with each other. The bottom image creates a dream (or nightmare) of one staircase contorted together with itself at different scales in an impossible way.

The general technique for photo compositing in Photoshop is to place the distinct images on separate layers, then use layer masks and blending modes to combine the layers. My own practice of compositing seems to often involve combining rotated or resized versions of the original photo, creating a kind of regression or recursion effect, as I explain in World without End.

View this image larger. Read the back story featuring this image.

OK, so most people recognize that a Photoshop photo composition is adding the element of composition, or collage, to straight in-camera photography. In fact, some purists don’t like Photoshopped photos for this reason. It can also be pointed out that it was certainly possible, if labor intensive, to create photo compositions using pre-digital technology (as a case in point, the great compositions of Jerry Uelsmann come to mind).

But an important point that seems forgotten is that every digital photograph has been post-processed. This post-processing may involve aggressive Photoshop work (or even as in the illustrations here the creation of entirely new composites). Or it may be the digital camera, that single-purpose computer with a lens and a scanner attached, automatically processes the scanner input into a file made up of pixels that it can save and display.

My own experience is that I spend far more time post-processing a photo than I do taking the photo in the first place. This is true for me even when the image doesn’t involve photo composition. Of course, if you are a production photographer processing (for example) hundreds of wedding photographs, you don’t have the luxury of this time. But I suspect that most serious photographers spend the couple of hours per image that I do in post-processing. In which case, how much of the resulting image is Photoshop and how much is photograph?

In fact, whether the post-process is under the control of the photographer, or whether the photographer is even aware of the post-processing, it does happen for every digital photo. In this sense, digital photography adds a whole new step to photography (I hate to use the overused “paradigm”, but it probably applies). It is no longer just photography, it is digitally post-processed photography. And the greatest transformation of photography since photography was invented.

View this image larger. Read the back story featuring this image.

My last week’s post about using Lightroom on multiple computers has received some excellent comments, and not everyone agrees about the need for this. My challenge is that both my girlfriend and I share the same camera in many situations, so our pictures are not separated.

We we return home, we empty the cards to our iMac and one of us starts to work on the pictures from the trip. Since we also have a MacBook Pro computer, it would be incredible to be able to work on the pictures simultaneously to save time. My guess is that studios with multiple photographers would also like this functionality.

I agree that it will probably be few versions of Lightroom before we will see true multi-user environment for Lightroom because it’s not really what the program is trying to do, and its architecture probably isn’t built to to support such functionality.

More important to me is the ability to open up the same Library from different computers, even though it wouldn’t support two or more simultaneous users on the same Library. This is because we each have our own computers and having access to all of our photos is crucial.

Both Richard and PECourtejole pointed out in comments in last post that it is possible saving the library on external file with the pictures and then it is possible to open it up with different computers by connecting the drive. I think that is a route I will be going with for the time being. I have a decent Firewire 800 drive, so the speed should be pretty good in Lightroom.

Thank you all for your good comments, and please email me or post here if you want me to discuss any specific parts of my Lightroom set up.

Back in March a photographer by the name of Chase Jarvis posted a how-to video on YouTube.com, where he showed off his customized laptop case for location assignments. In the video, Chase and his assistant explain an easy way to set up a Pelican 1490 laptop case along with a 15″ MacBook Pro and two 160Gig LaCie Rugged external hard drives.

The end result is a pretty cool location rig, prefect for big production shoots where you might have to show off your work as you shoot to an art director or your client. Not only does the rig offer a nicely protected from the elements laptop solution, but it also offers the potential to have a mirrored onsite backup of your work as you go. This type of redundancy is essential on a big shoot like this, and it got me thinking. How could I set this up using Aperture?

So, take a look at the video above, read through his blog post, and be sure to check out Chase’s amazing portrait photography. When you are finished, come back here and finish reading my thoughts pertaining to Aperture. Of course, I have yet to actually set something like this up myself, so any thoughts you might have would be greatly appreciated!

Here is the link to the post on Chase’s blog. http://chasejarvis.com/blog/2007/03/photography-laptop-case-aka-pimp-your.html

One of the first things that came to mind when I watched this video was that Aperture really has no obvious means for importing a shoot to two different physical locations at the same time. However, there are a few ways around this.

First of all, you can use Aperture’s Vault system to backup your shoot. While the vault wont give you an immediate duplicate copy on import, you can update your vault as you work, without much trouble. If you keep the vault updated as you shoot, there shouldn’t be too much downtime while waiting for images to copy from one place to the next. Hopefully in the next version of Aperture, the vault will run entirely in the background, giving you the ability to continue working on your images while they import.

But lets, back up here a moment (no pun intended). How is our Aperture library going be set up in the first place? Well, for a big shoot like this, especially one where you might have a client leaning over your shoulder, it would make good sense to start with a fresh Aperture library. This has many advantages. Not only will your client only be able to view the images pertaining to the shoot at hand, but Aperture (especially on a MacBook Pro) will run a little faster.

If you set up your clean library on one of the external drives you will have plenty of room to work and when your assignment is finished, you can simply merge the shoot into your larger library back at your home or office, and then shelve the external drive as a permanent backup. Chase even mentions that he incorporates the drive as a line item on his invoice, and delivers the drive to the client for their own safe keeping off-site. Great idea!

So, with your Aperture library set up on drive A, you can easily use the Vault to create a mirror copy on drive B, so long as you are using a completely managed library. To me, this is the most elegant way to work. There may be a small amount of downtime while backing up your vault as you go, but I would think it would be pretty manageable. Just remember to keep an eye on the vault indicator and make sure it is “black” meaning backed up, at all times.

If the downtime IS an issue, here is a possible alternative. You can use another application such as Image Capture or PhotoMechanic to import your images to both hard drives at once. Once you have done this, you can have Aperture import the shots from one of the two locations as Referenced masters, leaving the original images in their current location. With this setup you can choose to keep your Aperture library on your laptop’s internal hard drive, or one of the two external drives. Now you have a duplicate copy on import, and your images are referenced in Aperture’s library.

The downside to this method is that it is sort of a two step process on import, and that could take extra time. Also, you will probably want to use the vault or some other backup application to backup the Aperture library in order to protect your metadata and any work you are doing on your images in the field. I also like the first method a little better because you end up with a single file containing all of your digital assets and metadata.

I had also thought about setting the two drives up as a RAID pair using Disk Utility, but this means that those two drives are paired together forever, and that would limit my ability to remove one for storage or delivery to a client. However, it would solve the immediate problem of backup on the fly. So, it is still something to investigate.

I would be really interested to hear if any of you have another solution, or have tried something similar in the field. I imagine there is someone out there who has a cool rsync command line figured out or a simple AppleScript or Automator workflow. Are there any other mods you might add to Chase’s case?

If you missed it, see 60 Minutes interview with Negroponte about the teams dreams and the origin of the laptop idea.

You can create slideshows from Aperture using iMovie, Keynote, even iPhoto. So why use Final Cut Pro? Well for me it’s about control. Final Cut allows you to control your slideshow at a much more granular level than anything else out there. Decide exactly how your photos are positioned and customize the transitions between images from a huge selection of options. Control the dimensions and framerate of your project from Final Cut’s selection of industry-standard codecs. And speaking of codecs: keep in mind that this post is about creating video slideshows. If you are looking to create slideshows to accompany a spoken presentation and you want to be able to “drive” the slideshow’s transitions, then I’d suggest looking to Keynote.

The key to this workflow is the Aperture to Final Cut Pro export plug-in from Connected Flow. Start by downloading and installing the plug-in. Next, select the photos for export and choose File -> Export -> Final Cut Pro… to bring up the export options. In the options dialog you can specify your slides’ durations and choose transitions from Final Cut’s library of transitions. If you’re like me and you want all your photos to use the same duration and transition, simply select all your images from the list with a Shift-click.

Give your project a name and be sure you consider the options under “Sequence Preset”. If you intend to play your movie on a standard definition television you’ll want to pick DV NTSC 48kHz for North America or DV PAL 48 kHz for Europe. You can also experiment with a huge selection of HD codecs as well. Finally, consider the choices under the Version Preset menu. Depending on the dimensions of your photos, the default, JPEG - Original Size, is potentially overkill for standard def video. (Remember, standard def is only 720px x 480px.) Pick a preset that makes sense for you, enter a name for your images and click Export.

I would strongly recommend exporting your images to a folder dedicated to this project; if you pick an arbitrary location without thinking about it you are going to end up with a slew of JPEGs scattered across your machine. Once you click Export for the second time, the plugin will export your images using the criteria you specified and create an XML interchange file that specifies your durations, transitions, and codec choices. This file will open automatically in FCP and you’ll be asked to enter a name for the new project file that gets created. Then simply double-click on the sequence in FCP’s Browser to open it in the Timeline.

Now you’re in Final Cut Pro-land: you can edit the clips, change transitions, add music and video clips. Finally, I know this is Inside Aperture, but I’ll leave you with a good Final Cut Pro tip that will be helpful if you decide to try this on your own: in the Canvas window, click on the View pop-up menu and choose “Image+Wireframe”. This will make it much easier to change the images’ positions if you need to crop or intend to create some custom panning or zoom effects.

Ok, maybe bliss was overstating it in that header but keyboard short cuts are key in just about every software application and Lightroom has a few that I find super useful. I’ll list my most favorite and most used keyboard shortcuts below with the most used first. Here they are:

F - Full Frame Modes
By pushing the F key on your keyboard you can toggle through the different full frame modes of Lightroom. Push it once and the top bar disappears, push it again and Lightroom takes over your monitor and uses all the available space. I like this last full-frame mode because it doesn’t leave any space for extraneous light leaks around the Lightroom interface as in the image below.

G - Grid Mode
Pushing G from any Module in Lightroom will take you back to the Grid mode in the Library which is the basic browser as in the image below. After switching to full frame mode this is the keyboard shortcut I use most often.

The Numbers 1 though 5
I normally rate my images using stars. By pushing the corresponding number from 1 through 5 I can rate my images very quickly. With one finger on the arrow key and my other fingers on the numbers I can zip through images and rank them.

( \ ) Backslash Key
In the Develop Module pressing the backslash key shows you the image you are working on as it was when you imported it. This allows me to see where an image started and where I have taken it - and I can then decide if I like where I have taken it. It’s a VERY useful keyboard shortcut.

