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.

Since January, I’ve been spending most of my time away from home. This means that while I’ve got all the hard drive space I need at home, I’ve been getting a bit creative to keep my images near to me while on the road. If I were just away for a week at a time, it’d be easy, but when I spend 4 or 6 weeks away from home, I need to be able to dig back through my archives and fetch out images when a client comes calling for it. This seems to happen every few weeks at this point, and I’d be loosing out on licensing opportunities if I didn’t keep my library accessible. To accomplish this, I’ve been using a portable 750GB portable hard drive. For a while, this worked out great and I could easily take all of my images everywhere I went.

I like to edit quickly. Heck, a few weeks ago, I posted tips for editing quickly. It even used to bug me that in Aperture, it always took an extra step to move a rejected image from my library to the trash. That quickly stopped bugging me the first time I mis-rated an image and had to un-reject it :) However, I recently realized that my rejected smart album is a great way to improve my photography.

This past weekend, I was editing some shots from a kiteboarding race. I’d been shooting from a jet ski in choppy waters, which is quite hard (have I mentioned how much I love the straighten tool?)! Out of about two hundred shots, I kept about fifty. As I went to delete the rejects, something made me stop for a second. It hit me that the rejected album had a lot of information for me about what I did wrong, conveniently located in one album, and learning from our mistakes is a very useful way to improve.

Instead of deleting my images right away, I flipped on the viewer by pressing “v” and started looking through them. Quickly, I saw that there were two main reasons I was rejecting images, composition and focus. From experience, I’ve (finally) reached the point where exposure isn’t much of an issue, especially because of how flexible RAW files are (and how good Aperture’s shadow/highlight tool is).

When I looked at the images with focus problems, I realized that the main issue was in shots where the riders were further away. There, my camera’s AF system would lock onto the hills behind the riders instead of the riders (I was shooting with an original Canon 1Ds, and its ring of fire isn’t as reliable as on the 1D Mark II. Quick side note: to shoot with the ring of fire, first put your subject under the central AF point and then press the shutter half way. That will cause the AF system to start tracking the object). The next time I’m out shooting, I plan on using my focus points more when the riders are further away, and I’ll make sure to check that they’re aligned with the riders. Even though I was shooting at a fairly small aperture, I just didn’t have enough depth of field to get both the hills and riders, and better focusing would mean fewer rejects.

For the images with composition problems, I’m not sure there’s much I can do aside from just trying to adapt to the rocking jet ski. In the shots where I was able to brace myself against some part of the jet ski, the only shots I deleted were the head and tail shots from a burst. But if I was being lazy and not bracing myself, I’d often end up cutting off part of the kite or having the rider at a weird position in the frame, a position that didn’t even look good after cropping.

Once I finished thinking about my rejects, I did happily delete them, and there’s no evidence that I ever took an out of focus shot this weekend. However, I’m glad that I took a second to flip through my rejects, and I find it great that Aperture lets me flip through them like any other album. Even if you don’t share your own rejects with anyone else, do try to check them out once in a while–it can be a really great way to improve your photography.

I was helping my son make a Father’s Day present this past weekend, printing out images of him and his dad playing baseball. My first instinct was to send them to Costco for printing, but it was 105 degrees outside, so I decided to see what kind of results I could get in the comfort of my air-conditioned home from my simple desktop inkjet photo printer (Canon Pixma iP4300, retail value $99) and Lightroom’s Print module.

To avoid having to venture out in blazing heat, I decided to use some nice matte finish stock I’d purchased from my friendly neighborhood camera store’s Epson-laden shelves. Why wouldn’t that work as well as anything? I mean Epson is a reputable company that makes good paper, right? How different can paper be? And the only Canon paper my neighborhood vendor had was a high gloss number that was just too, well, shiny.

Rookie mistake. The experienced photographers out there are shaking their heads at the obvious flaw in my plan. The rub is that the only ICC profiles that Lightroom’s Color Management pane has for my Canon printer were for specific (Canon) papers. Some part of my brain was convinced I’d be able to guess at the equivalent paper, but with all the variables, how much paper, ink, time and CMH (Color Management Headache) are you going to risk? Answer from my photographer friend was, “Just. Um. No.”

So I braved the heat, walked back over to my friendly neighborhood Epson paper-loving store, bought the one Canon paper they had, set the right profile in Lightroom, and ended up with truly frameable (albeit glossy) prints that had my son beaming on Sunday morning when he presented his dad with the final product.

I’ve changed my philosophy about rating images over the last year. When I first started using Aperture, I would try to precisely evaluate each image and try to give it an appropriate star rating. But I’ve discovered that this approach is both time consuming and isn’t even that accurate. I often find myslef “raising the bar” as I work through the shoot, so my earlier ratings aren’t consistent with those later on.

Father and daughter waiting for Cable Car in San Francisco. Photo by Derrick Story.

I now limit my first pass ratings to 4 stars, 3 stars or none. The bulk of my images receive no rating at all. If they are out and out dogs, I get rid of them. Everything else stays in the library because you never know when you’ll need one of those shots. My favorites get 4 stars, and my “almost favorites” get 3.

After I work a shot in the HUD or Photoshop, and decide that I really like it, I might elevate it to 5 stars, but never on the first pass.

I’ve been a much happier man since I switched to this system. I now breeze through my shoots faster and enjoy the rating process more. If you’re not having fun rating your pictures, it might be time to take a second look at your approach.

Judging brightness and white balance using any RAW processing software can be a tricky situation. In Lightroom’s Develop Module I often use the Lights Out and Lights Dim feature to work with my images especially when I am working with the white balance and brightness sliders.

There are three modes to the Lights out mode in Lightroom - and it works in every Lightroom module as well. The three modes are off, lights dim, and lights out. To toggle through these modes you simply press the “L” key. The lights dim mode is the first to appear (as in the image below). If you press the “L” key again you go to lights out which is completely black save for the image.

Normally, I will go to lights dim on just about every image to judge brightness because it still allows me to see my sliders and controls but forces me to look at the image. And I have found that I am able to set a better brightness level in this mode without all of the distractions of the filmstrip and develop panel.

I also use the lights dim mode for working with images that have tough white balance issues. Normally, as in a previous post, I use custom white balance settings in camera for all of my work. But every once in a while I have to use auto white balance when the light is changing fast or I don’t have time to create an in-camera custom white balance.

And as with most Adobe products, everything is customizable and so is the lights dim mode. To alter the percentage of dimming that the lights dim mode works with you can set exactly what you want in the preferences dialog as in the image below. I tend to leave it at the default because I am generally working on my images in a darkened room, not pitch black but with the lights out.

