O'Reilly Digital Media

Christopher Penn from the Financial Aid Podcast has just released a tool to easily generate an iPhone-compatible page for your podcast. It is called the Financial Aid Podcast Podcaster iPhone Kit, and it is a free download.

from Chris’s site:

This simple little web page parses your podcast’s XML feed and slaps it into a nice page designed to render well in Safari, which is the browser on which the iPhone operates. It also grabs your feed’s image and displays it as the icons.

I installed it in only a couple of minutes, giving me this iPhone-compatible version of Boston Behind the Scenes.

You can get the file here: [http://www.financialaidpodcast.com/iphone.zip], make a few simple modifications, then upload it to your webserver.

Read on for more specific instructions.

I’ve relaunched my Digital Night website. It’s greatly expanded, with tips, techniques, and geographic sections. This site is an archive of my stories about photographing the landscapes of the night. The geographic sections are for Point Reyes, Yosemite, San Francisco, and Marin Headlands.

Check it out: www.digitalnight.us.

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

I checked out AUPN’s event at the Apple SoHo Store last night. Aperture trainer Jenny McCormack gave a presentation on Aperture for the videographer, focusing on an introduction to Aperture and highlighting the similarities between it and Connected Flow’s Aperture to Final Cut Pro plug-in to send her high-res JPEGs directly into FCP. She also discussed Aperture to Keynote workflow using the iLife/iWork Media Browser.

And check out this great tip I picked up: in Keynote you can drag a group of thumbnails from the Media Browser to an empty area in Keynote’s Slides panel; Keynote will create a new slide for each photo. This is a super-easy way to create a photo slideshow in Keynote.

Dropping thumbnails from the Media Browser to Keynote

I also picked up a good suggestion for iPhoto users who are moving to Aperture: many beginners find Aperture’s interface to be a little overwhelming on first launch. So if you’re ever working with a beginner, try having him or her hide the Viewer and Control Bar to make Aperture look more like iPhoto.

Aperture with the Viewer and Control Bar hidden

A standard iPhoto window

I have as usual been surfing the digital photography forums for a suitable topic for this week’s blog posting and the winner by a clear mile is the new Clarity adjustment in Lightroom 1.1. As an easy image enhancement addition to the Saturation and Vibrance adjustments, it seems to suit a lot of photographers (quick photo fix) needs.

We have of course already seen the Clarity adjustment in the recently released Adobe Camera Raw update (ACR 4.1), but it is still the talk of the web on a number of digital photography forums. Coming a close second are the the new four slider sharpening controls which now resemble the Unsharp Mask (USM) and Smartsharpen Filter controls in Photoshop CS3.

Clarity is described variously as a local contrast enhancement filter and a way to add more depth and (apparent) sharpness to details in an image. It also seems to reduce that hazy look that you often get when shooting a glass-paneled building and sharpens objects behind the glass. The Adobe Help files describe Clarity as being a tool that adds “extra punch”.

The best way to see what it does is obviously to run a problem photograph through it and see what happens. I will use a (less than perfect) picture of the Bangkok Airport control tower, which I need to use in a travel website project.

Image 1 - the full image without any Clarity adjustment.

Image 2 - 1:1 image without Clarity adjustment.

Image 3 - 1:1 image with full 100 value Clarity adjustment.

Image 4 - 1:1 image with 100 value Clarity adjustment, plus noise reduction and some sharpening applied.

Image 5 - the full image with all adjustments applied.

From the Adobe Lightroom 1.1 ReadMe file.

Clarity: New Control available in the Basic panel. Clarity adds depth to an image by increasing local contrast. When using this setting, it is best to zoom in to 100% or greater. To maximize the effect, increase the setting until you see halos near the edge details of the image, and then reduce the setting slightly.

For photographers with large libraries, one of the trickiest things about contemplating a move to Aperture is simply figuring out how to handle the importing of all of your legacy files. If you’re a raw shooter who’s making the move from Adobe Camera Raw, here’s one approach to streamlining your migration.

When I moved my archive into Aperture, I took the opportunity as a chance to do some housecleaning. I decided that I would not import all of my images, only the ones that, over time had proven to be the images that I needed. In other words, I decided to import just the pick images from long-ago shots, and opted to forego lots of variants and alternates that I didn’t really need.

Much of this sorting had to be done by hand, by picking out the JPEGs, PSDs, and TIFF files that I wanted to take into my Aperture library. But with my raw files, I found a way to automate the process. I have Camera Raw configured to store edits in XMP sidecar files rather than in the internal Camera Raw database. This means that any raw image that I’ve performed edits on has a little text file sitting alongside it, with the same filename as the raw image, but with a .xmp extension. So, it’s fairly safe to assume that the raw files with XMP extensions are the ones that I’m interested in, and the rest of my raw files can be ignored.