L - Lights Out
By pressing the L key successively Lightroom will cycle through three modes: normal, lights dim and lights out. I use this key a lot in the Develop Module to adjust the brightness of images. First, I will work the image up then as a final check I will push the L key once to dim everything else in the interface and adjust the brightness as needed. This really helps because it removes all of the distracting glare of the sliders and panels but you can still see and adjust your sliders as in the image below.

I hope these keyboard shortcuts help out. Most of you I’m sure use the first three but perhaps you have not known about the last two. That’s it for this week.

Adios, Michael Clark

Why should you take a photography workshop? One answer is that you’ll learn something specific. For example, if you take my workshop Digital Workflow: From the Field to Flickr (I’ll be giving it next at the Santa Fe Workshops from July 7-14) you’ll learn a great deal about shooting digital under field conditions, and come away from my workshop with a personalized digitial workflow.

Golden Gate at Night, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. Read more about this image.

But in some ways the specific topic of a photography workshop is a red herring, or as Alfred Hitchcock called the apparent storyline of his films, a MacGuffin. Hitchcock’s MacGuffin is a plot device that advances the story, but otherwise has little relevance to the story. The nominal topic of a good photography workshop performs the same role as a MacGuffin in a movie. Think of the statue of the bird in The Maltese Falcon. Without the statue, there would be no story, but other than the statue’s value it has no lasting importance to the story.

For me, photography is life and life is photography. You can’t separate who you are from the photos you make. Every good photo shows something of the spirit and soul of its creator. It may seem obvious, but you should look for a workshop led by a photographer whose work speaks to you. Craft is important, but digital photography goes way beyond craft. You can see some of my work on my blog.

My workshop Digital Workflow: From the Field to Flickr explains aspects of the technical craft of digital photography in the context of my work. But my workshops are not about me as much as it is about you. The single most important aspect of any workshop is to help facilitate the creation of a community of photographers. Technique without soul and vision is nothing. My real goal in giving a workshop is to help each participant understand what photography means in their own life. In my workshops, we explore digital photography together as a journey, not a destination, and accept a happy, busy, creative, and fun time together as a quest. This is a visual, philosophic, and sentimental quest. The results may not be what you expect, but I can guarantee adventures along the way.

From Aperture Plugged In:

If you have been patiently waiting for a way to share your Aperture library over a network with multiple users, you’ll want to check out PHPture.

PHPture, created by a software developer from The Netherlands has just been released as a free download and open source project. This new web application allows Aperture users to share their libraries via a web server, offering users an “Aperture-like” user interface complete with stacks, thumbnails, and a complete listing of all of your Aperture projects. By utilizing Aperture’s Previews, PHPture can make all of your image versions available to other computers on your network, or via the web.

I spent about a half hour figuring out how to install PHPture and although there are a few important pieces you will need to be sure you have installed, the installation was pretty simple. Once installed I was able to view my Aperture library in Safari. I could download the Master image file (if it was available) or a version preview image.

The interface is very similar to Aperture in that you can customize the view, hide panels, and get quick access to metadata. There is even a HUD-like view for keywords, which you can use in PHPture to search through your library.

Although PHPture is in its infancy, I can easily see this application becoming a really useful tool. Since setting up a local web server in a home is so easy now with OS X, an application like PHPture makes really good sense. And, if I want to be able to have access to my Aperture library from a remote location, or allow clients to view a project online, PHPture could easily become the tool for the job.

I really hope this application, and others like it begin to take off in the not too distant future. These are just the types of tools Aperture users are really waiting for!

For more information, be sure to check out PHPture at http://phpture.sourceforge.net

My Lightroom Adventure book tech editor, Doug Nelson, and I got in an argument the other day about the value of placing certain camera EXIF data under the Library module Histogram.

I ran across this question today from someone who says that he does not print that many of his images or do anything specific with them, but he would like to just simply be able to view them at maximum size, on a plain black background with no formatting or overlays of any sort.

The question is really quite valid because the emphasis in Lightroom is on doing something with the individual modules not doing nothing. Default settings in Lightroom tend to add a fair number of adjustments that are not always wanted.

There may be other ways of getting to this minimalist end but here is my version.

1. In the Library module I select what images I want to view, I click on the images and type B to make a Quick Collection of those images.

2. I click on the Quick Collection button in the Library panel, which makes only Quick Collection visible.

3. I click on the Slideshow module selector and bring the Quick Collection into the Slideshow module.

4. In the Slideshow module, I turn off and deselect almost all the options. Stroke Border, Cast Shadow, Show Guides (set all to 0 px), Identity Plate, Rating Stars, Text Overlays, Color Wash, turn off Background Color (or set to black), no Soundtrack and turn off Slide Duration.

5. Individual settings can be applied to the images if you wish, but it is best to start with a clean plate.

6. Add a template to the Template Browser (the Add button is below the Template Browser) - I call this zero settings template “Black Out”.

7. Press on Play and press your right arrow key for advancing the individual images at maximum size, on a pure black background.

8. To fill your entire screen you can select Zoom to Fill Frame in the Options but that will crop into images, unless they are already cropped for your screen.

That is it, once you have set up the parameters in the Slideshow module, it is a simple matter of selecting as many images as you like, opening the Slideshow module, selecting the “Black Out” preset and pressing the Play button.

Just wanted y’all to know: In addition to this here HTML version of dekeBytes, there’s a new video version of dekeBytes as well. One’s up now, and another goes up tomorrow. The movies are short, between 3 and 5 minutes, so the learning-to-time ratio is up there in the stratosphere. And my pals at lynda.com have added zooms, which let us focus in on important details instead of staying wide the whole time. You’ll see.

Amazon.com is hosting ‘em on its Creative Suite 3 page. So check it.

Small disclaimer: The movies are Windows Media (WMV) files. Not my favorite format, but the best choice given Amazon’s constraints. Things should work automatically on a PC inside Microsoft’s dreadful designed-by-monkeys Windows Media Player. On the Mac, I’m told you can view the movies in the much superior QuickTime using the flip4mac WMV codec or the more versatile Perian component . Haven’t tried it myself, so write with successes or failures. Both are free-toe-licious–by which I mean, just free actually.

The video blog is solid new-in-CS3 stuff for now. Given that, let me know if there’s something specific you’re curious about. Assuming it’s in my sphere of knowledge, I’ll try to work it in. For example, don’t ask me why your dog’s teeth are so wiggly. I’m not a dog dentist, so I’d be like, “Gosh, dunno.” But secretly, I’d be wondering, like loose-tooth wiggly, or undulating-squid wiggly? For a proper diagnosis, I think I’d have to know that.

Kind of makes you want to go watch my video blog, huh? Well, get going!

For a whole book-load of hands-on Deke tutorials complete with more accompanying video goodness, look for his new book Adobe Photoshop CS3 One-on-One coming next month from O’Reilly. You can also check out more of Deke’s videos at online training center lynda.com.

One of the biggest blessings in Lightroom is the Web module…at least, to my way of thinking. There are plenty of easy ways to crank out a quick web photo gallery. Most every application that processes photos has some sort of automatic gallery builder built-in. I’ve been using them for years as an easy way to let clients look at the results of a shoot and then get back to me on their favorites and present their comments.

In minutes, you can create one gallery for client review, another for use on a website, and another that shows how the photos were shot. The gallery you see below was created in less than two minutes.

All of the gallery styles look thoroughly professional, even without your having to do any customization. You can check them out in just the same way you can check out photo presets in the Develop module. You just drag down the list and watch the preview button until you see what you like. Click a choice, and the whole gallery instantly assumes that style. You can then add an Identity plate, gallery title and sub-title, captions for each photo, or show all the photo’s metadata. All you have to do is “click, type, and watch.”

If you do want to customize and you know even the basics of Dreamweaver, you can add, move, recolor or add a Paypal link where and as you’d like. Since you’re starting from such a lovely place, you can really do this efficiently.

Some “auto galleries” even let you set up a “feeback area” or let you attach notes to a gallery. That’s something that Adobe might consider adding to Lightroom in the future. It would be especially great, however, if…instead of keeping the notes on the page, the program automatically created an email to you that included the image’s file name. The note wouldn’t stay on the site, so the notes would be strictly private between you and the viewer. Another thing I’d really like to see is an automatic way to add a Paypal order button.

Using the levels control in Aperture, you can play with different color channels to make color adjustments; but I find the Color Tool a much more natural and therefore easier way to fix color, particularly with all important skin tones. These color tools are powerful, allowing you to fine-tune the hue, saturation, and luminance of each color individually. Of course you can use this tool to great advantage with all images from landscapes to still lives, but this post concentrates on skin.

I first use the white balance slider to get as close as I can get to natural overall skin color. If I had an overall magenta or green cast, I would adjust the Tint control. I always try and shoot a frame with my WhiBal card when I can, to simplify the White Balance Correction. See previous post.

Because I currently use one 23-inch monitor with Aperture, I find my screen is less busy by collapsing the colors in the adjustments HUD to “compact” vs. the expanded view, by toggling this button:

I then choose one color at a time to make my adjustments.

Collapsed view where Red has been highlighted and the saturation decreased. Twins ©Steve Simon

But if I’m working on an image where several colors need to be changed, I may prefer the expanded view of the colors (below), where I can easily move from color slider to color slider making multiple color changes.

It helps to know some color theory, but with the color controls in Aperture, the squares on either side of the slider show you toward which color your changes will be made.

Hue: The Hue slider will move the selected color closer to the color on either side of the slider. I find I most often use the Yellow Hue Slider with skin tones, warming up the yellows by moving the Hue slider toward the red.

Saturation: This slider will increase or decrease the intensity of the color high-lighted. I don’t know about you, but with my digital capture, red is the color which most often needs de-saturating in the skin tones.

Luminance: This slider affects the brightness of the specific color highlighted; and is more subtle than using the Saturation slider.

After you make your changes, using the “Color Range” slider is a great way to finesse subtle skin tone changes. The range slider allows you to make even more subtle changes by increasing or decreasing the combination of color adjustments made with the Hue, Saturation and Luminance Sliders. It allows minor refinements that will satisfy your perfectionist tendencies.

I have made my adjustments on this image, but have unchecked both Color and White Balance to show you the original, un-adjusted image at the top. The middle image is with white balance only checked (showing) and the bottom image shows what the photograph looks like with all white balance and color adjustments.

Notice that I have stayed mostly in the yellows and reds for my adjustments, taking out some cyan and blue in the curtains. After decreasing the red saturation, I moved the yellow hue slider toward the red for a warming effect, and have increased the luminance in both reds and yellows to brighten them slightly. Then I finessed my changes using the Range slider.