Using the lights dim and lights out mode along with some other keyboard shortcuts allows one to really fine tune an image quickly. You can find my 5 favorite keyboard shorts cuts in an earlier blog post here:

http://www.oreillynet.com/digitalmedia/blog/2007/05/five_keyboard_shortcuts_to_bli_1.html

A note on calibrating monitors, if you do not have a calibrated monitor then all of this is hogwash and adjusting the brightness or any settings of your images visually is akin to painting on a canvas with a blindfold on - basically you have no idea how you are adjusting your images. For a tutorial on monitor calibration download my Winter 2007 Newsletter here:

http://www.michaelclarkphoto.com/winter_2007.pdf

Also of note, George Jardine, Lightroom evangelist extraordinaire has uploaded his latest podcast which covers some very interesting basics in the Develop Module and - AND it shows off one of the new features found in the soon to be released (hopefully) Lightroom version 1.1. You can download that podcast here:

http://idisk.mac.com/george_jardine-Public?view=web

The podcast is labeled “20070614 Tutorial Podcast - Basic Color Correction” and appears at the bottom of the list of podcasts. Alternatively you can get the podcast on iTunes as well. Just search for “Lightroom” and it will appear as “Adobe Photoshop Lightroom” in iTunes. Many thanks go out to George for his exceptional work on the podcasts!

That’s it for this week.

Adios, Michael Clark

Paul McCartney turns 65 tomorrow (June 18th), and his creative output and youthful enthusiasm doesn’t seem to have been dimmed by age. His new CD “Memory Almost Full”, marks his 21st solo delivery in a 37-year solo career. In a partnership with Starbucks’ new label, the CD (which has been out nearly two weeks now) is pushing sales of nearly 200k units thus far — at least three times stronger than sales of his past CD in the same time window. Sir Paul has embraced a multi-faceted marketing campaign that includes digital sales of his catalog for the first time.

The Starbucks tie-in has certainly catapulted him front and center into a receptive retail audience; and we know about the power of Starbucks to create momentum, buzz, and impulse sales. To be specific, the new CD is being saturated across more than 10,000 Starbucks locations in 29 countries reaching an audience of nearly six million coffee drinkers. McCartney is the first artist on the new Starbucks label.

This marketing approach is coupled with a digital push through major online retailers (iTunes & many others), and heavy dedicated programming on Hear Music (featured on XM Satellite Radio). There’s a video clip of one of the singles on Amazon.com. And finally, to celebrate the release — and Paul’s 65th birthday — Starbucks is planning a massive party tomorrow, on the 18th itself. The company is sending out camera crews in cities around the globe collecting birthday wishes from customers & splicing together a montage for release on the 18th.

This whole set of circumstances has to represent a festive, buoyant experience for Sir Paul who has had a challenging past year. All of this activity is perfectly timed with celebrating a milestone birthday. Macca certainly deserves all of his success, heartfelt birthday wishes, & our thanks for his many contributions.

If you grant my premise that digital photography is an entirely new medium of expression, then you have to wonder about the prevalence of metaphors that use the techniques of analog photography. In Photoshop, we use the Dodge and Burn tools. We “cross process” using Nik’s excellent library of Photoshop filters (among other digital “cross processing” techniques). We produce versions of our images from our RAW captures that are “like the prints made from film negatives.” The myths and metaphors imported from film are useful shared vocabulary, but none of these analog-to-digital metaphors are really quite right.

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

A metaphor is an implicit comparison of one thing to something else: “my love is a red, red rose”. A simile, of course, is a kind of metaphor that makes the comparison explicit using “like” or “as”: “my love is as beautiful as a red, red rose.”

Confusion occurs when metaphors (or similes) are confused with facts. In no way are the metaphors of analog photography exactly analagous to the digital concepts and techniques described.

The Photoshop Dodge and Burn tools operate on pixels, not on emulsion-coated paper, and are not even the best way to achieve the results of lightening or darkening areas of an image. (You are much better off using selective layer masking, the Paintbrush tool, and blending modes to achieve this result.)

In analog terms, “cross processing” meant dunking film or paper in chemistry that was not intended. Nik carries this metaphor quite a distance. Its cross-process filters let you choose either C41 to E6, or E6 to C41 (using the names for Kodacolor and Ektachrome processing). You can also fine tune these filters in a variety of ways. But obviously you are not cross processing. At best, you have simulated cross processing with these Photoshop filters.

It’s true that I create many versions of my photos starting with a single RAW capture. For example, I might produce an RGB version for screen display, a CMYK version for publication, a sized CMYK version for running through my RIP software and making a physical print, a JPEG version for web display, and a light JPEG version that looks good on Flickr (Flickr runs a filter that makes some images look artificially darker), and so on. But these pixel-to-pixel conversions don’t really compare to the process of analog print making except in the sense that you are changing one thing (the negative or RAW capture) into another (the print or the converted file). Print making still requires output on paper.

So what’s to make of all this? Metaphors are good because they help communicate tough concepts. But they can also shackle us to think in a manner that doesn’t apply to new technologies and situations. Is there a good reason that new-fangled digital SLRs look pretty much like old-fashioned analog SLRs, or is this form-factor just what we are used to, and an example of metaphor gone awry? What will the digital generation that comes of age without understanding the analog terminology do with these dubious metaphors, and where will they go?

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

Myths can be something that is widely believed, but false. A myth can also be an important legend about how something was created. When myth is used in the second sense, the myth can even be true (at least in part). Myths are stories, and they are also metaphors.

The myths of analog photography include the patience required to coat fragile glass plates with emulsion, and to make exposures of long duration under field conditions. Ansel Adams is said to have carted his view camera up and down the Sierras on the back of a mule. These are stories of a forgotten world, and it’s hard to even remember the endurance it required to be a serious photographer.

When the last master silver halide print has been made, what myths will digital photographers have to compare with the heroic traditions of analog photography? Will the new mythology be about photography, or about processing pixels?

By learning to see the world digitally, by making long night exposures from a cliff high above the ocean, by experimenting with different ways to achieve digital capture and to process the captures, I like to think I am contributing to the new mythology of digital.

With the release of its CS3 products, Adobe has once again ever so slightly shifted its official marketing and documentation language. The newest casualty? Palettes. Palettes no longer exist. The word “palettes” has been struck from the Adobe lexicon. Those things that were palettes are now “panels.”

I probably shouldn’t care. But after 20 years of writing, I’ve come to believe that words have meanings that transcend software updates (if such a thing is possible!). The word “panels” is already otherwise occupied, and panels aren’t palettes. Here’s my take on it:

• When a dialog box contains too many options to fit on screen at once, the developer tends to break the options off into logical groups that are clustered in separate panels. The panels are fixed inside the dialog box and they remain on screen only so long as the dialog box is open.

• A palette is a subset of options that may remain on screen indefinitely. You can move a palette. And it floats above the document that you’re working on.

In CS3, you can organize palettes into anchored docking panes, which locks them in place. But that doesn’t make them panels. They remain on screen indefinitely, you can move them, and they float above the contents of your document. They are still palettes.

The only application that gives me pause is the Bridge. (I call it “the” Bridge because it spans the CS3 applications and joins them together, just like a bridge. Adobe prefers just plain “Bridge,” but if you ask me, that’s a nickname for Bridget. And Bridget is no name for a digital asset manager.) In the Bridge, a palette can never float above the contents of the document window and your options for movement are limited. So in this one case, I resign myself to “panels.” But I could be wrong. There’s a good chance I should be calling them “palettes” in the Bridge as well.