So, I created an Automator Action that automatically filters a folder for XMP files, and then imports those raw images into Aperture. You can download my Pass Only Files With XMP action from here. That address also includes full instructions on how to install and use it. If you’re unfamilliar with Automator, then check out this article.

It’s important to realize that, though this approach imports only your edited raw files, it doesn’t import the edits themselves. Aperture has no way to import XMP metadata, so all you’ll be getting is the original raw file. In my case though, the processed raw files were also saved in the same folder as the original raws, usually in PSD or TIFF format. It’s easy enough to isolate those files for import into Aperture. You can either sort the Finder window by Kind and then grab all the TIFFs and PSDs, or you can build an Automator workflow that searches a folder and automatically imports TIFFs and PSDs.

This isn’t a one-stop solution that imports everything, but it can ease the process.

Who should see this hugely entertaining and educational web video ASAP:

• Everyone who likes sound
• Everyone who likes fire
• Every high school science teacher in the world

Who should avoid it (or at least keep quiet about it afterwards):

• Stoners

Thanks to Brendan Stead of Harman and Project Bar-B-Q for the tip.

Mark and I went back out to Arch Rock last night. It was a little earlier than my last hike out there, so I was able to work my way down the little canyon and across a couple of rock faces to the beach, where I photographed the arch in Arch Rock in the gathering dusk. Of course, I also photographed the moon on the beach, and other aspects of this grand scene. On our way back through the long foot-pounding miles of the tunnel of a trail under the dark trees we talked about RAW captures, white balance, and landscape photography.

View this image larger.

It’s well known that one of RAW capture’s great virtues is the ability to correct exposure in post-processing. Within each RAW capture there’s a theoretical eight f-stop range of possible exposures that can be processed out of the raw data (if you excuse the pun). Processing at the limits of this range does introduce problems, such as excess noise, into an image. But still, the potential exposures inherent within each RAW capture do give opportunities for correcting poor initial exposures, and for extending the dynamic range of images. An example of extended dynamic range means to be able to see detail in shadow areas that would normally be black in an image exposed for bright sunshine.

That said, it’s best practice not to presume on the kindness of RAW. You should expose each image in-camera as accurately as possible. This avoids potential problems and gives you more options when you do post-process the RAW.

Even when a photo of mine was exposed properly in the first place, like the image above at ISO 100, 2.5 seconds, and f/4, I almost always end up combining from three to five different versions of the RAW capture using Photoshop layers, masking, and layer blending modes. The 2.5 second time exposure accounts for the soft effect in the clouds and water.

White balance refers to the color temperature of the light used in a photograph. It is measured in Kelvin degrees. The photograph above is lit by a combination of ambient sunlight (generally 5200 degrees Kelvin, but a little warmer in the photo of the arch because the sun was setting, so maybe 5800 degrees), and moonlight (roughly 4300 degrees Kelvin).

You can measure the color temperature of light under controlled circumstances, for example, in a photography studio. If you’ve measured the temperature of the light, you can dial it into your camera. In theory, this leads to an accurate color rendition of your subject.

As a practical matter, it is pretty impossible to measure light temperature in field conditions like I encountered in the photo of the arch. Not only did I have to do a bit of the mountain goat thing to even get in range for the photo, I also had only a short amount of time to make my exposure before I lost the light.

So the best practice is to leave White Balance set to Automatic. This means that your camera will make some attempt to measure the light temperature, and associate this reading with the image. But associating a White Balance measurement with a RAW image doesn’t actually change the image data itself because the White Balance data is simply set in a tagged text file associated with the RAW file. You can change the White Balance to any Kelvin number you think is appropriate when you convert the image in post-processing. You can do this using a slider, and visually inspect the impact of the change on your photo.

If you really want to get tricky, you can process different versions of a single RAW capture using different white balances. For example, I processed the water within the arch at 4300 degrees Kelvin (moonlight) and the clouds at 5800 degrees Kelvin (sunset).

As with differing exposure values from a single RAW capture, versions from a single RAW capture that use different white balances are combined in Photoshop as layers using masking and your choice of blending mode.

First, lest I be left out, let me tell you that Lightroom 1.1 is available as a free download to anyone who already has a copy of Lightroom 1.0. More importantly, you’ll be very glad you downloaded and installed it. There are lots of very helpful new features, but most of all, the app is really fast. You hardly waste any time at all watching the image come to full resolution when you magnify to 100% and the thumbnails load significantly faster. I still have considerable studying to do to see what all the new features do. Most importantly, they don’t make the interface you’re used to seem unfamiliar or awkward.

The Lightroom 1.1 distraction aside, back to the topic and hand: One guy’s scheme for ranking and grouping images. Although the only rule that really counts in art and photography is that rules are made to be broken (otherwise, everyone’s pix would be the same), most of the time it pays to pay attention to the rules. Otherwise, you’re a lot more likely to just make a mess. So here are some suggestions I’ve come up with. I print these out and follow them each time I download a card. If I find something that doesn’t work or something that works better, I make a note, and test it for a while. When I feel pretty secure that the change is going to work most of the time, I type it permanently into the list, re-print it, and go on from there.