Once you’ve made your color corrections for one image, you can lift and stamp to apply your changes to all images shot under the same lighting conditons.

We’re excited about the Science Channel’s new show, “It’s All Geek to Me,” a weekly series
starring O’Reilly author and The New York Times personal-technology
columnist David Pogue.

David’s show premieres Friday, May 18, at 8 PM (ET/PT) and
will air every Friday on The Science Channel.

Get tech tips and view exclusive video sneak peeks of of David’s new television show, It’s All Geek to Me.

Cakewalk, one of the first music software manufacturers to achieve Windows Vista compatibility, just launched a musicians’ resource site for the new OS. It explains the musical benefits, lists audio gear with Vista drivers, and features links to other sites with Vista music information.

Speaking of which, be sure to check out O’Reilly’s Vista site as well, where you’ll find books, PDFs, blogs, and articles galore.

Why am I so interested in photographing water drops? What are the special challenges and techniques associated with photographing water drops? Do different water drops have different characteristics (in other words, is there a taxonomy of water drops from a photographer’s perspective)?

Orchid Water Drop, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger. Read more about this image.

Leaving the technicalities of water drop photography aside for a second, water drops interest me because they are, as poet William Blake put it, a world in a grain of sand. Each water drop seems like a complete world, or universe, to me with its unique colors, reflections, and refractions. These worlds are ethereal and ephemeral, meaning they are fragile, ghostly, almost like magical parallel universes.

Technically, water drop photography is macro photography with some subject-matter specific difficulties. Macro photography in and of itself is one of the most technically difficult kinds of photography because once you get really close to a small object, inherently shallow depth-of-field, precise focus, and motion–even the slightest motion–are all issues that can defeat a photograph, no matter how beautiful it would be otherwise.

What makes water drop photography a bit more difficult than run-of-the-mill photography of very small subjects is the extreme reflectivity of a water drop and the fact that a water drop is in almost constant motion.

There are some techniques you can use to help abate the motion problem. For example, the photograph at the top of this story was taken using a macro flash. Here’s a story I wrote about using flash to enhance water drop photography. Under the right conditions, using flash to light water drops can both stop the motion of the water drop and also provide sufficient depth-of-field.

As with photographing flowers in the field, one can use a special clamp to hold down the plant or branch that “hosts” the water drop. Here’s more information about using clamps to control the motion of a water drop so one can make a long exposure.

Once your lens is really close to a water drop, you may as well realize that your depth-of-field is going to be shallow, even with the lens stopped down as far as it will go. The only remedy for this is precision. Precision about focus, about placing the camera focal plane parallel to the subject, and about composition. You may find that a magnifying eye piece attachment helps with this.

Here’s where the precision of composition comes in. If you recognize that even at f/64 there will not be all the depth-of-field you might like, then you need to focus on the key elements of the composition, hopefully towards the center of the image front-to-back. For example, in the photo of water drops on an ice plant below I focused on a water drop very much in the mid-zone of depth.

Nature’s Harp, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. Read more about this image.

Yes, Virginia, there is a taxonomy of water drops. Water drops from irrigation have very different characteristics from water drops generated by a spray bottle or in the studio. And water drops that are genuinely from rain are best of all. Of course, it is really rare to get water drops from rain in the sunshine. Because even if it rains and then is sunny, water drops will then evaporate very quickly. So if you are interested in photographing water drops, and there comes a day of rain followed by sunshine, get out there with your tripod and macro gear. Particularly if the day is without wind.

Once you spend some real time looking closely at water drops, you’ll be able to distinguish rain drops from “artificial” water drops. For example, the photo below shows a classical “real” water drop on an echinacea flower in my garden.

Echinacea Water Drop, photo by Harold Davis. View this photograph larger. Read more about this image.

To learn more: Water Drops category on Photoblog 2.0, Water Drop Photograph Techniques.

The metadata browser in Lightroom offers an informative hierarchical tree of information based on the various bits and bobs of metadata that are associated with your images. From the moment I saw this, I became fascinated with the way that it allowed me to browse my images. For example, I could look at all of the images taken with my 135 f/2 lens and compare them without any interference from shots taken with a wide angle lens. But then, as time went on, I found it not only served as a way to browse images, it also told me a lot of information about my equipment habits, at least in terms of usage.

Today I’m going to take a step back and share some thoughts about the process of our art rather than specific techniques. Photography attracts a lot of people who love gear (including me). Impassioned discussions of which is better, and suggestions for what someone should buy are common. Many folks eagerly search the web for hints of the next great product and are anxious to be the first to get the latest/greatest. Lively discussions follow as to what’s best - the latest camera from Canon or Nikon? Aperture or Lightroom (…those of us here know the answer to that one don’t we?) Anyway, I readily admit that I love my gear and at times have “equipment lust.”

Equipment lust isn’t a problem per se, but I suspect it diverts energy away from the art of photography, focusing it more on the acquisition of gear and less on ability, technique, and ultimate expression. I began thinking about this last week when someone sent me a forward about Itzhak Perlman, the great concert violinist. I won’t quote the entire email, but the gist of it is that Perlman, who had polio as a child, walks with great difficulty using crutches and braces. At one concert he had just begun playing when a string broke on his violin. Rather than getting up and going off stage to get more equipment - a new string or a different violin - he simply paused, closed his eyes a moment and then nodded for the conductor and orchestra to continue. He played the entire symphonic piece using only three strings, with “…such passion, power and purity as they had never heard… You could see him modulating, changing, recomposing the piece in his head. At one point it sounded like he detuned the strings to get new sounds from them that they had never made before. When he finished there was an awesome silence in the room. And then people rose and cheered … He (Perlman) smiled, wiped the sweat from this brow, raised his bow to quiet us, and then he said - not boastfully, but in a quiet, pensive, reverent tone - ‘You know, sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.’ ”

The author of the email concluded by commenting, “So, perhaps our task in this shaky, fast-changing, bewildering world in which we live is to make music, at first with all that we have, and then, when that is no longer possible, to make music with what we have left.”

There is great wisdom in that. Perhaps we need to spend a little more energy focusing on understanding our equipment inside and out and improving our abilities, as well as knowing just what it is that we’re trying to express in each image we make. Then we too can make magic happen with what we have. The latest/greatest gear may make it technologically easier to do something or enable us to do something we currently can’t do with what we have. But the soul of our images comes from within. Sometimes having less makes us work smarter and better.

Don’t misunderstand - I’m still eagerly anticipating the rumored Canon 1DsMKIII- but I suspect that what will matter more to my photography is ensuring that I use the tools that I have not only to their full potential, but even creatively to meet the demands of a situation. We need to understand the nuances of the equipment we already have - both hardware and software - and then exploit those tools to create images that express our passion and vision.

One of the more powerful features that came with Aperture 1.5 was the ability to store master image files outside of the Aperture library. By using Referenced Masters we are now able to store our Masters anywhere we would like.

This can be especially useful if you have more than one person in your home or office working on your images. Personally, I use this feature all the time. I typically shoot in the field and download my shots to my laptop’s internal hard drive using Aperture as my importer. Later, when I am back at my apartment I use the Relocate Masters function to move the original RAW files to an external hard drive, freeing up space on my laptop’s hard disk. I can still see my image thumbnails when I am disconnected form the external hard drive, and if I set Aperture to generate previews, I always have a high resolution jpeg available on the road.

On top of all of this, I now have the added capability of sharing my Master image files with another user. All the second user needs to do is to attach the hard drive to their computer and use Aperture’s import function, making sure to select “Store Files: In their current location.” Not only can the second user import the files into Aperture, but they can use any other photo editing software so long as it leaves the original files in their current location, untouched.

I can also send that second user a copy of my Aperture Project file by clicking Export Project. This function creates a duplicate copy of the Aperture Project package which any Aperture user can import. The project file will contain all of the metadata, IPTC information, star rankings, web albums and well, everything associated with that project. If the project contains Managed image masters, these will be included as well.

One trick I have learned is the following. If I am going on the road and want to take some of the Master image files with me so that I can work on them during my downtime, I can easily select the images I want, and click Consolidate Masters from the File menu. This function will move my original RAW images back to Aperture’s Managed library on my laptop’s hard drive.

However, when I do this, I get the option to either Copy or Move the files in question. If I select Move, the images will no longer be available to additional users. So, what I like to do is select Copy. This leaves the original Masters in place on the external hard drive, allowing other users full access to the files while I am gone. When I am back and I no longer need the Master files on my laptop’s hard drive I can get rid of them and reconnect to the identical masters on my external drive with the following routine:

1. Simply, use the Relocate Masters function to move the Managed masters to a folder on your Desktop.
2. Move that folder to the Trash. (Don’t empty the Trash yet.)
3. Attach the external hard drive to your computer and use the Manage Referenced Files function to reconnect your missing Masters to their originals on your external drive.

Usually you just need to find one missing master (indicated in red) and you can click Reconnect All. Once all the images have been reconnected, you can empty your trash and it’s back to business as usual.

My girlfriend and I both have Macs at our home, and we are very much into photography and use both machines for working on our pictures. The problem we run in to is that Lightroom is a single user application - two users can’t share a database and work on pictures at the same time.

Lightroom uses a database for storing all information about its Library, and it must reside on the machine you’re working on (or on a hard drive connected to your machine). It can’t reside on a network drive enabling more than one user to work on the same database. I know some users are copying the database file back and forth to use on different machines, but that is a solution I’m not very found of.

What I would like in the next version of Lightroom is a true multi-user environment where people can work asynchronously on the same Library.

I’m aware of the export/import feature in Lightroom, and it seems that it is the only solution for it now. Work on a collection of images on one machine, and then import them into the other machine, which would be like a master database for my picture collection.

I’d like to hear your workarounds to simulate a multiuser environment with Lightroom… while we wait to see what the future holds.

Want to set up a small photo studio in the garage or spare room, but don’t want to spend thousands of dollars on lighting equipment? A trip to the hardware store can provide you with most of the items you need to set up a studio for portraits and inanimate objects.

Basic tungsten shop lights with reflectors and clamps can be positioned in traditional lighting setups and yield good photographs. Here’s a quick overview.