How does shifting the name “palettes” to “panels” help anyone? The argument goes, “panels” might make Dreamweaver and Flash users — many of whom are understandably worried about their software’s assimilation into the enemy’s Borg — feel less threatened and more at home. But I reckon, as long as you’ve been assimilated anyway, you might as well embrace the good things that assimilation has to offer. If you get bit by a vampire, for example, you get to wear cool capes and stay up late. If you get gobbled up by Adobe, you get better software design. So I’m all for sticking with Adobe’s existing language where precedent and industry-acceptance are in its favor.

You get where I’m coming from? Just because a vampire switches to Abercrombie & Fitch and eats the occasional brain doesn’t make it a zombie. A thing is a thing. And these particular things are palettes.

Michael Clark posted earlier this week about using templates in Lightroom’s print module. I find being able to setup templates in the print module extremely handy as well and have recently taken things a step further. You see, sometimes when I’m printing out photographs on my HP 9180, I’ll use a the HP glossy paper. Some times, I’ll use the HP satin-gloss paper which is a bit more to my liking. And other times I’ll use Hahnemuehle’s Lumijet Genuine Pearl, which I really like. Of course, these decisions are all about what I happen to have on hand and my mood at the time.

What I don’t like doing when I’m using different kinds of paper is remember to set things up in the printer dialog boxes. So, what I’ll do is create duplicates of my favorite templates and set them up for each paper, including the print driver settings as well as the ICC profile to use for the particular paper I’m using. For example, here’s a screen shot showing a setup for printing out 2 5×7 images onto different kinds of 8.5×11 paper:

After setting these up with just the correct settings for each paper, I no longer have to think about profiles or the like. I just select some images, select the template, and hit print. Easy peasy and just the ticket when I’m in a hurry to get some quick prints out and take with me when I’m on the run to a client.

Last week I was taken to task by a reader because of a statement I made about switching to Photoshop CS3 Extended because of it’s advanced High Dynamic Range capability. Basically the question was, why should I spend another US $300 to get CS3 Extended?

Photoshop CS3 does have 32-bit High Dynamic Range capabilities, you can take a series of bracketed photos and by applying Merge to HDR, you can broaden the tonal range beyond what is possible from a single exposure. Photoshop CS3 Extended also provides the basic 32-bit High Dynamic Range Merge to HDR function, and in addition it allows you to apply Brushes, Text, Levels, Hue, Saturation, etc. to the 32-bit HDR image and more than likely a wider range of Photoshop CS3 image enhancement tools will be added in the future.

The 32-bit HDR color picker

In essence Photoshop CS3 users who are working with High Dynamic Range images, now have another choice beside using the Photomatix Tone Mapping plug-ins to enhance the High Dynamic Range capabilities of Photoshop CS2 & CS3. As anyone who has experimented with High Dynamic Range images knows, just merging the images is not enough, there is quite a bit of massaging to be done to get the effect you see in the better quality High Dynamic Range images.

I have not had time to experiment with all the new CS3 Extended version tools yet but I imagine that the Smart Stacks tools are also going to become very handy in the process of creating better High Dynamic Range images. At the moment the Smart Stacks tools in CS3 Extended are best known for the ability to remove tourists from scenic photographs but this powerful tool will find more uses as time goes by and as I mentioned before will more than likely become very useful in the process of creating High Dynamic Range images.

More than likely serious High Dynamic Range photographers are not really going to worry about which is the best tool to use at this point, but instead are going to buy every new tool made available to them, so that they can make use of it when it is necessary. The additional cost of CS3 Extended may be a bitter pill to swallow for some, but it is the (Photoshop) area where more than likely, the most development will be seen in the next couple of years.

How does Photoshop Lightroom fit into this scenario? Well basically it is used to organize and enhance the bracketed images before they are processed in Photoshop CS3 Extended and then the end results are once again cataloged and processed in Lightroom, for presentation and delivery using Lightroom.

With Photoshop CS3 and CS3 Extended becoming more compatible with Lightroom than previous versions of Photoshop CS, I believe that it is even more than before, now very valid to maintain a constant two way stream between Photoshop CS and Photoshop Lightroom.

Since I’m a .Mac user, I clicked over to see the new site design. First you have to get there. Login is now located under the “Mac” tab at Apple.com. Look for the login link in the left nav bar. The new layout is nice, but the content of .Mac is basically the same, including creating your own custom iCards if you’re a .Mac member. Though there are a slew of great stock images for iCards to choose from, a photographer would of course like to use his or her own images.

Because I think my photographs are the best way to communicate with clients, I often send a relevant attached photo when I’m communicating with them. Not every email contains a photo, but ones like announcing that their photos are ready, or a thank you note after an engagement shoot, usually get a photo attached.

Custom iCards make this task a snap. From Aperture, I simply drop a preview version of a photo into the Pictures folder located in my iDisk (yes, previews on for this task), and from there sign in to my .Mac account and create a card. The instructions posted on the homepage of the site are so easy that’s there’s no need to repeat them here. Short messages can be typed on the cards using one of six different font styles.

The only draw back is the the little Apple stamp icon on the iCards, which may not fit the marketing objectives for some users.

Nevertheless, iCards are a great way to communicate with friends, family, and clients. And as a .Mac member, it’s so easy to create them, why not to take advantage of the service?

One of the ways I have increased my speed and efficiency working with Aperture was to learn a few layout shortcuts that kicked my workflow into high gear. This is particularly important if you’re an Aperture laptop user, which many, if not most of us are. I dream of a two screen set-up and I will edit my work that way someday, but for now these layout shortcuts will make you forget you’re not working on a 30-inch monitor.

Apple>Option>S gives you the basic view.

Control D lets you toggle the Metadata panel, Control A for the Adjustments panel as part of the browser. Play with all these short cut keys and you’ll know them.

Apple Option B gives you a browser showing all your images in that project or album.

Apple Option V maximizes your browser, even the projects panel goes away. To bring it back, press the W key. Toggle it and see what happens.

Of course the F key takes you to a favorite place for most Aperture users: Full Screen Mode. Of course you can move the filmstrip around, placing it on the side for verticals and on the bottom for horizontal views. In the bottom left corner is the Viewer Mode Button. If you activate “Auto” the filmstrip disappears unless you roll the cursor over it. “Avoid” means the image won’t be cut off by the filmstrip, but instead re-sizes itself to show the whole image. Very cool.

Playing around with the browser short cut keys will get you moving swiftly through your images with Aperture. Much more to come on speeding up workflow…

It all started when I pointed my digital camera into the void of night and was surprised by the results. In apparent darkness, there’s plenty of “light” we cannot see that is picked up by digital sensors. The digital night landscape is very colorful indeed. Since this discovery, I have haunted dark and wild landscapes at night…[Read more].

My new website, Digital Night by Harold Davis, www.digitalnight.us, features photographs taken in the night. I also write about the techniques and human aspects of digital night photography.

Read the back story featuring this image.