Coming from the Photoshop world, “Save As” is a familiar term. It often translated into a desk stacked high with hard drives, and if you were like me, multiple, identical versions of photos that made organizing and finding them a slight to full-fledged nightmare.

Those days are gone for me, with Aperture. As you know doubt know by now, Aperture lets you make as many versions of a master raw file as you would like, but a version is only a recipe for making the final image when exported, and it takes up very little space.

There are times when I like the idea of Save As. When I’m working on an image, and I’m happy with the result to that point, but I plan on taking my adjustments further. At this stage with Photoshop, I might have used Save As to create a new version, and pick up where I left off when I come back to the image.

With Aperture, you can do this too. Just create a duplicate version of the image, which allows you to continue from the point you left off. Any other version you have including the master of course, stay just as pristine as when you left them. This can work well with different crops for example, allowing you to compare and ultimately decide which looks best. Or when you’re finessing a black and white version of the image, you might want to keep a black and white version to work on.

I won’t make a new version very often, but when making adjustments which significantly change the original, as with crops or conversions to black and white, I find it helps to create a new version.

If you want to try something new, the Duplicate From Master icon will let you make a new version from the “un-fooled-around-with” master file, letting you start your adjustments from the beginning again. Of course with Aperture, every version can be brought back to previous stages in the adjustments, but versioning sometimes lets you see things more clearly.

Computers are like pets or infants in some ways. When something is wrong they rarely calmly deliver a message that explicitly states what’s wrong. You know, something on the order of, “Attention your hard drive in Bay C is going bad, please replace immediately,” or “This computer is facing imminent self destruction due to a bad motherboard, make certain everything is backed up and take the computer to an Apple certified repair center at once.” Instead just like pets or infants, they behave in odd ways. It’s up to you to figure out what’s going on, if it’s important, and how to remedy it.

For example, late last year I struggled with what initially, but incorrectly, seemed to be a problem with Aperture. Every time I tried to access my RAID system, where many referenced files were located, as well as others that predated Aperture and had not yet been imported, Aperture worked as expected for about 10 minutes. And then suddenly it lost the directory of the RAID system and all my files appeared as if they were in one mass jumble rather than organized into folders. This happened repeatedly. Interestingly Bridge did not have the same trouble, which led to my thinking that something was amiss with Aperture. Then one day the alarm went off in one of the bays on the RAID system. That drive was corrupt. (Now that’s the kind of warning I understand!) As soon as I replaced that drive, Aperture has been fine. Somehow Aperture was more sensitive to whatever was starting to go wrong in that drive than Bridge was. Unfortunately Aperture couldn’t tell me that in ways that I could comprehend.

I readily admit that Murphy tends to live with me. A couple weeks ago I blogged about compact flash card failures and tracing that problem back to a problem with the USB ports on my computer. I thought that really wasn’t too major a problem since I could use the ports on my monitors instead. What I didn’t realize was that was the computer’s attempt at telling me something major was wrong internally. The following week one application after another failed to open. Aperture actually held on longer than most, but then one day it gave a warning that the library was corrupt and would need to be rebuilt. Fortunately at the first sign of additional trouble I made certain to back up everything. (I admit for whatever stupid reasons I am lax about regularly backing up my system. I can’t wait for Time Machine!) And I got lucky that whatever is progressively malfunctioning within that computer allowed me to copy my files correctly before the machine totally dies. I had been planning to upgrade to a MacPro, and that hastened the decision. Now I’m eagerly awaiting its arrival.

The point of telling you all this is just to get you thinking, regularly backing up all your files including the Vault in Aperture, and letting you know that sometimes really odd computer behavior is a symptom of a problem that may not be immediately apparent. Forgive me, those of you who are computer gurus. I’m a photographer and I’m good with software, but I am by no means a computer expert. I have no doubt that some of you readers who are far more computer savvy than I am would easily recognize these malfunctions. But for those of you for whom the computer is a tool, and your expertise is in photography (or elsewhere) perhaps knowing my experiences may help you one day.

You are in for a treat! Lightroom 1.1 is available today and I think you’ll be amazed at what Adobe has done in the short time since the original release of 1.0. I still can’t believe they are calling it a 1.1 release. When I first saw the list of new features and improvements I envisioned a 1.5 naming or even 2.0.

My favorite thing about the release of Lightroom 1.1? We’re going to press this week with Mikkel’s beautiful book, Photoshop Lightroom Adventure. And we’re doing so knowing that it will be the most up-to-date Lightroom book out there. Over the past few months, Mikkel has been painstakingly updating the manuscript for the changes anticipated in version 1.1, a monumental task. Not only did he have to diligently monitor and document all the great new features that were being added for LR 1.1, but he had to reshoot most of the nearly one thousand images in the book to reflect the new interface.