One of my clients, PassAlong Networks, offers a very robust platform for independent artists called Speakerheart. PassAlong is all about creating new digital media services that empower the connection between artists and their fans (can you tell why they’re a client of mine? ;) ). While the major labels are working to figure out what comes next in their evolution, there’s a massive, thriving independent music market. PassAlong figured out that this burgeoning indie music community needed a highly effective, easy-to-use method of enabling online commerce for artists through a system enabling direct transactions between fans and artists.

Speakerheart is such a service. It enables artists to upload their own albums and tracks & convert their songs to ringtones; in turn, it allows fans to preview songs (and ultimately music videos), and also to purchase tracks, ringtones, CDs, and merchandise if it’s available. Artists can take the Speaker (preview function) and Heart (bookmark function) and transport these functions across the Web via promotional tools known as “Shelves”; these will allow fans to browse the artist’s Speakerheart ’shelf’ on the artist’s web site, a MySpace page, a blog, or wherever HTML is accepted. Another nifty feature (one of my favorites) is that the artist can set their own pricing for a track; no longer are they tied to a 99 cent model where they’ll make a few pennies if they’re lucky. Now, they can set the pricing higher or lower than 99 cents a track (at their discretion); Speakerheart keeps 25 cents as a transaction fee — and the rest goes directly in the artist’s pocket. This means that artists no longer have to sell millions of copies of a song or CD; since they’re keeping the vast majority of the proceeds they can get by quite nicely on smaller volumes. PassAlong is the first company in the space to make variable pricing available for MP3 downloads. Speakerheart offers a big step in the right direction in terms of artist & fan empowerment.

Two weeks ago my MacBook Pro began to have video display problems. After diminishing returns using the “jiggling fix” (like an old rabbit ears antenna for the TV), I resigned to repair and took my MBP to the nearest Apple Store. The Genius ran a few tests, made some notes, and replied, “Mr. Story, I need to take your Mac into the shop.”

Oh no! Since my Aperture Library is on an external hard drive, my data was OK, but my backup computer is a 17″ PowerBook 1.5 GHz with 2 GBs of RAM. I knew this wasn’t going to be fun.

As it turned out, my MBP was in the shop for two weeks waiting for parts. They replaced the entire LCD and hinge assembly. It works great now, and all charges were covered by Apple.

But I also discovered that I could not bear to use Aperture on the PowerBook. It just isn’t a good user experience. On my MBP, Aperture operates at the speed I work. I’m allowed to become immersed in the photos without thinking about the computer, or even the application. Being forced to use the PowerBook made me constantly think about the computer.

It was an interesting exercise. Like having your DSL go down and be forced to use dial-up networking. Aperture is absolutely amazing… on the right computer. I’m *really* happy to have my MBP back.

One of the tricks I learned very early on when I started shooting digital was to use custom white balance settings while shooting. Every DSLR that I know of will let you set a “Custom” or “Preset” white balance. How easy it is to actually get to that place in the menu system will vary. Here I will show you two ways that I set a custom white balance so that my white balance is dead on (or at least accurate to the scene) when I get to Lightroom.

The first method, and the easiest, is created using a Gretag MacBeth Color Chart. I have a mini version of the Gretag MacBeth color chart which is very portable and stays in my camera bag at all times. This is not an in-camera method but it is a method whereby you set the custom white balance in Lightroom with one click. With this method all you have to do is take a photo of the color chart in the same light that strikes your subject. It doesn’t matter what white balance mode your camera is in - auto works fine for this method. Once you have the photo of the chart you continue shooting. If you move into the shade or another lighting condition, you simply take another photo of the color chart.

Now when you get back into Lightroom, all you have to do to set your custom white balance is pick up the eye dropper in the develop module (top right panel) and click on the off white square in the bottom left of the color chart as in the image below. Presto - Lightroom has now set an accurate custom white balance. To adjust the white balance in the images you shot just after the color chart image, select the rest of the images with that same lighting and click on the Synch button in the bottom right panel, then when the synch dialog box opens up choose white balance and click ok to synch the white balance of all the images shot in the same lighting.

Another method is to set an in-camera preset white balance using a grey card. I find this method much more accurate. I don’t know exactly why but it just seems to give me more pleasing colors. I use a Lastolite EZYBalance disc and I use the grey side for my Nikon D2x (see image below). It is a bit more involved but it still takes only a few seconds to take a custom white balance reading off the disc and then continue shooting.

In my tests I find that I get much more accurate colors using a custom white balance and all of the colors just look better, especially when it comes to skin tones. Of course, with either method, once you get into Lightroom you can fine-tune the white balance - and you will have to if you add contrast or saturation as this will affect the white balance of the final image. The custom set white balance is just a starting point. But it saves me a lot of time when I have large numbers of images to process. For myself, I prefer to set the custom white balance in camera with the EZYBalance disc instead of the color chart. I have found that the color chart works but it tends to give very muted tones.

And another side benefit is that creating a custom white balance slows me down and makes me think - that is always a good thing. Shooting digital for some reason makes us want to blast away as soon as we get the camera in our hands. I don’t know why that is but taking the time to set a custom white balance slows me down and helps ward off the “blast away” urge.

That’s it for this week. If you get a chance, try out the custom white balance techniques and see if they work for you.

Adios, Michael Clark

Many of us that have now been using Adobe Lightroom for over a year, have forgotten that most photographers in the world have not even tried it yet, or even know what all the fuss is about. So I searched some of the internet photography forums this week and found that a lot of photographers are still asking the very basic question, “Why should I switch to Adobe Lightroom?”

These aren’t all the reasons of course but they are representative of the most common reasons given by Lightroom users at this time.

1. It’s simplicity, at first it seems confusing and intimidating because of all the various panels, sliders and buttons, but once you realize that you can not ruin your photos, no matter what you do, since all controls and adjustments in the application are non-destructive, than the sliders are just tools to be explored at will.

2. The fact that it is truly non-destructive, this can not be stressed enough. It takes a while to get used to the idea of working with a non-destructive tool. At first it seems like someone has given you a hammer and told you to go ahead and smash your grandmother’s crystal vase, “don’t worry it is a non-destructive hammer, the vase will put itself back together when you push the reset button”. Incredibly in Lightroom it does just that.

3. Very easy Hue, Saturation and Luminance adjustments, yes I agree with that, all the color adjustments are easy and non-destructive.

4. Easy roundtrip editing between Lightroom and Photoshop CS, you just select edit in Photoshop CS (the file will be converted to TIFF or PSD), make your changes in Photoshop CS and save. The results will be automatically available in Lightroom (as a TIFF or PSD file).

5. Any image editor can be assigned to be a second external roundtrip editor, the instructions are the same as for using Photoshop CS. Most photographers seem to choose Photoshop Elements, I am using Nikon Capture NX as the second external editor.

6. Batch editing, really useful for event photographers but probably of limited use to photographers who like to massage the best they can out of one image at a time. It does come in really handy though if you have goofed and assigned the wrong camera setting to whole day’s worth of shooting.

7. Assigning keywords and ratings to a large number of images on import and immediately after import. If you have the self discipline to perform this little task religiously, it will make it really easy to find your images, next week or even a few years down the road.

8. Download the free trial and try it yourself, if it works for you and makes you enjoy your photography more, it is the right application for you.

First, a quick “thank you” to everyone who offered suggestions and encouragement to my post last week, Buying a Digital SLR. I was very pleased with the amount of information everyone provided and it really helped me focus my search for a first digital SLR.

So what did I get? (Drum roll please…)

I ended up going with a Canon Digital Rebel XTi paired with a Canon EF 28mm f/1.8 USM Wide Angle Lens. I chose Canon for a number of reasons, but it came down to a few factors: First, I’ve owned other Canon digital cameras and I’ve always been pleased with them. Second, I have several friends and colleagues who shoot Canon, and the ability to borrow lenses is very appealing. And finally, I plan on shooting while traveling and the small size and light weight will really help lighten my load. I chose the wide angle lens because I plan to be shooting in low light and I wanted something high-quality but affordable. The EF 28mm f/1.8 seems the perfect choice.

I’ll continue to share my experiences getting started with the XTi, but this is the Inside Aperture site after all, so how about a couple of Aperture tips?

Two tips today about customizing Aperture’s Browser window. First, many users don’t realize that Aperture features a tabbed-browser very similar to Safari. Try Command-clicking on any project, album, Light Table, etc, in your Project panel. Each collection will open as a separate tab in your Browser.

Try it with the Viewer hidden and visible to get an idea of the possibilities.

Second, a variation on Browser tabs: the Browser split. Try Option-clicking on a project or album in your Project panel: the Browser window splits into two panes.

This is particularly useful if you have a 23” or 30” widescreen display. And to take it one step further, you can combine the tabbed Browser with the split screen view to create a further customized workspace. Now if only Safari supported the split browser…

In an earlier blog I wrote about Lightroom’s contextual menus, which are like hidden Easter eggs sprinkled throughout the user interface, revealed with a right/click of the mouse. But, hey, there are more surprises!

Try this and you’ll see what I mean: Hold the option/alt key while clicking on and moving the Exposure slider in the Develop module.

I’ve been away from the blog for a while due to many different factors in my life … but I’m back now and I bring you a great deal on namebrand compact flash.

J&R Photo World is offering the Sandisk 16GB Extreme III Compact Flash card for $289.99 with a $130.00 Sandisk rebate making it only $159.99

Offer expires May 31st 2007 so act soon if you want a giant 16GB card for just over $150.00

Here is the page on J&R

Here is the rebate form

Until next time,

Keep shooting.

Allen Rockwell
My Digital Photography Podcast

Wilder Shore, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger. Read more about this image.

OK, let’s start with two questions. Would you think the photo above was taken into almost complete night? And why would someone go to a great deal of trouble to hike out into the wilds somewhere, mount their camera on a tripod, and take a long time exposure into total darkness?

The answer to the first question is, “Yes, the sun was long down, and if it wasn’t quite pitch-black night, it was certainly hard-to-see gray twilight darkness.” And I think this answer to the first question also answers the second, explaining why night photography has become one of my new passions. Digital photography just does not render the scene after dark in the way we see it (or in the way film did), and some of the effects are startlingly interesting.

Still not convinced? Here’s another photograph, exposed for five minutes in the night of Yosemite Valley:

View this image larger. Read more about this image.

Supposing that I can convince you to join me in my newfound love of photographing the dark, there are some things you should keep in mind. Darkness is not light, and it is hard to see in the dark. You should take simple safetyprecautions like bringing a good light source, dressing warmly, and letting someone responsible know where you are going.