Here’s a situation that all of us face from time to time: We spend a day shooting as much as we can and doing it as fast as we can, return to home base, download a few hundred images, delete the faggedaboutits, and then have to get the rest of the images to someone else so that they can pick those that will make it all the way into print. Now, if you have to make each of those images look as good as possible before you adjust them with final finesse, you could find yourself either staying up all night for a couple of nights in a row or missing your deadlines and schedule.

Here’s a better idea: Do you know about the magic of using AutoAdjust? There are a couple of ways you can use it, and they’ll both save you hours of needless tedium.

To get the images to the point where they can be submitted for initial approval, put the Sorting in User mode and then drag all the similar images into contiguous groups. Then do the following, one group at a time: While in Library Grid mode, select all the images in a group (series). Now click Sync Settings. The Synchronize Settings dialog will appear.

In Grid Mode, Lightroom always assumes AutoSync mode for synchronizing settings. So if you just use the Quick Develop keys. You’ll get all the adjustments you’ll need to get the images looking pretty close to how the final images should look. Then your client or associate can pick the exact images that will be used. Then you only have to do the tedious and careful adjusting on a few “picks”.

Even if you’re in a situation where you have to use the White Balance dropper or have to make final adjustments on a whole series of images that have to match perfectly, you can still use nearly same technique for any and all of the adjustments. The only big differences are that you have to switch back and forth between the Library and Develop modules and you have to use AutoSynch. Here are the steps:

1. Select the shots in the Library module.
2. Press D to go to Develop.
3. Ctrl Click the Sync button in the Develop module to switch to Auto Synch.
4. Make an adjustment in the Develop Module module.
5. When you’re satisfied with the adjustments you’ve made for the image viewed in the Develop module, press L to switch back to the Library Grid mode and watch the Thumbnails as the selected images are automatically sequentially adjusted.

As long as Auto Synch is left turned on, you can then select a different set of images and apply the results to all of those images, then repeat the steps for the next set, etc, etc.

The Aperture Light Table is much easier to work with if you learn to drive it using its mouse and keyboard shortcuts. (Note: Wondering if the Light Table is even worth investing time in? Take a look at my previous post titled, Learning to Respect the Light Table.) The Light Table is most useful when you can quickly navigate it, and fortunately, there are many shortcuts built-in. Here are some crucial ones:

* Panning and Zooming. If you hold down the space bar, you can pan about the Light Table by clicking and dragging. If you have a mouse with a scroll wheel, or a Trackpad with two-fingered scrolling, then scrolling while holding down the space bar will zoom in and out. So, by simply holding down the space bar you can both pan and zoom.

* Image context menu. If you right-click (or control-click if you don’t have a two-button mouse) on any image on the Light Table, you’ll get a popup menu that includes Align, Distribute, and Arrange commands that aren’t available anywhere else. These offer the same type of features that you’ll find in a drawing program, and make it easy to get your images positioned. (Note that the Align tool aligns against the last image that you select.)

* Light Table context menu. The Light Table itself has a context menu that provides a few simple options, the most important being Minimize Size. As you’ve probably already discovered, it’s very easy to accidentally increase the size of the light table through a few errant drags. Choosing Minimize Size will reduce the size of the Light Table so that it encloses only the images that you’ve placed.

* If you like your Light Tables to look like Light Tables - that is, to have a white background - you can change the background color the Light Table by adjusting the Viewer Background Brightness slider in the Aperture Preferences dialog box. Note, however, that with a neutral gray background you’ll have a far more accurate perception of color.

Finally, don’t forget to use the zoom feature. Often, if you want to see an image on the Light Table at a larger size, the impulse is to grab the image and make it larger. While this will certainly work, rendering a larger image is more processor-intensive for Aperture. It’s much better to take advantage of the zoom feature and zoom in when you want to see a larger view of an image.

Ethan Salwen talks about about photo capture-sharpening practices in AfterCapture and features O’Reilly author Mikkel Aaland.

“There are compelling reasons to apply capture sharpening during the RAW
conversion process,” explains Mikkel Aaland, a San Francisco-based
photographer and digital-imaging expert. “And there are compelling
reasons to turn off a converter’s sharpening function and wait until
the file is in Photoshop.” In accurate, down-to- earth language, Aaland
outlines some of these reasons in his book Photoshop CS2 RAW
(O’Reilly, 2006). However, Aaland encourages photographers not to
hyperventilate over this topic. What’s called for is simply a basic
understanding of how to approach capture sharpening during RAW
conversion (or not) in a way that best meets your specific workflow
needs.”

The entire article is available here.

A few weeks ago, Mikkel talked about all the handy contextual (right-click) menus in Lightroom. Yesterday, when we met to do final finishing touches for the book, I showed him how the new MacBook and MacBook Pros have a trackpad setting that allows you to evoke contextual menus easily. You can set up the trackpad on these computers to “right-click” when you put two fingers on the trackpad and click. You’ll need to set this up by going to System Preferences > Keyboard & Mouse > Trackpad. Then click the aptly named box, “Place two fingers on trackpad and click button for secondary click.” Voila, all those handy Lightroom menus are now just a click away on your laptop.

Sooner or later it happens to almost all digital photographers - at least all those who shoot a lot. You check some of the images in camera and they look good. You load the memory card into the reader and wait for the images to appear in Aperture’s import window. But nothing happens. You push the card into the reader a little more firmly and make sure the reader is attached properly to the computer, but still there’s no sign of the card showing up on the computer.

If you haven’t already noticed, Aperture Plugged In has a new look and feel. I have been working really hard to bring a better design to the site and create a better user experience. The new site will have lots of new features, better content, and better navigation. So, be sure to go check out the site! It’s live, up and running right now.

You will probably notice, if you have seen the site before, that the list of plugins on the right hand side is now gone. This list has been replaced with the three most recently updated plugins, but you will still be able to see a growing list of all Aperture plugins on the Plugins page. The current list on the Plugins page is still being updated, and we should hopefully have a complete list up and running by the end of the week.

Aperture Plugged In has proven to be a really enjoyable project so far. We started the site in the beginning of the year as a way for Aperture users and plugin developers to interact, and centralize information. I think it’s working out really nicely. In the weeks to come we are going to add more and more content, and make the site a better resource for everyone.

Yesterday I had the pleasure of attending my first Keynote address at Apple’s WorldWide Developer’s Conference, in San Francisco. The new Core Animation component to Leopard is really going to add amazing possibilities for media professionals in the years to come. I also agree with Derrick about Time Machine. It looks really promising, and will hopefully take all the guesswork out of backup things up. And, the 64 bit OS sounds like a real advantage for photographers and media people alike.

This evening I will be joining Derrick, AUPN, and a few of the folks from the Aperture product team for an evening with developers interested in Aperture plugins. The gathering takes place in about four hours. So, this is your last chance to let us know your ideas for new plugins. Well, it’s not your last chance forever, but it’s a really good opportunity. In addition to new plugin ideas, we are going to be taking a look at the new Aperture Plugged In website. I am hoping to get lots of feedback on the community aspect of the site, and learn from both the developers and photographers how we can all work together to make the website, and Aperture, better and better. I really appreciate all of you who have left your comments on the Plugged In site, and those of you who have voiced your opinions for new plugins in the forums section. Thanks for all of your support.