Today, one of my last official acts as the book’s editor was to get the final changes made to the screen shot of the Develop module that appears on the book’s back cover. There I was, up in the O’Reilly design department (staffed by patient, hardworking, and understanding professionals, by the way), explaining that before it went out the door, “We absolutely have to change this rubber stamp icon right here to a spray paint can.” (The “Keyword Stamper” has been changed to the “Painter” in 1.1)

In the end, our hard work will pay off (really, even the equally patient, hardworking, and understanding Production team is starting to agree with me; it’s all those gorgeous Iceland photos, combined with Mikkel’s lucid prose, of course, that are bringing them around.) This book is the perfect blend of instruction and inspiration, and it’s great knowing it’s also Lightroom 1.1 compliant.

Adobe’s Pro Photo Evangelist, aka “Mr Lightroom,” George Jardine’s photo graces the cover of Adobe Lightroom Adventure by Mikkel Aaland, coming soon from O’Reilly. Mikkel tells a great story of how this cover came to be.

Apple has scheduled a series of lectures led by some of the best sports photographers in the business. Aperture in Action connects you with these shooters so you can learn how they use Aperture to organize their field-to-studio workflows and manage the thousands of pictures they take every time they go out on a job. They’ll also share their personal tips and tricks for using Aperture.

All attendees will receive a free Aperture Tutorial DVD that demonstrates Aperture’s easy-to-use features. You can sign up today by visiting the Aperture in Action web page.

It’s Christmas in Summer. The iPhone arrives in just a few days, along with Pixar’s new film, Ratatouille. The new Canon 1D Mark III is slowly starting to ship out to people and I was lucky enough to get mine late last week. And then, to top it all off, the 1.1 release of Lightroom is now available. There is a long laundry list of things that are new or fixed in Lightroom 1.1, and you can read up all about them in the Lightroom 1.1 Read Me PDF. All of the changes, however, are in the details. From a wide view, Lightroom looks and acts much as before.

I am planning to construct a one day workshop for young photographers. This workshop, will take place on a small tropical island in the West Indies sometime in July, and will feature myself as a guest speaker. The cost for attendance is free, but you must be shorter than 4 feet to attend.

On my island in the West Indies, there is a really tiny school for the children of students who attend the medical school. After talking with the principal, we hashed out an idea to have a mini workshop for the kids, where I would come in and teach them how to take pictures. The whole idea sounded easy enough at the time, but now I am beginning to worry.

I have taught plenty in my time, but for the most part, my students have been well over the drinking age, and on many occasions, AARP members. So, I am trying to figure out how to best approach this idea and come up with an afternoon’s worth of fun with cameras.

Most of the kids will have their parent’s point-and-shoot digital cameras. So, equipment probably won’t be too big of an issue. However, the cameras will probably run the gamut in terms of quality, make and model. As long as they can capture images, and connect to my laptop, they should be just fine.

I was thinking that in the beginning of the session we would start by taking a look at some classic, or stock photos that show off some very simple composition ideas. Later, once they were bored with the slides, we could start playing with the cameras and I would just make sure everyone knew how to press the shutter button and review their photos on the LCD.

Then we would all go out (with a small team of teachers to corral everyone) and we would take pictures. The assignment would be simple, but to the point, and each kid would have to go out and make a fixed number of images.

After a brief snack break and maybe a short nap, I will have downloaded each kid’s shoot into Aperture, making a new album for each student. Then we would go through each kid’s take on the overhead and try and edit down to their favorite pics by show of hands, or yells, or spit wads.

One thing I am thinking of throwing in the mix is Aperture’s light-table feature. During the slideshow portion of the show, once we have a first-cut edit, and if the kids haven’t dozed off, I will try and use the light-table to make a quick selection of the best shots from the day (one from each kid of course), and if all goes well, I will have one of the teachers print the light-table out as a poster for the classroom.

Okay, this is as far as my plan has developed. I have to say, I am a little nervous about the whole thing. I have been told to show no fear, but this could get out of control. I am sure there will be a few “pros” in the class who will argue my star rating methods, and knock me down when I start to talk about RAW vs. Jpeg, and I am also curious to see if any natural artists arise from the pack.

As I am fairly new to the concept of molding small children into the likes of Diane Arbus and Alfred Stieglitz, I am posting this as a call for advice. Please, if you have any words of wisdom for a small photo workshop with a pack of hungry elementary schoolers, let me know ASAP!

Once we finish the class, I plan to make a quick web gallery of the kids’ favorite pics, and any “behind the scenes” shots I take during the day. This way the kids and their parents will be able to share the day of fun and photography with their friends and families back home in the states. Of course I am going to use Aperture to produce the gallery, but I just wish there was a gallery template that looked a little “less professional!”