A good tripod is a must for night photography.

Night exposures are a matter of trial and error. These exposures take guess work and experience is what it is, which is part of what makes this so much fun, because it is challenging. The good news, of course, with a digital camera is that you can get immediate feedback on your photo, although with my Nikon D200 processing these long exposure images takes about half as long as the exposure itself (and you won’t see th eimage on the LCD until it has been processed).

If you have a scene that is lit by bright starlight, try ISO 100 at 90 seconds and somewhere between f/4 and f/11 for a first exposure.

Make sure your camera is set to process the noise from a long exposure, if this setting is on one of the menus.

What also helps is taking exposures as the light fades, that way you’ll already be in the right ballpark.

You’ll want a remote cable that is programmable, so you can set it for a long Bulb exposure without having to hold the shutter button down. (Here’s some info about working with the Nikon remote MC-36 cable.)

If you want to learn more, have a look at On Night Photography.

One of the Lightroom Print module’s strengths is the ease with which you can adjust the print margins so that you can place the image pretty much anywhere on a page that you like. Like most everything else in Lightroom, all it takes is dragging sliders while you watch until you like what you see. I’ve found this an invaluable aid in making very classy-looking hard-cover perfect-bound books that can be turned into portfolios, event albums, scrapbooks, and…best of all…very high-priced art books.

It’s always been possible to make prints and then send them to a book-binding company, but that may be a little beyond your budget. I’ve been wanting to do that for the many models for whom I take composite and portfolio pictures. Not to mention simply wanting a more elegant but affordable way to print my own images. So I was thrilled when, in the course of doing some research on an upcoming O’Reilly book, I came across a cool gadget called Photo Book Creator (www.myphotobookcreator.com). It’s a “make your own photo book” kit that sells for just over $100, complete with a sample of a book cover and software that helps you layout and make the book. You get the binding machine, a sample cover, and layout software. These binders will hold only ten to forty (depending on thickness) pages of photo-quality inkjet paper, but if you buy double-sided paper, you can have twenty pages. You can also print multiple images per-page, so you could easily show off 30 or more images in a single book. All it takes to make a book is to print the pages, drop them into the slot in the binder cover and set the binder into the binding machine for about 90 seconds (see the image below). When you set the binder into the machine, it automatically turns on and heats the glue in the binding. Thirty seconds later, the binder turns off and you let it cool for a minute. Now you have a book. It’s even easier than sliding prints into portfolio sleeves.

The more I play and use Aperture, the more I love what it does for me. I keep coming up with new and improved ways to use it.

This spring and summer, I will be leading a few workshops and I plan on taking Aperture along as my teaching assistant. Though I’ve yet to try it in this way, I’m thinking that all the features that I love Aperture for can be put to great use by teachers using Aperture to show off good work and to project images by students and others for critique in the classroom.

I will likely dedicate a specific library for this task, and I can plan my classes in advance using albums, slideshows, web galleries, light tables and even books to quickly access them for specific class plans.

Aperture is second to no program when it comes to editing. With students, it’s very easy to go into stack mode and compare the subtle differences between images, discussing which works best and why. And with auto-stack, we can see how an assignment was approached and develops, in real time. Was it “worked” enough with the student trying a variety of compositions, moving closer and further from the subject, experimenting with new angles? A time-related stack is better than a contact sheet for insight into just how a photographer worked a particular shoot.

If the class is interesting and you’re using Aperture for visual aid, students should stay awake, unlike this girl, caught through the window of her school. ©Steve Simon

For building a narrative, by throwing some of the best images from an edit onto a light table, you can play around to see how best to tell a story. Photographs destined for publication can be finessed, and questions like which is the signature image? Which photographs contribute best to further a story and layout? Which photographs with important small detail need to be big and which can still communicate effectively at a smaller size? Because you can move things around and make images bigger or smaller, the light table is a great way to figure all this out.

After an edit has been done, I might put all the photographs into a class album for that assignment. They can be run as a slide show at first, and then talked about one by one. I will probably choose a song from iTunes for the slideshow, just because I like the powerful combination of well chosen music and visuals.

Recess. ©Steve Simon

Since web galleries are so easy and fast to create, I will probably give students a URL of a gallery I make and ask them specific questions about the work, be it my work, their work or photographs from another photographer who we are discussing. I would consider asking students themselves to post a gallery from an assignment, maybe their 10 best in the order they think is strongest to weakest. Hard copies can be made of single images as well as contact sheets using Aperture’s printing features. It’s also a one-button task to send an image along via email if that’s the way I want a particular assignment handled.

Web galleries can be made quickly by each student and by maintaining these galleries throughout the course, I think it can visually help a teacher to map progress and see improvement over time.

Long term projects and assignments can be kept in albums or even smart albums with the right criteria or rating systems assigned. Be it in albums or web galleries, we can look at student work together for critique, at any time throwing the loupe on an area or zooming in with the Z key, or pressing the C key and cropping an image to see and discuss if it is improved by cropping. Adjustments can be made, color converted to black and white, all quickly and on the fly. At any time we can quickly get back to the unaltered Master Raw image by pressing the M key.

If it’s a longer workshop or course, I might make students create a book, which in consultation with the teacher could ultimately become a nice portfolio piece.

Never a dull moment in Sex-Ed class. ©Steve Simon

Many different programs together can accomplish these things, but Aperture is the all in one program that allows the flexibility and speed to create entertaining and interesting class experiences. I think it has the potential to maximize and speed up the learning process. I’m looking forward to hooking up my Macbook Pro to a digital projector. Let the bell ring and class begin.

This new feature in Photoshop CS3 allows you to automatically align multiple images captured from a single vantage point, even if you shot them without a tripod. For instance, let’s say we have these pictures of me and my wife, Elizabeth, from the balcony of our stateroom on the Photoshop Fling cruise, a week-long Geek Cruises event held every February. We each photographed each other separately by setting the camera on a table and taking turns pressing the shutter release. Unfortunately, the camera moved slightly so the images don’t exactly align (hey, we were at sea). In the past, I’ve actually shown people how to align these images manually, which requires some work and patience. Now Photoshop can do it automatically.

The German webzine “heise mobil” has an excellent 8 (web)page article on the XO (English translation provided), A good review of the hardware, the XO’s unique dual-mode display, the innovative software (including Etoys!) and the cooperating developers and sponsors.

Without a doubt, the most tedious activity for me in processing a shoot is applying keywords and writing captions. There’s magic in the develop module when you make a photo the best it can be. And the process of ranking and finding the best images in a shoot is one of discovery. But the act of applying keywords and writing a title and caption is just plain work. Yet, it’s very important work. It’s how you’ll find pictures in your archives in the coming years in your library. If you distribute your images, it’s how other people will know who is in your photos and where they were taken. And, if you do things right, once you’ve titled and captioned a picture, you’ll never have to do it again. Wherever your images go, the title, keywords, and caption will follow and be presented along with your photograph.

Aperture 1.5 added a new preview feature, and since I’ve received a few questions about it lately, this week’s blog will be devoted to discussing how Aperture uses previews. If you’re like me, you’ve noticed that periodically, especially right after importing your images, you will see “Generating Previews” listed in the task window. Plus, sometimes when you try to quit Aperture, an alert will pop-up saying that Aperture is generating previews. Unfortunately, there’s no little box in Aperture that says what Previews are useful for!

It’s a common misconception that when you click on an image, while waiting for Aperture to decode the RAW file, you’re seeing the preview in the viewer. This actually isn’t the case (to the best of my knowledge); instead, you’re seeing a large thumbnail. However, if the RAW file isn’t available but a preview is (and the preview is larger than the large thumbnail), Aperture will display the preview instead of the RAW file. In other words, when using offline images, Aperture will generally use previews.

Now the question is at what other times will Aperture use your previews?

• When you drag and drop the image thumbnail to another application, Aperture will put the preview on the pasteboard.
• If you use slide shows and have them set to not load the RAW files, Aperture will use previews.
• If you use your Aperture images in iLife applications, like iDVD, those applications will use your Aperture previews.

If it turns out that you don’t ever need previews, you can save some hard drive space and processor time by deleting your previews and turning preview generation off. To do so, follow these instructions:

1. Click on the Action menu (gear icon) above the Library and uncheck “Maintain Previews for All Projects”
2. Control-click on the Library and choose “Delete Previews for Library”
3. Under Preferences, uncheck “New projects automatically generate previews” to stop new previews from being automatically generated

If previews really are useful for your workflow, make sure that you are using them efficiently–limit their size and resolution! Under Preferences, there is a slider for the image quality. Somewhere between 5 and 8 should be sufficient, depending on if you’ll want higher-quality images or not. Under the Limit Preview Size popup, if you have it set to “Don’t Limit,” then Aperture will create previews at the same size as the original image. You will be fine limiting the preview size to the size of the largest screen you’ll be working on, such as 1440 x 1440 for a 15″ MacBook Pro.

Sometimes, you’ll notice that a preview is corrupt or out of date. When this happens to me, I first control-click on the image and choose “Update Preview.” If that fails to do the trick, I’ll hold down Option and then control-click on the image and choose “Generate Preview.” If that still doesn’t work, I’ll control-click, pick “Delete Preview” and then option-control-click and choose “Generate Preview.” I have yet to find a bad preview that those steps won’t fix!

Last but not least, if you’re really unhappy with when Aperture generates previews, either uncheck the “Maintain Previews for All Projects” under the Project Panel’s Action menu or control-click a specific project and uncheck “Maintain Previews for Project.” Now, you have full control over when Aperture will generate previews (select the images, option-control-click, and choose “Generate Previews”).

One final note on a different topic–I will be speaking at the Cocoaheads meeting this Thursday about Aperture plug-ins at Apple in Cupertino. Feel free to attend!

Synonyms are a very powerful feature of Lightroom Keyword system. It allows you to define for each keyword in you keyword list synonyms that save time, especially when keywording for stock agencies, Lightroom, Photosharing sites etc. to maximize changes of your pictures being found in searches.

To enter synonym(s) for a keyword just type them in the keyword dialogue when creating a new keyword or editing existing keyword. The synonyms will be exported as regular keywords when the pictures are exported and therefore usable in other applications.

When a picture is tagged with a keyword which has synonym(s), the synonyms will be displayed in the Implied Keywords field in the Keywording panel to the right.