-micah

I enjoyed the Steve Jobs keynote today at Apple’s World Wide Developers Conference in San Francisco. I listened to the 10 new Leopard features with a photographer’s ear, and here are three of my favorites.

One of the best overall Leopard perks, and probably the most highly touted too, is Time Machine. As Apple puts it, “More than a mere backup, Time Machine makes an up-to-date copy of everything on your Mac — digital photos, music, movies, TV shows, and documents — so you can go back in time to recover anything.” Since some of us don’t use automated backup, having this function baked right into the operating system is going to save lots of data for many, many people. And for photographers, that should mean never losing another image. After all, not even Aperture’s Vault is fully automatic…

My second favorite item was Quick Look. This seems like a real timesaver when searching through images and documents. According to Apple, “Using Quick Look, you can view the contents of a file without even opening it. Flip through multiple-page documents. Watch full-screen video. See entire Keynote presentations. With a single click.” I sometimes use Preview for this task, but Quick Look seems faster and more versatile. I don’t always want to launch Aperture just to peek at photos on my hard drive.

One other new goodie that I think we’ll find useful is the next version of iChat. Not only can we video conference as before, but now with the new “theater” function, we can share slideshows, iPhoto libraries, Keynote presentations, and videos in the iChat interface while meeting with others in remote locations. Our ability to show off our work during live conferencing will be much easier, and nice to look at too. And we should be able to show off our Aperture images too, if not directly, then through iPhoto using Aperture’s previews.

Leopard has tons of good stuff under the hood, but I’m already looking forward to testing some of these new consumer-oriented features.

Hello, viewers! I’ve been sharing audio online for years, but just discovered an amusing way to generate a talking-head video. At Gizmoz.com, you upload a photo and record a sound bite, and the service converts them into an animated 3D face:

I used my basic USB headset mic to record the audio above. First I had to right-click the screen and give Flash access to the mic. I also noticed that the program clipped the beginning of the phrase, so I redid it with a quick tongue clack before speaking to fool the recorder.

Here’s a clip using different visual accessories and Gizmoz’s text-to-speech option:

One little fancy feature that many miss is the Templates that can be saved in the Print Module and in the Slideshow and Web Modules as well. I’ll just cover the Print Module here as the others function in pretty much the exact same manner.

So, let’s say that you have a certain layout you really like in the print Module and you would like to use that again at a later date. As in the image below - a recent image from a surfing shoot out in Encinitas, California - I have set up a horizontal print with my website address below it.

To save this layout for all future images I simply click on the “Add” Button in the left panel as in the image below. Instantaneously an outlined “Untitled Template” space will show up in the list above the Add and Remove buttons. Type in a descriptive name for your new template and it will be saved for later use.

To remove a Template simply select the one you wish to remove and click the “Remove” button. Simple stuff but very powerful. Especially when you need to print contact sheets for clients.

If you would like to back up these templates - or any others - outside of Lightroom you can find them at (on Apple computers):

User/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom/Print templates

And in fact all of the templates live in folders at:

User/Library/Application Support/Adobe/Lightroom

It is always a good idea to back these up on another drive just in case you have a fatal hard drive crash. That way you won’t lose all of your custom Lightroom settings if something goes awry.

That’s it for this week.

Adios, Michael Clark

There are several big Reunion tours taking place this Summer (including The Police, Genesis, and the Smashing Pumpkins); these are bands who have sold many millions of albums each, and who have a cadre of hungry fans around the world eager to experience the magic once again. I’m one of them. I don’t know about you, but when I go to see artists I enjoy in concert I appreciate the so-called “happy accidents” and miscues that only a ‘live’ performance affords. Disclaimer: this may be more of an analog post than digital — so bear with me.

Stewart Copeland is the drummer & founder of The Police (as an aside — he also happened to write the foreword to my book, The Art of Digital Music , co-written with David Battino). The Police have been rehearsing for months in Vancouver ahead of their big world tour which kicked off last week — and will span some 80 concerts and multiple continents. All of that preparation, and yet — things can still go off track. For anyone who knows him, Stewart is a very witty, intelligent, articulate guy who writes nearly as well as he drums. He’s posted an amazingly funny blog entry on his web site here about the first disaster gig of the tour which happened last week in Vancouver.

In this blog entry, Stewart goes into some detail about how the guys in the band were out of sync and just couldn’t get it together throughout the night at this show — despite who they are and what they’ve achieved. It’s a rare glimpse into what can go wrong; something you just don’t see a major artist write about publically too often. But I think it really levels the playing field between artist and fan — when the artist isn’t perfect & isn’t afraid to talk about what goes wrong along with all the good stuff; makes them more human & brings them back down to earth. I’m proud of Stewart for having shared the gory details — it’s a fun read with a happy ending (and you definitely feel as though you were there experiencing it all yourself). I encourage you to read Stewart’s blog entry; everyone I’ve shared it with has gotten a big kick out of it. For my part, I’m looking forward to seeing the live show in LA in a couple of weeks — and am hoping I get to experience some of the screw-ups first hand; guaranteed it will make the show that much more fun and memorable!

The term bokeh is used to refer to blurring in a photograph. Good bokeh is smooth and pleasing, whereas bad bokeh produces a jagged and discordant effect. This may sound subjective, but pretty quickly you can get to recognize excellent bokeh when you see it in a photo. And the effort of doing so will help you improve your photography.

Bokeh generally refers to background blur rather than foreground blur, because background blur tends to be far more important than foreground blur in most compositions. The photo of the California poppy in the wind (below) is an exception to this rule.

Almost everyone can recognize sharpness of an entire composition as effective. Realistically, this can only happen in limited situations. For example, all elements of a photograph must be in focus (this happens in landscape photos at infinity) and everything must be still enough so there is no motion blur.

The way of bokeh is to recognize that almost all photographs have some blurring and out-of-focus elements. Rather than deprecating, the zen of blur is to embrace. If you must have blur, why not make your bokeh the best it can be?

Taking the zen of bokeh one step further, can you conceive of photos that are about blurring rather than sharpness?

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

Bokeh comes from the Japanese word boke (ぼけ), meaning blur. The terminology may also be derived in part from bokashi, a blurring ink wash technique used by great Japanese artists like Hokusai. (Bokashi also seems to be a Japanese composting method.)

In photograph terms, bokeh is caused by a great number of factors, including:

• the lens and its optical design
• the way a scene is lit
• the motion inherent to a subject
• the aperture (f-stop) used
• the quantity of out-of-focus elements in a scene
• the way a scene is lit

Lens designers know that depth-of-field gets shallower for close-up subjects. The converse is also true: Going outwards from infinity there is infinite depth-of-field.