Photographers often ask me how to get the right exposure with night landscapes. It’s a tricky topic. My experience is that the light meter in my dSLR is pretty much worthless for anything that is dark enough to need an exposure of longer than about 15 seconds at ISO 100. This can be OK for night cityscapes, which typically come in at between 15-30 seconds at ISO 100. But it does mean that the internal light meter is useless in darker landscape situations.

Once exposure times get beyond this city night range, I switch to manual exposure mode, and use the feedback from the camera’s LCD to see how I am doing. The problem with this is that you can’t always tell with night exposures from the LCD whether you’ve exposed properly, or whether you got anything at all. Also, it can be very hard to switch between a bright LCD panel and the almost total darkness of the true night landscape. You want to get your eyes accustomed to the darkness, and checking out the LCD breaks this concentration.

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

So if the camera’s metering is no help, and the LCD review only partially useful, what gives? The answers tend to be trial and error and experience, but there are some tricks that help.

First, you want to start exposing before it gets completely dark. This gives you a feeling for where the light is trending as the night deepens.

Next, consider how long an exposure you want to make. The difference between longer and shorter exposures at night tends to be the impact on lights in motion (think of stars). For example, an exposure in the 15-30 minute range will render attractive curved star trails, while an exposure of under 3 minutes duration will mostly render stars as pinpoint light sources. (This story has an example of more or less the same scene rendered each way.)

You don’t get many cracks at 15-30 minute exposures, at least not without direct current access. My experience is that a 25 minute exposure, processed for noise reduction, will drain a fully charged battery to nothing (besides taking about 40 minutes in toto).

So the best tactic is to get the exposure right at a high ISO. I find that 3.5 minutes at ISO 640 and f/4 is about right for a night lightscape lit only by starlight. (You might want to do seat-of-the-pants adjustments for light sources other than stars such as the moon, residual sunset, or ambient people light.) If you fire off a shot at ISO 640 and 3.5 minutes and find it is roughly right, you can then calculate the equivalent at ISO 100 by mutliplying the exposure time by 6.4. This gives an exposure time of 22.5 minutes. Plop in a fresh battery, and expose away, with some confidence that your one shot will be close enough (as in the 22.5 minute exposure of Half Dome and Tenaya Canyon with star trails that illustrates this story).

Printing a Light Table is a great way to knock out a quick printed proof of a layout idea or presentation. Just select File > Print Light Table and the contents of the current Light Table will be printed to fit your specific page size. But Light Table printing is also a way of delivering annotated electronic proofs, thanks to Aperture’s ability to output Light Tables as PDFs.

Say, for example, that you want to email a layout idea to an editor. Mock up the layout on a Light Table, then choose File > Print Light Table. In the Print dialog box, click the Save as PDF button and save the file. Aperture saves its PDFs with full-res images, which means that the resulting PDFs can be quite large - much too large for emailing or uploading. So, before you transmit your PDF, you’ll need to crunch it down. You have two options for reducing the size of a PDF.

The easiest way is to open the PDF in Preview, and choose File > Export and then save the file as a JPEG. This will produce a full-res JPEG of the PDF, which will be substantially smaller than the original file. Depending on the JPEG settings you use, you should be able to output files with little discernible quality loss.

One of the great advantages of PDF, though, is the ability to add comments and annotations using standard PDF markup features. Apple’s Preview, Adobe Acrobat, and many other PDF editors provide markup tools, and markups can be a great way to include comments and queries in a Light Table layout. Obviously, if you convert the PDF to a JPEG, you’ll lose those annotations.

So, if you want to create a smaller PDF to preserve any annotations you might have made, you’ll have to turn to Adobe Acrobat, to re-build the PDF with smaller images. Open the Aperture-created PDF in Adobe Acrobat and then choose Advanced > PDF Optimizer. The optimizer provides a number of options for controlling how images are compressed and altered, but simply choosing the defaults should greatly reduce the size of your PDF.

One last note: if you want to print your entire Light Table, you must be certain that no individual images on the Light Table are selected. If you have individual images selected, then they will output separately.

One of the very nice features in Lightroom is the ability to create web galleries directly from RAW images. It is as simple as selecting a group of images in the Library module and clicking on “Web” in the upper right corner of Lightroom. Once in the Web module, there are a plethora of choices for how to layout your web gallery. I really like the fact that one can customize the page with a logo or type face, add an email, even your website and make these hot links so all one has to do is click on the email to contact the photographer or go to your website.

Below is one of the provided FLASH templates by Adobe. There are many templates to choose from and many options to customize the formatting of the web gallery. I won’t go into all of the options as playing with it for just a few minutes will teach you all that you need to know. Isn’t Lightroom intuitive!?