The downside to this is that every user has to enter his or her own synonyms. It would be great if Lightroom could hook up to some web service or something that your synonyms could be uploaded and shared with others and you could use synonyms from other people in similar manner. That would save lot’s of time, and people could focus on things other than entering synonyms to keywords.

A little less than a month ago I was directed to a new product, which I think might be of use to a number of Aperture users. Billed as “The Worlds First Storage Robot” Drobo offers “Fully automated storage you don’t have to manage.”

So, what is a Drobo? I took a read through their website, and watched the demo video, and all I can come up with is, “a very cool thing.” Drobo (which has already dropped in price from $699.99 to $499.99 without any drives) is a robot for your hard drives. From what I can tell, it is essentially a RAID controller that you don’t have to configure or worry about. You simply plug in up to 4 drives and Drobo does the rest. The drives are hot swappable, and can be any size you choose. So, if you have a bunch of miss-matched drives hanging around you can plug them right in, and Drobo will take care of the formatting, and mirroring for you.

What you get is a single drive on your desktop redundantly mirrored without any work at all. They even have a “Drobolator” which you can use to figure out how much free space you will have based on the drives you install.

One major advantage I see with the Drobo is that you can use any size 3.5″ SATA I or II drive, from any manufacturer, in any of the four bays. If you want to expand to a larger drive, you don’t need to worry about migrating your files to the new drive, you just plug in the new drive and you are done.

This is a very slick product that I can see sitting on the desks of many Aperture users.

From Aperture Plugged In:

Software development company Übermind has just announced a new Aperture plugin that allows the export of images to a FileMaker database.

ApertureToFilemaker 1.0 boasts the following features.

• Support for multiple FileMaker databases
• Automatically creates schema and table structure
• Inserts photo and 120+ pieces of metadata
• Keychain support

For more information visit Übermind’s website here.

From Übermind’s Press Release:

Seattle, Washington–May 7, 2007–Übermind, Inc., the market leader for
Aperture plug-in development, is pleased to announce the immediate
availability of the ApertureToFileMaker export plug-in. The
ApertureToFileMaker plug-in provides a simple, intuitive mechanism to
export images and their associated metadata from Aperture to FileMaker
databases.

Übermind Inc., the creators of the popular ApertureToFTP Pro and
ApertureToGallery plug-ins have developed a plug-in that bridges the gap
between Aperture and FileMaker providing users with new and exciting ways
to leverage their digital photography library. The ApertureToFileMaker
plug-in provides support for multiple FileMaker databases, automatically
creates schema and table structure, and inserts over 120 pieces of
metadata.

For users looking to harness the power of FileMaker with their Aperture
photography library, the wait is over.

Price: Freeware

Plug-in Details:
Version: 1.0
Post Date: 05/07/2007
File Size: 3.7 MB

System Requirements:
Aperture 1.5
FileMaker Pro 8.5
Mac OS 10.4

Aperture’s Rotate tools, the ones that sit in the Toolbar at the top of the Aperture window, provide a simple facility for rotating images right or left. Select either the clockwise or counter-clockwise rotate tool and then click on any image and it will rotate 90°. If you hold down the Option key while clicking, you’ll get the opposite rotation from either tool.

However, if you select multiple images and click on one of them with the Rotate tool, only that image will rotate (regardless of the state of the Toggle Primary Select button). This might seem unintuitive, but don’t worry, there’s still a way to rotate entire groups of images. Just select the images as normal, and then use the ] key to rotate clockwise, and the [ to rotate counter-clockwise. Alternately, you can use the Rotate commands found under the Images menu.

Also, don’t forget that you can rotate single or multiple images upon import, by using the Rotate commands found in the Aperture Import dialog.

In my last blog post about XMP sidecar files and Lightroom, there were quite a few comments and questions. In the course of answering some of those questions, I realized that there are a few tricks to using the XMP files so that you can transfer images from one computer to another and have all of your develop and metadata settings in Lightroom retained between machines.

The key to all of this is understanding that the XMP files are not automatically updated beyond the information included in the Library Module unless you export your XMP sidecar files after making all of your adjustments. Hence, a critical step in a workflow with Lightroom - if you want to have access to all of the settings you’ve made in the Develop Module is to export the XMP sidecar files after you have made the final adjustments your images. To do this, select all of your images, then Export the XMP metadata by going to (in the menu bar) Metadata > XMP > Export XMP Metadata to Files. This will save all of your settings to the XMP file and update each XMP file.

Now, sadly, exporting the XMP sidecar files will not record the creation of Virtual Copies and the settings you made to those or any other information regarding stacking, slideshows, etc. Basically it includes all of the keywords, metadata, ranking and ratings and all changes made in the develop mode to the original RAW file. To transfer these other settings you would have to copy the Lightroom cache file along with the folder of images and load all of that onto the other machine.

An easier way of dealing with all of this is to have your Lightroom cache and the images on an external hard drive that you can switch between computers. For most of us that is impractical and if that external drive is FireWire or USB 2.0, the connection speed of either will drastically slow down Lightroom as it tries to read the cache and images from the external hard drive.

I wish I had better news on an easy way to work up your images on your laptop, then transfer those settings to your office computer when you get back from a shoot but it isn’t always straight forward or easy. It can be done though. I am sure Adobe is working on this issue as we speak and hopefully we’ll see an easy solution to this issue in an update or Version 2.0.

For my work, I can generally wait to get back into the office and download my images to my imaging machine and keep all of my Lightroom settings on that computer. If a client needs images while I am in the field and I have to work them up on my laptop then I will do so but otherwise everything runs through my imaging computer in the office. For most clients I explain that for the best image quality and color management it would be best if I don’t work the images up on my laptop and I wait to do that work back in the office. Hopefully laptop displays will get better and that will change but so far I haven’t seen a laptop screen that can compare to my Apple Cinema Display in terms of color accuracy.

That’s it for this week. I hope this helps to clear up a few issues with the XMP sidecar files.

Adios, Michael Clark

The California Democratic Party held its annual convention in San Diego April 27-29, and I was there blogging, along with hundreds of other traditional and web-based reporters. Here are some observations.

<- First, a thought about this picture: No matter how much technology finds its way into campaigns and campaign coverage, politics is ultimately about touch. This shot is from a rally of Barack Obama supporters just before Obama went into the main hall to address the 2,000-plus attendees. Notice the hand wrapped around Obama’s wrist, and the other one hovering over his head. Also: the fists in the foreground, expressing solidarity, and the echo of the fist in the background, holding up a cell phone camera. And meanwhile a big bodyguard tries to make sure all these attempts to connect with the candidate don’t get out of hand. On to more practical matters…

I made up this little chart to keep track of the various makers of modular/patchable analog synths (including modules,kits, PCBs and virtual synths) outside America, especially here in Australia. Pin matrixes are definitely a British/Australian phenomenon.

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Sometimes some things seem very simple on the surface but are actually a little more complicated under the skin.

For instance you would assume that the default setting for a RAW image file in the Develop Module of Lightgroom would be a file that has not been altered in any way whatsoever, or that the Reset button would take you to that same unaltered RAW state.

Your assumption would be wrong. When you first open an image in the Lightroom Develop module, it will open in the Lightroom Default setting, which In the case of the Nikon D200 image of the lighthouse above, is set to +50 Brightness, +25 Contrast and +5 Blacks.

If you really want to see the image as it came out of the camera’s RAW image file processor you will have to select the Zero’d image which will give you a setting of zero across the board and a straight line for the Tone Curve. It is also possible to assign the Zero’d setting to the image on import into Lightroom.

In most cases the default image is actually a very good starting point for your final image settings, but when you come across an image which has for instance a blown out sky, it is a good idea to select the Zero’d Preset and see if the image does actually have any color in the sky and then to use that as the starting point instead.

If your default setting in the Develop module is consistently off the mark for your particular camera’s images, it is also a good idea to start with the Zero’d setting when building the custom Develop Preset for that camera.

One thing to remember when experimenting with images that have an initial Custom or Zero’d default setting, is that the Reset button resets to the Lightroom default. To return to your Custom Preset settings you must press the Custom Preset button and to get back to the Zero’d setting you must press the Zero’d Preset button.

In the early ’00s I had a company that developed P2P streaming software that powered Internet radio broadcasts.

At that time, there was a big risk that Internet radio would get shut down. It didn’t - but it was burdened with regulations that made it pay MORE fees than terrestrial or satellite radio. (Net radio has to pay composer and performers, whereas, due to it’s roots as a promotional vehicle, terrestrial radio only has to pay composers).

Anyway, it’s very important that Internet radio survives. A new proposal is trying to vastly increase the fees in such a way that all the indie stations that are paying hundreds to several thousands a year would go into 5 digits - i.e. they would have to shut down their stations and cease to exist. This issue has nothing to do with digital piracy or anything exciting and contentious like that; it’s just standard incumbents vs. upstarts, with Internet radio fighting the uphill battle for over a decade now.

In a few years, your car and mobile phone will be bathed in ubiquitous broadband. You’ll be able to tune into any station you’d like, anywhere around the world. The promise of this is great - but some ill-conceieved regulation could establish too high a bar - and prevent the kind of independent communication essential to a healthy culture.

You can call your representative and say Support H.R. 2060, the Internet Radio Equality Act, if the issue is important to you.

Technorati Tags: activism, business, congress, emerging media, legislation, internetradio, radio

So I have a confession to make: I’ve never owned a digital SLR. I’ve been teaching Aperture for more than a year and a half now, talking with photographers, answering questions, and troubleshooting software and workflow issues. I’ve fashioned myself to be quite an expert on all things Aperture. And I do know a lot about this great piece of software. But all along I’ve felt like something of an impostor, shooting with an old Canon point-and-shoot.*

Now, truth be told, my background isn’t that far removed from digital photography. I’ve been a graphic designer and user of Adobe Creative Suite for years. My expertise in Photoshop was initially what got me involved in using Aperture when it was first released. I worked for Apple at the time, and this was a rare opportunity to immerse myself in a new piece of software before the general public got their hands on it. So I spent several days learning the software, using it, and beginning to understand the streamlined workflow that it offered photographers.

That was October of 2005. And here we are 18 months later. I have a deep knowledge of Aperture but still consider myself a terribly amateur photographer. So now, just in time for the warm weather in New York City, I’m going to take the plunge: I’m buying a digital SLR.

But what to buy? I always knew the Mac vs. PC debate was fierce and the Aperture vs. Lightroom discussion is heating up. But these pale in comparison to the “Canon vs. Nikon vs. everyone else” debates.