Since macro photography therefore implies shallow depth-of-field, there will be focus blurring even at f/64. Taking this in mind, some speciality macro lenses are made so that they tend to produce good bokeh. As the manual for my Nikon PC Micro-Nikkor 85mm f/2.8D puts this, “Rounded diaphragm opening makes out-of-focus elements appear more natural.” [sic]

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

More important than the technical considerations of what creates good bokeh is the ability of a photographer to recognize pleasing bokeh and to work to enhance it.

You should look closely at the bokeh characteristics of your photos, particularly close-ups and portraits. Experiment. Try to understand what happens to your bokeh when you change your f/stop (use the depth-of-field preview to get a sense of this while taking the photo). Work with your photographic compositions to see if you can enhance the bokeh by slightly changing your position, the lighting, or your precise point of focus.

Realize that the bokeh in a photo is as important, or even more important, than any other element. For example, in the photo I took of a white California poppy below, the flower bud and waterdrops are nice, but the purple bokeh is what makes the photo.

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

How about a California seaside photo workshop taught by the award-winning author
of Stephen Johnson on Digital Photography?

Details here.

Most Aperture users I know don’t pay a lot of attention to the Light Table. I was this way once. I thought it was a silly feature for Apple to have devoted engineering resources to, when they could have been building me localized editing tools, or vignette correction, or a plug-in architecture. I still want those things, of course, but I’m now realizing that the Light Table is a very flexible tool that more Aperture users might consider trying.

Most of us see the Light Table and think “oh, I get it, it’s a way that I can shuffle images around more interactively, so that I can find a flow or narrative in my shoot.” It can definitely do that, and it’s an excellent tool for those tasks. Similarly, it’s great for roughing out page layouts, book designs, or gallery layouts, or any other type of presentation where you need to do more than simply sequence images. For times when size and position matters, the Light Table is very handy.

But there’s another use for the Light Table, one made possible by Aperture’s non-modal architecture: the Light Table is a great replacement for the Browser pane.

Most of us organize our images in the Browser pane - sometimes referred to as the Grid view. We change image order and use the Browser pane to select the images that we want to edit. But you can just as easily perform these same tasks with a Light Table, but with more free-form flexibility.

For example, while the Browser pane makes me view all of my images as a grid, the Light Table gives me more flxible options. For example, let’s say I want to sort through a bunch of Death Valley images, to find the ones I like. In this case, I might take all my sand dune images and heap them into a pile ont the Light Table, and throw all of the stormy images into another pile. As I work, sorting images here and there, I get a much more “organic” organization scheme.

With my images roughly organized into piles, I can now go work through each pile. Let’s start with the sand dune images. I select all of the sand dune pictures, and right click to get a context menu:

I select Arrange, and Aperture automatically arranges the images into a neat grid on the Light Table, so that I can easily see each one.

Now I can zoom in on those images, resize them, re-arrange them, and work with them in the normal Light Table manner.

But I can also do all of the normal operations that I would perform in the Browser. I can activate the Loupe to view close-ups of my images, I can add ratings and metadata, and I can do all of this while also moving my images around with all of the freeform flexibility of the Light Table. If I want to edit an image, I have two options: I can hit F to go into Full Screen mode, or I can click the Show Viewer for This Browser button, (located at the top of the Browser pane) which swaps out the Light Table view with a normal Viewer pane.

In addition to all of the normal rating and keywording tools, the Light Table provides you with an additional way of sorting your images while you look for your selects. As you sort through the images on the table, you can remove images that you don’t like by selecting them and clicking the Put Back button, or pressing Shift-P. This removes the image from the Light Table, allowing you to easily filter your images down to just your selects.

So, even if you have no need for the layout and sizing options provided by the Light Table, give it a try as a Browser replacement. You may find that the more flexible organizing options it provides are a better alternative to the rigidity of the Browser pane.

It is easy to see how both Photoshop old timers and new Photoshop users may be confused as to which of the new Photoshop products to buy, or to upgrade to at this time.

1. Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 - The slick new all-in-one RAW image management and editing program that arguably has only one competitor, Apple Aperture, in the new non-destructive image handling arena. As evidenced by this website and many others, Lightroom has quickly become the main image handling application for a large number of digital photographers, both professional and advanced amateurs, worldwide.

Mamiya has just started packaging Photoshop Lightroom 1.0, with their medium format digital cameras and digital camera backs. Admittedly this is a US $10,000 camera but it is probably an indicator of more high end digital camera plus Photoshop Lightroom packages to come.

2. Photoshop CS3 - This newest upgrade to Photoshop CS is the standard for pixel pushing photographers and has no equal in the retouching, working in layers and generally manipulating digital images to the highest standards department.

Interestingly enough the new Adobe Camera Raw upgrade (ACR4), which only works with Photoshop CS3 (CS2 users must upgrade to CS3 first) now includes almost all of the Lightroom 1.0 Develop Module tools and some of the newest (obviously developed for Lightroom components) that are not yet available to Lightroom users. Lightroom users have to wait for the next application upgrade before they can use them.

3. Photoshop CS3 Extended - I had figured that this version was not for me, since it is primarily aimed at scientists and medical professionals (and photographers who work in those fields), but I just discovered that it has better image stacking and High Dynamic Range (HDR) capabilities than the regular Photoshop CS3 version, so I guess I will have to change to the Extended version so I can continue my HDR experiments.

Conclusion - Most professional photographers who now use the Photoshop CS2 application will automatically upgrade to Photoshop CS3, mainly because they can’t afford to be behind the curve. If they are interested in working with High Dynamic Range photography I recommend upgrading to the Extended version of Photoshop CS3.

For the same reason they will more than likely already have experimented with Photoshop Lightroom 1.0 and are either using it now or waiting for a newer version. It only makes sense to use a digital assets manager that is tightly integrated with your digital image editor.

New RAW image photographers who do not have either Photoshop CS or Photoshop Lightroom yet, should probably start with Photoshop Lightroom first and add Photoshop CS later when they find that they need the specialized pixel manipulating capabilities that can only be found in Photoshop CS.

I just came across a problem with the versatility of Lightroom’s print module… and a couple of solutions that work pretty well, for the time-being. The problem: I couldn’t initially figure out how to print several instances of the same picture on the same page. After pondering this problem for a while, here are the two solutions I came up with:

Solution #1: Use Photoshop. This is the solution I like best because I have a lot more control over the size, resolution, and placement of the individual images. In Lightroom, I simply press Cmd/Ctrl + Shift + E and the image I want to print appears in Photoshop.

The very first thing I do is resize the image to the size it must be in order to print as many copies as I want to print on a single piece of paper. I then double-click the background layer in the Layers palette and then press OK in the resulting dialog to let it become a standard layer. I then duplicate that layer as many times as I need to print copies on the same piece of paper. Then I create a new, empty layer and drag it to the bottom of the stack. Now I use the Image > Canvas Size command to make the overall image the same size (less borders if your printer isn’t borderless) as the paper I’m going to print on. I then fill the empty bottom layer with white, select each individual layer, and move the images to the position I want them to be in when I make the print. Finally, I print the images from Photoshop. When I’m done, I flatten (to save disk space) and save the multi-image page if I’m likely to need to print it several times. If not, I just close Photoshop and then Remove (press Delete/Backspace) the image from Lightroom.