I use the Lightroom web gallery feature when clients need an online lightbox right away. The only downside to the Lightroom web galleries is that no sharpening is applied to the large previews. In Photoshop, when I build web galleries I go through and run actions on the images to size them, convert to sRGB color space and sharpen the jpegs as well so they look really snappy when submitted to clients. In comparison, the Lightroom web galleries are super fancy but the images just look a little soft - not bad - but just a bit softer than I’d prefer. Maybe I’m just a perfectionist but hopefully a sharpening slider will be added to the right hand panel at some point.

If you don’t really like any of the preset web templates that come with Lightroom there are a few others that you can download from Lightroom Galleries, a website online at http://www.lightroomgalleries.com/. These folks have put together some pretty cool new templates for the Web Module in Lightroom. And best of all they are completely free! Here are a few samples…

TTG Simple Viewer Gallery 1.4

Large Flash Slide Strip v1.0

After you download the web template it is easy enough to install it so you can use it in Lightroom. For Mac users place the downloaded folder in Lightroom’s Web Galleries folder:

Users/Username/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Web Galleries/

For PC users place the downloaded folder in Lightroom’s Web Galleries folder like so:

C:\Documents and Settings/username/Application Data/Adobe/Lightroom/Web Galleries

Last but not least, Lightroom smartly incorporated an FTP program within the Web module so you can upload your newly built web gallery from within Lightroom. Setting it up is as easy as typing in your FTP info and clicking upload. And as with all Lightroom operations, once you click upload you can move onto other work, as Lightroom will finish the upload in the background as you work on other images.

That’s it for this week.

Adios, Michael Clark

Loops

OK, so, my relationship with loops is, uh, complex …

on the one hand, they’ve saved my professional ass on many occasions, enabling the delivery of lots of music and sound effects in a minimum amount of space. they have also been crucial to many interactive audio projects i’ve worked on. i love loops so much, my new audio toy is Ableton Live, the most amazing looping sequence editor i’ve ever heard.

on the other hand: holy crap, batman! when i think about the number of hours i’ve spent over the past 15 years listening to the same thing over and over and over, hearing the loop point make that same little glitch again and again and again, moving the pointer in tiny increments, looking for juuuuust the right place … well, that’s why i’ve gone insane! what’s your excuse?

Uh-Huh

and here’s where i stand up, make outrageous statements, and then run away, laughing:
i forsee a day when looping ringtones are a thing of the past, as obsolete as cassette decks and mellotrons.

why? because a ringtone will only ever play for 30 seconds, period. after that, the call goes to voicemail, and the ringtone stops playing. that’s true on all cell phones everywhere, and thank god! (truth is, if you don’t pick up your phone in the first ten seconds, odds are, you ain’t gonna pick it up at all!)

so say goodbye to polyphonic ringtones, looping wav files, even lo-rez 15″ MP3s (a current de-facto standard in the ringtone market). mobile bandwidth and memory is expanding so rapidly, that soon, very soon, thirty seconds of hi-rez digital audio datastream will be well within the download capabilities of modern devices. a 30″ 128kbps stereo MP3 file is only 470k (half that for mono), a spit in the bucket compared to video files and broadband internet streams.

I’ve been playing with the Cepstral speech synthesizer, which offers a unique twist: You can buy individual voices at bargain rates. The standard voices cost just $29.99, and the special-effect ones, which I find have more creative potential, are just $6.99. The synth runs on Windows, OS X, Linux, and even Solaris, and sounds at least as good as the one on this site. (Which you can hear by clicking the Listen link above.)

You can even add effects, including Dizzy Droid, Liquid Love, Old Robot, PVC Pipe, Spacetime Echo, and Split Personality. Here are the $6.99 Damien and Whispery voice reciting a phrase my 5-year-old son suggested, monster house darkness power super monkey fruit pizza:

• Damien Voice (MP3)
• Whisper Voice with Echo (MP3)

Another fun twist is that the downloadable version nags you to pay up by inserting random comments into the speech output. For example, when I rendered a phrase with the drill sergeant-like Shouty voice, it interjected, "This voice is not licensed! Purchase a license!"

This preference pane shows the Cepstral voices I’ve installed. You can adjust their pitch range and add effects, but it would be interesting to be able to adjust the "age" and gender as well.

Cepstral’s FAQ page explains how to render speech output into WAV files using the Terminal, but you can also use a streamripper program such as Audio Hijack.

For more on creative speech synthesis, check out our Digital Media Insider Podcast #3: Singing Computers.

Software Entrepreneur, Aaron Morse, out of Anchorage, Alaska, recently posted in the the Flickr.com Aperture group (which I frequent on a regular basis) a request for the types of plug-ins Aperture users would like to make their life easier. As you might imagine he got a significant list of responses, ranging from a plug-in to “easily export a set of images in pre-determined sizes within separate folders,” to a popular request for a plug-in that would integrate with Noise Ninja, a digital noise reduction application.

Aaron is partner in a Seattle-based company called Übermind which has already developed three plug-ins including the ApertureToGallery plug-in which integrates with Gallery the popular open-source photo album. Their other two plug-ins are ApertureToFTP Pro, which automates the process of uploading photos from Aperture to a remote FTP server, and ApertureToFileMaker, which also automates the process of getting photos from Aperture into the data management and processing software, FileMaker.