Get the most out of your Sony Alpha DSLR A100 with this essential manual designed for shooters of every skill level.

Sony Alpha DSLR A100: A Better Manual is a PDF so you can read it on your computer or PDA. It is laid out on an 8.5 x 11-inch “page” so if you want to print it, you won’t have to waste paper or spend time configuring your printer.

Read more here.

One of the most powerful innovations that Apple introduced with Aperture was the stack. While it’s very easy to think of a stack as a folder - and stacks can function very well as a container for related images - this isn’t really what they were designed for. Ultimately, the point of a stack is to provide access to the one image out of a group that you really like. That image, the pick, is shown on the front of the stack. The rest of the stack can contain alternate images that are there if you need them, but the idea is that you probably won’t ultimately ever utilitize these images - the stack simply provides a quick way to access them should you need to swap one out with the current Pick.

With this philosophy in mind, Aperture really intends for you to think of a stack as a single image - the Pick. As such, it alows you to handle a stack just as you would a normal, unstacked, single image. You can drop it in an album, a book, or a web page - or start editing - and only that one image will be altered. This is a fundamental understanding that Adobe has missed with Lightroom, as evidenced by the fact that stacked images don’t present themselves as such in many parts of the program.

Unfortunately, it’s also an understanding that slipped by Apple when they created Aperture’s Export Masters command. If you select a closed stack with the intent of exporting the master of the Pick image, Aperture will export everything in the stack! if you’re working with a stack containing a lot of high-res images, this export can take a fair amount of time and disk space, and leave you with a bunch of images laying around that you need to sort through and delete.

Luckily, the work-around is fairly simple: just open the stack, select only the image(s) that you want to export, and choose the Export commands as normal.

If you haven’t heard, Paul Davis and friends have just released the second version of Ardour - a free open-source multitrack recorder for Linux and now for OSX. The intro on the site gives a good summary:

“Ardour capabilities include: multichannel recording, non-destructive editing with unlimited undo/redo, full automation support, a powerful mixer, unlimited tracks/busses/plugins, timecode synchronization, and hardware control from surfaces like the Mackie Control Universal. If you’ve been looking for a tool similar to ProTools, Nuendo, Pyramix, or Sequoia, you might have found it.”

2 years in the making, Paul lists some of the new features for this version:

* new user interface featuring:
- more accessible menus
- improved overall GUI design
- instant accelerator key rebinding direct from menus
* destructive recording (”dubbing”) capabilities (as used by the new Harrison Xdubber)
* undo/redo across program startup/shutdown
* redesigned and more stable support for VST
* support for 24 bit integer native files in addition to 32 bit float as in 0.99
* modular support for hardware control surfaces, including the Frontier Designs Tranzport and Mackie Control Protocol devices

If you’re not familiar with the product, you should read the features. Why not download it and try it out? I’ve always found it to be easy to use and rock solid. Paul and his team have done a great job. I’m excited about diving into the upgraded VST support.

If you need help, try the forums on their site. Or, join the Linux Audio User group mailing list.

A flash bracket is one of those accessories, I have always known about, but never really needed. Frankly, most of my shooting is horizontal, and the biggest advantage of using one of these things, is when you’re shooting verticals with flash, to avoid the ugly shadows behind your subject, particularly when subjects are close to walls or other backdrops.

I might have been content to not think about this accessory, but when I took my bike for a ride here in New York City, there happened to be a film premiere as part of the Tribecca Film Festival down the street, so I slowed down to see what was going on. There was a lull in the action, and there were about 30 photographers all standing around behind the cordon, waiting for someone famous to take pictures of.

I don’t like generalizing as a rule, but it’s safe to say that every single one of the paparazzi had a flash bracket, except for one who told me he forgot his. For these shooters, it’s essential. As one bored photographer told me, he’s “shooting vertical all the time”.

Magazines want verticals, it’s that simple and you give the client that’s paying you what they want. “When was the last time you saw a horizontal shot in a magazine”, he quipped.

This is my horizontal paparazzi shot of actress Clare Danes. Taken with a pocket Fuji F10, I turned off the flash, to get this striking ambient light effect, unlike the boring flash shot below. Or maybe the flash didn’t fire and I got lucky; I’ll never tell.

Frankly, I never paid it much attention, but I guess magazines in the market for photos of celebrities want verticals, and a quick look around at some celebrity photo sites, confirmed what he said.

Why the flash bracket? When you shoot verticals, with on camera shoe-mounted flashes you get an ugly shadow cast behind the subject, particularly noticeable on red carpets, with advertising banners close behind.

You can also get harsh shadows in the subject’s eye sockets or under the chin, which is also not so flattering. But you don’t need one when you’re using flash as fill in bright light situations, or when using bounce flash.

Wedding photographers have long used these flip brackets that allow them to flip the flash on a pivoting arm so it is always over the lens and not beside it. Since off camera cords are available for most TTL flashes, maintaining TTL flash metering with flash on bracket is not a problem.

And even when shooting horizontals, the higher flash position these brackets give you can minimize red eyes and add a bit of “three-dimensionality” to your photograph, as well as keeping shadows out of site. I like the Gary Fong diffuser, which gives a really nice, soft quality of light; which many of the “beautiful people” don’t really need.

Now I admit, I haven’t used a bracket in years, but I’m looking at the Stroboframe Cameraflip, because of it’s small size, which folds neatly into a camera bag.

But from all I know and have read, you’re best to go down to the store and try out different brackets to see what feels best for you, and for the camera you are using. (some brackets won’t work on bigger, medium format cameras or when bulky motordrives or external batteries are attached)

Next Post: Aperture As Teacher

If you’re new to Aperture consider attending a two day workshop at the Santa Fe Workshops June 1 and 2, or Aug 31 and Sept 1. I’ll be teaching two Aperture workshops in this beautifully equipped facility in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The workshops are geared towards helping you take full advantage of the many features in Aperture to make your workflow as efficient, productive, and even fun as possible. We’ll not only cover the basics, but you’ll also learn tricks and tips to make Aperture even easier to use. For example, when using the Spot and Patch tool, rather than having to drag the radius slider to size the tool appropriately, you can drag two fingers along the mouse pad on a laptop, or use the scroll wheel on a mouse. For more information or to register see www.sfworkshop.com/digital/index.cfm or call the Santa Fe Workshops at (505) 983-1400

Lightroom has plenty of hidden contextual menus, and like Easter eggs, they are fun to find. To reveal one of these menus simply place your cursor over a thumbnail, panel pane, or work area and right-click. On a Mac hold the Ctrl key when you click. A menu with very useful options will immediately pop-up on the screen, ready to help stream-line your workflow, or just make your work environment more friendly.

Here are a few of my favorite contextual menu options:

Last week, I showed you how to use Smart Filters, a new feature in Photoshop CS3, to apply non-destructive filter effects to an image. Well, just as you can use layer masks with adjustment layers, you can apply masks to your smart filter effects. I’ll show you what I mean as we apply a Radial Blur effect to last week’s Autumn Blonde image, and along the way, I can show you a few other cool additions to CS3.

Our Smart Filter mask will render Joey Nelson’s “Autumn Blonde” utterly radiant. (Image courtesy of iStockphoto)

Picking what tools to use in the digital darkroom is hard. For a while, it was difficult because all the tools were apparently built by people who weren’t talking to photographers. For a long time, we all suffered through using a combination of Photoshop and the Finder (or Explorer on Windows). Adobe Lightroom and Apple’s Aperture changed that and we now have a pair of tools that have been built with a wealth of input from photographers and which promise to continue to evolve with our input. But, having two good tools in the form of Aperture and Lightroom means that there’s another choice to be made.

For the last year or so, I’ve been working hard to avoid making this choice. I kept my master library in Aperture and using it for most tasks. For those tasks where the beta versions of Lightroom were noticeably better, notably printing, I would take that image into Lightroom and print it. However, the master was still back in Aperture. That’s where all of my organization happened. I continued this pattern throughout the betas for Lightroom as I wasn’t ready to commit my world to it. My workflow with Aperture was working well and for the kind of work I do, I can’t have my workflow let me down.

To put things into perspective since this is my first post on the Inside Lightroom blog, I should introduce myself a bit and note that the bulk of my photography—at least in number of shots taken—centers around event photography. For the last two and some years, I’ve been the photographer for all of the O’Reilly conferences and have shot events for Apple and other clients. When I shoot an event, I stress all the tools I use to the max. For example, at the recent Web 2.0 Expo, my shooting partner and I shot over 6000 frames, pushing well over 50GB of data, in 4 days. Then, we had to edit that down to less than 1000 to deliver to my clients. I’m not easy on my software, and I’m always looking for a better way to get things done.

In retrospect, it was so easy.

Last week I got a mysterious e-mail saying,

Our host just had a birthday (perhaps a BIG one, I’m not sure) and was “lamenting” according to [his wife], that there was no celebration. She asked us not to bring gifts, but Chris and I have an idea: when we all sing him the surprise “Happy Birthday” serenade, we will accompany ourselves on strange instruments. (Comb & wax paper? Wooden spoon and pot lid? Grampa’s old ukelele? Castanets?) If you play a real instrument, you can bring that, but a toy or joke one is OK, too. Chris has promised a prize to the person with the strangest (musical) instrument.

Looking around my studio, my eyes lit on the Music Pole I’d never gotten around to reviewing—mostly because I’d never gotten around to learning how to play it. The Music Pole is a MIDI controller that supposedly makes it easy to play in any key; each time you rotate it, your fingers align with the notes for the chromatically adjacent scale. No matter what key the rest of the band started out in, I could then match up quickly, I thought.

The Music Pole transmits MIDI notes when you touch its sensors with conductive fabric rings called “Thumbletz.”

When Aperture v1.5 was released I eagerly embraced a workflow using Referenced files. After all, I enjoy the freedom to periodically open images in other programs without exporting them, and being able to store images offline was a necessity given the volume of pictures I shoot. Having Aperture reference the files and store previews within the Library seemed ideal. I chose to create previews that were large enough that I could use them to create presentations using Keynote. while on the road. What a wonderful boost to productivity!

And then all of a sudden I encountered a wall. I needed to email one of those offline referenced files to a client. Emailing online or managed files from Aperture couldn’t be easier - you simply select the image(s) and click the mail icon. But Aperture stubbornly refuses to allow you to create an email using the previews of offline images by clicking the Mail icon

I finally found a way to send an email of an offline image. Rather than clicking the mail icon, first create a new email. Then in Aperture click on the image thumbnail and drag it into the email. If you don’t care about the size of the image in your email, you can simply send it as is. However since I create large previews , these images are larger than what I like to send in an email.