Solution #2: If the images will fit in a regular grid, just make as many Virtual Copies (Library: Photo > Create Virtual Copy) of the image as you need on a page in Lightroom. Then select the thumbnails of all the versions of the same image and go to the Print module. In the Page Grid panel, drag the sliders to give you as many rows and columns as you need in order to make the number of prints that you need to make. Bingo! They all appear neatly laid-out on the page.

I’m still in the process of moving my archives over to Aperture. I’m taking my time, pre-organizing and story-boarding my collection to maximize efficiency. I love that I can create a new folder in Aperture and under File Menu > Import> “Folders Into Project”, (which maintains the folder hierarchy) import images into new Aperture Projects, Folders and Albums.

There is no limit to the size of an Aperture Library, but projects are limited to 10,000 images. However, the bigger the library, the more it might bog down if it gets too big–so multiple libraries are common among Aperture users, and how big is too big –is still open for debate, depending on your hardware.

You can’t contain Mother Nature but you can keep your digital assets safe in Aperture. Photos Copyright Steve Simon

I keep waffling between referenced and managed libraries. Though I love the idea of taking my referenced library and it’s large JPEG Previews with me everywhere, there is the seduction of easy back up using the vault system. And I can still export projects to take with me to work on while on the road.

With managed libraries, Aperture takes care of everything. I’m choosing to keep it simple and safe by with managed libraries in Aperture and backing them up using the vault system. The beauty is I can move back to a referenced system or combination of referenced and managed at any time if I so choose.

With multiple libraries, it makes sense to rename them for easy recognition. For instance, I have a “Aperture Personal Projects” Library and an “Aperture Commercial Library” on my external drive. You can only have one Aperture library open at a time, so when switching libraries I just quit out of one and double click on the other to open it up.

If there is one library you use most, make that the default library in the preferences panel, so when you click on the Aperture Icon in your dock, that is the library that opens.

A shortcut for Preferences Panel is Command > Comma, which lets you choose which Aperture library will open by default, and can be changed at any time in seconds.

Also in the Preferences Panel, you can choose your external editor, set copyright and email size and decide if you want new projects to automatically generate previews.

When I first got Aperture, I allowed Aperture to automatically generate previews, but I have since decided it is more efficient for me to only generate previews for my three-star “good” to five-star portfolio images; keeping the size big and the quality at maximum which makes these previews usable for everything from slideshows and web galleries to publication.

As you no doubt know, it takes a while for Aperture to generate previews and I don’t need previews of everything I ingest, but I can always change my mind, and generate previews of any image(s) at any time. Just choose the images you want previews for, and go to Images > Update Previews. To delete unwanted previews select those images and go to Images > Delete Preview.

Last week, Mikkel hinted broadly on this blog that he’s been holding up the release of his Lightroom book because of the pending Lightroom update. And Tom Hogarty, the product manager of both Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom, has also stated that Lightroom will be updated in the near future. It’s enough to give one anticipation jitters.

There are four primary things I’m looking forward to in this update:

• Support for the Canon 1D Mark III. I don’t have a copy of this new camera in my hands yet. Shipping of these new cameras has been sporadic and they are still in short supply, but it has the promise to be a game enhancer for the kind of photography that’s my bread and butter. Of course, without direct support in Lightroom, the workflow won’t be as seamless as one would like. There’s always the convert to DNG trick first, but that’s a pesky additional step.
• All the goodies from Adobe Camera Raw 4.1. The new sharpening controls look to be really interesting, but what has really caught my eye is the new Clarity control. Combining USM with local contrast enhancement seems like just the ticket. Jeff Schewe provides a good run down of all the new features of Adobe Camera Raw 4.1 over at PhotoshopNews.com. Be sure to compare the samples of Clarity at full size. The results are really compelling.
• A fix for a bug that’s particularly annoying for me. When I edit the metadata for several photographs at once, it’s impossible to tab between metadata fields. After advancing to the next text field, Lightroom thinks for a second, then removes the input focus from the next text field. There have been so many times when I’ve started typing a caption after tabbing to the caption field from the title field, only to have my keystrokes interpreted as commands and flip me between several modes in quick succession.
• The SDK. When Lightroom 1.0 came out, it was said that a third-party SDK would be released at some point in the future as well when things stabilized enough. I’m hoping that time is now, but I’m not entirely holding my breath. It would be nice, however, to see the start of the kinds of integration with third party websites that Aperture has featured for several months now.

Hopefully, we’ll know the answer to all of these questions shortly. Now, I’m going to go back to the game of seeing what comes first: the new mk3 or the new version of Lightroom.

If you are going to be in the San Frnacisco area next week, and you are interested in Aperture plugins, you won’t want to miss this event. AUPN and a few members of the Aperture product team will be hosting an informal gathering at the W Hotel. All are welcome, but you must R.S.V.P. To register for this free event, cick the image below and follow the instructions.

I hope to see you there!

Something very exciting happened Tuesday morning for Aperture users looking to buy a new laptop–Apple introduced new MacBook Pros (MBPs). As you’d probably expect, the new machines are faster (they’re available with up to a 2.4 Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo chip). In fact, Apple states that the new machines are 28% faster than the original 2.16 Ghz MBP for processing RAW images in Aperture.

However, there are some great non-obvious improvements for Aperture users. For one, the graphics card has been upgraded to a NVIDIA GeForce 8600M. This card is faster and supports more complicated operations than the card in the previous generation of MacBook Pros. Given how heavily Aperture (and Mac OS X itself) uses the graphics card, this is a welcome upgrade! Secondly, build to order options now include up to 4GB of RAM instead of 3GB (perfect for running Aperture and Photoshop at the same time), and the low-end model comes standard with 2GB of RAM instead of 1GB. Plus, the 17″ MBP now has an option for a 250GB hard drive (the 15″ still tops out at 200GB).

Yet the best part of this revision is what Apple’s done to the screens. On the 17″, there’s now an option for a high-resolution, 1920 x 1200 pixel screen. That’s the same resolution as the 23″ cinema display, perfect for viewing your images on the go.

Saving the best for last, we come to the 15″ MBP–its LCD screen now uses an LED backlight instead of CCFL (cold cathode fluorescent). Aside from being more environmentally-friendly, Apple states that these new screens add an extra 30 minutes - 1 hour of battery life, bringing the total estimated battery life to 6 hours. They also allowed Apple to shave 0.2 pounds from the 15″ MBP’s weight, dropping from 5.6 to 5.4 lbs. If that’s still not enough for you, the LED backlight starts up at full brightness as soon as the machine is turned on–there’s no warmup time anymore. Despite all of these changes, Apple says that the screens look exactly the same as the previous generation’s screen (i.e. same brightness, same viewing angle, etc.), but the word on the web is that the backlight is more even and the contrast ratio appears higher (with blacker blacks) on the LED screens. Both changes are very important for photo viewing and editing!