And as this article is being written, Ubermind has just announced the release of their newest plug-in, Aperture to Picasa Web Albums, an export plug-in that automates the process of getting photos from Aperture into Google’s Picasa Web Albums.

So in line with the World Wide Developer Conference last week, and the recent post about Aperture Plugged-In 2.0 by Micah Walter, I thought I’d fire off a few questions to Aaron about plug-in development for Aperture.

I thank Aaron for taking the time to respond to my questions.

1. Plug-ins seem to be a great way to expand a software application for particular needs of users. So could you explain the possibilities and limitations of developing plug-ins for Aperture? What are there certain parameters you have to work within?

We think plug-in architectures are a great way to build a software ecosystem. And, plug-ins also allow systems to evolve more quickly and maybe in unanticipated ways. The current plug-in API in Aperture is primarily intended to be used to export images out of the system. This opens a lot of doors, but at the same time it seems that many users would like an enhanced API that could support additional filters and tools within the system. For example, in responses to our inquiry on Flickr, several users requested a plug-in for Noise Ninja to provide enhanced noise reduction. Right now this type of plug-in is not feasible.

2. Most photographers are always looking for ways to make their post-production workflow easier and more efficient. What plug-in ideas do you have for Aperture that you think will help photographers in our post-production process?

It seems like enhanced integrations with printing services, web portals, network storage systems, and transfer systems could all be useful. We are exploring all of these areas.

3. One Flickr.com Aperture Users group member requested an export plug-in that “feeds a Photoshop action,” whereby, as he says, an Aperture user “could click Export to Photoshop Action from Aperture, have Photoshop load the image, process it with the chosen action, and save the result with whatever quality settings to whichever folder.” Do you see this as possible? If so, why or why not.

With an enhanced plug-in API, this sort of thing will absolutely be possible.

4. Can you talk about the plug-ins you’re currently working for Aperture and when they might be released?

Here is a teaser.

We expect to release several plug-ins over the next two quarters.

5. Finally, what changes are you looking forward to in Aperture that will help you more as a developer for the program?

Apple already offers a stellar development environment with Xcode and Cocoa. And we think that the possibilities of the existing API have not been fully explored. An extended plug-in API that is intended for image modification, within the system, would expand the options available to plug-in developers.

I was working on an article for my Lightroom eBook this week on dust spot removal and could not find any images in my Lightroom Library that had any dust spots. Strange as it may seem in the last couple of years of using the Nikon D200, D70 and D40 plus the permanently sealed CP8800, I have not experienced any sensor dust problems. Partly I assume because I tend to use the same lens for an entire day (a short zoom on one camera and a long zoom on another camera) and if I do have to change lenses I am very careful.

So I figured what the heck, why not use the Spot Remove tool to clean up some real world spots I want to remove on a picture. To be honest I did not expect the tool to be very good for this function. To my surprise though it actually worked fairly well. Not as good as the clone and heal tools in Photoshop CS3 but good enough for a slide show or quick presentation.

The Remove Spot tool is actually two tools; one a cloning tool and the other a healing tool. The difference between the cloning and healing tools is that the cloning tool clones the pixels from one area to another and the healing tool uses the pixels surrounding the area being healed to make a better blend. Since the blending process may distort an edge or straight line near the area being healed it is best to use the cloning tool when removing a spot close to an edge and the healing tool the rest of the time.

This is a cropped in section of the original image (zoomed in 1:1) of water barrels on a Thai fishing boat. The water barrels are painted blue and the orange colored plastic is showing through from wear, I will attempt to repair some of the scratches in the blue paint.

The pink circle is the area being healed, the white circle is the area the pixels are being copied from. By dragging on the white circle (with the mouse) it can be moved to any location and a white line will join the two circles, release the mouse and the action will take place. At any time you can click the Clear button to reverse the action. The size of the area affected can be adjusted by dragging on the edge of either circle.

All the circles on this image represent spots that have been removed. Since this is a non-destructive process, the original RAW image is never changed and all edits can be cleared or reset at any time to start over or go for a different result. To change the image permanently it has to be exported in a different format such as jpeg, PSD or tiff.

The same image as the last one above but with the Remove Spots Tool turned off (if I turned the Remove Spots Tool back on, all the circles would return). More work could be done but this version is obviously a lot cleaner than the original image.

One of the primary things that makes shooting and processing in RAW such a revolution is the possibility of making multiple “exposures” of the same frame and the same image and then combining in Photoshop to get an end result that could be created in no other way. In an earlier blog, I talked about the use of this technique for creating HDR images in instances where two or more separate exposures weren’t practical. Then, later, I posted a blog that talked about using Lightroom’s more sophisticated adjustments for correcting a particular problem, such as a blown-out sky or emphasizing the texture of a fabric by adjusting its colors individually with the HSL sliders.