To resize the images , Ctrl + click (right click) on the image in the email to open it in Photoshop. Resize it there and save it. Then attach that version to a new email. (Delete the original email with the larger version.) Admittedly this is a little awkward, but it does work. That way if you’re on the road and a client asks to see a picture that’s in your Aperture library, you can send it immediately and not have to carry your entire backup drive with you.

One of the reasons I fell in love with Lightroom when I first saw it was because it seemed to have so much promise when it came to keeping my photographs organized and easy-to-retreive when I needed them. Now that I’ve been working with the program for some months, I’m just beginning to appreciate how really powerful it is in that regard. There are lots of ways to add keywords to your photos. Then there are at least four ways to use both the camera’s recorded Metadata and Keywords to find pictures, and several of these methods have variations. So this week, I’m going to take you through the ways to do the keywording efficiently. Next week, I’ll take you through the ways to use keywords efficiently.

For openers, you can enter keywords right in the Import dialog so they canl be applied to all the photos in the shoot. Even if you have a few photos that need added keywords–or even totally different keywords–it’s a good idea to add the keywords that will apply to the majority of the photos being imported. Then it becomes very speedy to simply select the few photos that don’t fit the keywords and simply erase the import keywords and replace them with the correct keywords. Simply select the photos for which the keywords didn’t fit while the Keywords Panel is open. Each time you select a photo, the keywords that have already been assigned will appear. These words are already highlighted, so if you want to delete them all, just hit the Delete key.

Hello everyone! I’m new here, and I’ve decided to introduce myself by asking a pretty divisive question: How much does fancy gear really help you?

I’m a professional podcaster with over a hundred episodes of multiple podcasts under my belt, and I’m now a podcast consultant who has helped tweak or launch a number of high-profile podcasts. In both of these capacities, I’ve gotten rave reviews of my shows’ sound quality from untrained listeners and professional radio producers alike. To do all of that, I must have some pretty snazzy gear, right?

Nope!

To read what I use and why I recommend sticking to the basics, click “Continue Reading” below.

While traveling to Washington DC last week I ran into a photographer friend of mine whom I hadn’t seen in quite a while. After catching up we started talking about some of the writing I had been doing for Inside Aperture. Apparently he had been keeping up with my posts and articles but had been reluctant to try the software out for himself.

We talked about some of the great features in Aperture. I even opened up Aperture on my laptop and showed him how you can easily make Web Albums, organize your photos, and rapidly add all sorts of keywords and metadata with just a few clicks of the mouse.

I have to admit, he was mildly impressed. He really thought it was a nicely design program, but coming from years of using Photoshop and PhotoMechanic to edit and organize his images, he was, admittedly stuck in his ways.

So, I asked him what he knew about non-destructive image editing. He looked at me curiously. It was sort of one of those, “yeah, what’s that all about” moments. So I started to try and explain. I began by asking him to lay out for me his workflow from end to end. The bar napkins started to fly.

“Well” he said. “When I shoot in JPEG mode, it is pretty simple. I just import the images with PhotoMechanic, tag the best shots and open them in Photoshop. I then make my adjustments and save them each as a new file on my Desktop. This way I still have the original file. But, when I shoot RAW (which I am doing more and more these days) the process is a little more complex.”

He continued, explaining to me one of the most incredibly tedious workflows I have ever heard of. So, here it is. I will do my best to keep a running tab on the number of files, megabytes and software used in the process.

First, he starts out by importing all of his Nikon RAW files using PhotoMechanic. The files are copied to two separate locations so that there is an untouched backup copy on a separate disk at all times. PhotoMechanic makes nice work of this task with it’s Ingest Disks function. So far, he has two RAW files from his D100 at 10 megabytes each.

Next, after making his selects in PhotoMechnic he opens the RAW images in Nikon Capture and begins to make adjustments to contrast and exposure using Nikon’s RAW conversion software. Each image is saved as a new “adjusted” RAW file. So for each select he now has three files, totaling about 30 megabytes.

Once he has saved his RAW files, he then converts each one to an uncompressed 16-bitt TIFF file weighing in at about 17 megabytes a piece. He opens this file in Photoshop CS2 where he adds a number of layers for dodging and burning, dust removal and other fine adjustments. Once he is finished, he saves the files as a PSD document which can jump to nearly 100 megabytes depending on how much work he does. So far he is now up to around 150 megabytes per select, and five files.

He showed me how he organizes all these files on his hard drive using the Finder and a system of cleverly named folder so he can keep tabs on them. I was actually very impressed with the system he had thought up and then I realized he hadn’t made any files for output yet.

He went on to explain that he normally makes a finalized TIFF file form the layered PSD file, and from this he makes all of his output files, such as smaller JPEGs for the web, or cropped TIFF versions for print. I asked his how he came up with this system, and he explained to me that when he started shooting RAW, he sat down and tried to come up with a system that would give him the best quality and maintain a good deal of redundancy.

He told me that although each select can run him about 150 megabytes or more, and involves more than five individual files, he thought it was ultimately necessary in order to realize the power of his RAW files. Otherwise, he explained, he may as well just keep shooting Jpegs, starting from the original every time he wanted to make a new version.

So, I asked him what he would think about a single software application where he would be able to do everything he just showed me using just one Master RAW file and one backup copy. He was pretty excited.

Versions in Aperture and the corresponding Master in the Library Package

I spent the next ten minutes or so showing off my Aperture library. I pointed to a Project containing a shoot with over 300 RAW files, and I used it to explain to him what non-destructive image editing was. He was astonished to find out that even though I had made five or six different Versions from a handful of selected Masters, that in fact the Master RAW file itself had never been touched, and as well, each version was simply a set of instructions and not another image file. He was also impressed with how seamlessly I could send a version of any image to Photoshop and have it come back, stacked with its Master and neatly organized with the rest of the shoot. I could see the wheels starting to turn in his eyes. He was amazed by how easy it was to find images, and some of the more powerful features of Aperture that I have come to take for granted.

By the end of his tour of Aperture on my laptop, he was amazed. I showed him on the Apple website how he could download a trial version. He said he would download it as soon as he got home.

We parted ways and I thought about how Aperture has really improved my life as a photographer. I thought about how backbreaking the amount of tedious work can be for someone who shoots RAW and has to go through all those hoops, just to get an image out the door. I have been using Aperture since it was first released, and I never looked back. The whole experience has really made me wonder how many photographers are still out there using the Finder to organize their massive photo libraries. It’s sort of a scary thought!

Here is a breakdown of his current RAW workflow compared to my Aperture RAW workflow.

His Files:

• 2 Copies of the original RAW file - 10 meg each.
• 1 or more adjusted RAW files for each select - 10 meg each.
• 1 Uncompressed 16 bitt TIFF conversion from the adjusted RAW - 17 meg each.
• 1 Layered PSD file from the TIFF - 50 to 150 meg each depending on layers.
• 1 Flattened 16 bitt TIFF from the PSD - 17 meg each
• As many output JPEGs, TIFFs, PNGs or anything else you can think of from the TIFF. These are kept on disk so that he doesn’t have to make them over and over from the TIFF file in Photoshop.

His Software:

• Camerabits PhotoMechanic
• Nikon Capture
• Adobe Photoshop CS2
• Finder
• iView Media Pro
• Toast

My Files:

• The Master RAW file - Backed up with Aperture’s Vault to one or more external hard drives. I also use Crashplan to backup all of my files online to multiple locations around the country.
• PSD files - On occasion I will need to make a layered PSD file for fine tuning an image. This also gets backed up via the Vault and Crashplan.
• Output files. Whenever I need to output a file I just do it from within Aperture using a preset. I usually don’t keep these.

My Software:

• Apple Aperture
• Adobe Photoshop CS3
• Crashplan

The man of the hour in my book at the moment (and actually for a number of years now) is my friend and colleague Terry McBride, Founder & CEO of Nettwerk– an artist-centric, forward thinking artist management firm that also houses a label and a publishing arm for its artists.

Terry is an artist advocate; we are cut from the same cloth. He has run Nettwerk now for over 20 years, and he’s far and away the most artist-friendly guy in the industry. Some of the top artists who have chosen to be on his label over the years include: Coldplay, Sarah McLachlan, Barenaked Ladies, Dido & Avril Lavigne (among many others) — most of whom remain staunchly loyal to him. The reason is that Terry is charting a new course for artists in the digital age. I first met Terry about 12 years ago when I was driving music efforts at Apple — and he came to me about sponsoring this new concert series called Lilith Fair that he and Sarah were launching; to my chagrin, Apple passed on the opportunity and of course Lilith was a huge success in the three (or so) years that it took place. He was ahead even then.

With regard to Avril, he’s launched a Manga series of animated cartoon stories that speak directly to the core of her audience (these will live online and in book form). Terry also believes strongly in honoring the cultures where an artist has big audiences. For example, under Terry’s direction, Avril has also recorded several of her songs in multiiple languages geared towards her fans in the countries where she’s strongest. Avril’s #1 in the charts this week — so he must be doing something right. He’s also taken on the industry — in particular the RIAA (lobbying group for the major record labels in DC). The RIAA have been suing fans who are caught downloading songs illegally, including underage kids. When one of Avril’s fans was sued accordingly, Terry took a stand agains the RIAA & took on the kids’ legal bills.

Terry is also a leading advocate for ‘collapsed copyrights’ where artists retain control over their recorded masters, their publishing & domain names — thereby allowing them full control (and the majority of their revenues) with a wide range of licensing opportunities. This makes the job of a major film studio music supervisor much easier, for example — in the case of their desire to use a Barenaked Ladies track — when they can just go directly to the artist and get the deal done (one-stop-shopping). And of course the artist pockets the majority of the proceeds in turn.

There are many other such examples of where Terry is paving the way for artists to retain control over their assets and revenue streams. and connect in a much more meaningful, long-lasting way with their core audiences. I couldn’t be more in synch with his philosophies, and artists & the industry at large are also starting to sit up and take notice; Terry’s been the subject of countless articles and interviews in the past year & has been actively sought out as a Keynote speaker at a myriad of industry conferences. If you want to know where things are headed for artists in digital music moving forward, listen to what the man says.