In yet another blog, I talked about the convenience of being able to record or download a variety of Develop Module Presets and then being able to preview those presets simply by dragging the cursor down the names of the presets while watching the monitor. As Michael Clark so eloquently explained in his recent blog on getting the most out of the Lightroom Develop Module, these tools and adjustments are so versatile that you may actually prefer one treatment of an image for its interpretation of one section of the image and another treatment because it’s more flattering to a different area.

Today is a happy day for Aperture users with the following cameras: Panasonic DMC-LX1, Panasonic DMC-LX2, Leica M8, Leica D-LUX 2, Leica D-LUX 3, Fuji S5 Pro, Nikon D40x, and Canon EOS 1D Mk III.

The lastest Mac OS X 10.4.10 update now adds camera RAW support for these cameras. Now that Tiger can decode these RAW files, Aperture and iPhoto can get to work on processing them.

I was happy to finally be able to shoot RAW with my Fuji S5 camera and use Aperture to process the RAW files; though of all the cameras on the market, the Fuji S5 Sensor captures JPEGS with a very wide dynamic range.

This is what Fuji S5 RAW images looked like in Aperture before the update

After the update, I can get to work.

I know many Leica M8 users were discouraged from using Aperture because it didn’t support their camera in RAW format. Welcome.

There are other minor fixes, including one that fixes a bug in which Adobe DNG format files appeared “tinted or distorted”.

You can install the latest update through Software Update under the Apple menu, or as a standalone updater here.

My Dad says he told a group of his friends that he just bought a $25,000 computer. Understand that these friends were a bunch of computer scientists. Everyone thought my father had bought some really macho heavy digital iron. Completing the punch line, my dear father said, describing his Toyota Prius, “and it even came with a steering wheel and four tires.”

Similarly, a digital camera like a dSLR is a special-purpose computer. It happens to come with a lens (most of time) and a scanner (the sensor).

If digital photography is to live up to its full potential as a brave new medium, and not remain stuck as the bastard child of silver-halide photography, then we need to look at capturing differently. Why not start with a scan using a flatbed rather than a scan from a camera?

I created these Iris images (above and below) using an inexpensive desktop scanner.

Related story: Myths, Metaphors, and Digital Photography.

Great news this week for Aperture users who use Google’s Picasa Web Albums for sharing photos online. Übermind has released Aperture to Picasa Web Albums, an Aperture plug-in that enables uploading of photos to Picasa from within the Aperture environment. For me, it’s as though someone at Übermind heard me swearing to myself about how a Picasa plugin was exactly what I needed this week: I just returned from a wedding abroad, where I shot around 500 photos of the festivities. The bride and groom are both Picasa users, so they requested that I upload my photos there, instead of to Flickr, which is my usual choice for online photo sharing. “Picasa?” I said to myself. How many hoops am I going to have to jump through to get my photos uploaded? So the timely release of Übermind’s plugin is a welcome surprise.

I’ve been using Flickr for a number of reasons: in addition to its active online community of photographers, I can’t resist the ease with which I am able to export my photos to Flickr directly from Aperture. Connected Flow’s FlickrExport for Aperture has worked well for me, with its ability to resize your photos for the Web using Version Presets and translate Aperture keyword metadata to Flickr keyword “tags”. It even supports geotagging – incorporating latitude and longitude data with Google Earth integration. Flickr is cheap too: the Pro Account costs only $25/year for unlimited uploads, storage, and bandwidth.

FlickrExport for Aperture

But with a Picasa request from the bride and groom and a brand new plugin installed, I decided to give Picasa a go. And I have to say I’m pretty pleased with the results. The plugin works very similarly to FlickrExport: select some photos or an Album and choose Export->Picasa Web Albums. The plugin dialog validates your Picasa account info and allows you to export to an existing online album or create a new one. Photos can be resized via Version Presets on export and keyword metadata is translated to Picasa tags, however keywording is not customizable: there is no way to disable keyword export, and you can’t manipulate keywords on an individual photo basis.

Aperture to Picasa Web Albums

If you are putting photos online that you intend for your audience to download to their computers, Picasa has a major advantage over Flickr: Picasa allows users to download entire albums with one-click to their Picasa desktop client software. This iPhoto-like software is Windows-only, but if you’re using Aperture then this probably isn’t a concern for you. For my wedding photos however, it’s the perfect solution: use Aperture to process the photos and then export high-resolution JPEGs to Picasa. My Windows-using friends can then download the photos directly to their machines and can even crop, adjust or retouch as they please. And in this case, that’s just fine with me.

FlickrExport for Aperture is free to try for 30 days — the demo is limited to 5 photos per upload. After that it costs £14, or about US$26.50. Aperture to Picasa Web Albums is available as a free beta that will expire on July 15, 2007.