For photo work, I’d recommend the matte screen and not the glossy one, even though both screens are top-notch. Glossy screens tend to give a more saturated and contrasty appearance by default (which is fine for things like watching DVDs on an uncalibrated screen), but that appearance can affect what changes you feel you need to make to an image.

Overall, this revision really made a great machine even better, and if you end up buying one, feel free to share your impressions of how Aperture runs on it!

A translator sent me a sound file today, wondering how I would transliterate it to English. The sound is for an upcoming Japanese toy you jab with a tiny sword. Like a pistol in Russian roulette, the toy eventually explodes; this sound is what you hear each time you plunge in the blade:

• Sword Jab Sound (28KB WAV)

In Japanese, the sound would be written shakin (shah-keen). What does it sound like to you? The more I pondered, the more my ideas started to resemble Don Martin sound effects from Mad magazine…though perhaps that’s appropriate here.

For the ultimate list of Don Martin sound effects, visit the Don Martin Dictionary.

The other really powerful and photographer-friendly DAM non-destructive RAW processing software, after Lightroom and Aperture, is LightZone. Just recently, a new version of LightZone was announced that seems to be much faster than the original. They’ve also added quite a few new features, including Sharpening and Gaussian Blur. For a full list, check over the free download’s Help screens.

By way of perspective, I haven’t had LightZone for very long. This version has only been in my hands for an hour, and I’m already strongly devoted to Lightroom. So don’t expect a full and accurate review here. What I can tell you is that LightZone, especially in this new addition, is a great addition to Lightroom. One reason alone, combined with the program’s use of the Zone system for setting regional adjustments, makes this so: You can very quickly make very highly-controlled regional adjustments.

In the example below, you can see an area that’s been selected by one of the program’s selection tools. You make the selection by clicking dots around the area you want to control. You then “blend” whatever adjustment you’re going to make by dragging the selections inside border until it covers as wide a blending area as you like. Then you make your adjustment to that selected area and it blends automatically. There are also 29 effects pre-sets that do their job at the click of a button.

If you note the region that’s been selected in the screen above and compare it to the ZoneMapper 3 window at right, you can see that you can easily re-map the tonal range of any area of the image at any level of brightness. So you end up having amazing control over specific areas in the image that you could otherwise get only in Photoshop–and then only after investing much more time, effort, and expertise.

You can go between Lightroom and LightZone in just exactly the same way that you can go between Lightroom and Photoshop. Just designate LightZone as the secondary editor in the Lightroom Preferences dialog. Then, when you want to take the Lightroom adjusted image you’ve been working on into Lightzone, just press Cmd/Ctrl + Opt/Alt + Z.

One of my most lucrative images is also one of my most boring images. In 2004 I was assigned to shoot a hearing on Capitol Hill. The assignment was to cover a hearing of the Indian Affairs Committee. Many times when I get these types of assignments I really don’t know much about what is going on. When I can, I always try to read up on the news story as much as possible before going on the shoot, but many times there is simply not enough lead time. My hope is that at some point after the shoot, while I am busy editing pictures, I will find a news piece on the web that will help me find enough information to write my captions.

On this occasion, I really had no idea what to expect. Not only was I in the dark on the news at hand, but the REAL news, the news that would make this image so important, hadn’t happened yet.

A man by the name of Jack Abramoff had been called to testify before the Indian Affairs Committee. My assignment was to shoot the hearing, not because of Abramoff specifically, but because the client I worked for owned a newspaper based in New Mexico, and covered the Indian Affairs Committee very closely.

So, I showed up as assigned, shot the hearing, made sure to get the money shot of each person being sworn in, and finished up by transmitting my pictures to the client. The client paid me a small assignment fee, and that was the end of my day.

As I would normally do with news images, I sent the pictures a few days later to my agency, who added them to their archive. This is when the fun began.

A few months later, Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff had found himself in a gigantic scandal, which would eventually land him in jail with a sentence of 5 years and 10 months. During this time, I found out that I was the only photographer that happened to have a shot of Abramoff, with his right hand in the air, swearing to tell the truth.

After I sent that photograph to my agency, we have licensed usage fees all over the world. The picture first popped up as a cover photo for the Weekly Standard magazine (my first cover photo). It has also been published on the cover of a couple of books, used for TV spots, and printed in countless newspapers and magazines, not to mention its use throughout the Internet.

When the scandal began to heat up and my image sales began to take off, I decided to try and improve my reach by going back into my archives and seeing if I could find more frames and perhaps provide a better quality image.

When I switched over to Aperture, I had imported my entire archive of images. So, finding the Abramoff shoot was very easy. I simply typed his last name into the Query HUD and Aperture found all of the images from that shoot. I then took a look at what I had transmitted to my agency, and compared it to my raw shoot. What I found was pretty interesting.

When I shot the Abramoff assignment I had been using one of my least favorite cameras. The camera was an original Nikon D2h. The D2h was a really fast camera at 8fps, but it had a tiny 4 mega-pixel sensor, and performed really poorly in mixed lighting and high ISOs.

At the time, I had shot the assignment in RAW+Jpeg and had transmitted just a few frames, quickly edited from the Jpeg in Photoshop. The result was acceptable to my client who would be printing the images in newspapers, but they were really pretty awful for use anywhere else. Luckily, I had the original RAW files, so I was able to use Aperture to resurrect a better image from the D2h file.

The end result was still far from perfect, but I now had a much cleaner looking image, with a much more acceptable white balance. I gave the newly edited images a 5 star-ranking and sent them off to my agency. My agency was able to swap out the old images with the newly “re-mastered” versions, and I truly believe this has helped to increase my sales. I was also able to find a few extra frames that ended up being big sellers as well.

In photography there is always going to be the argument of what to keep and what to delete. Some photographers say you should delete as you shoot, and some never delete a frame. I find myself in the latter demographic. I believe that being able to go back and see how a photographer shot an assignment can be very beneficial to their artistic development. Fortunately for me, my methods worked in my favor. I didn’t delete my seconds from the Abramoff shoot, and I shot the assignment in RAW+Jpeg. This allowed me to quickly file the pictures at the time (long before Aperture was available) and later down the road, I was able to re-edit my images from the RAW originals. Every once in a while, you make a good decision, and it pays off.

So tell me, what do you delete?

A sculptor I know likes to say, “Art is a hammer knocking at your eyeballs.” Architect Robert Venturi described one of his approaches as “contradiction juxtaposed.”

Amy X Neuburg, here live at EXIT Theatre, juxtaposes fiery operatic vocals with electronic audio loops. (Photo by Rob Thomas)

Much successful art, it seems to me, takes concepts—or symbols of concepts—and squishes them together so our brains are provoked into making new connections. The art, or hammer-like impact, derives from the way those symbols are juxtaposed, the artist’s skill in adjusting contrasts—dark vs. light, repetition vs. surprise, fast vs. slow, sharp vs. blurry, realistic vs. distorted. . . .

There’s a whole chapter in my book called “Distortion is Art,” inspired by sound designer Gary Rydstrom’s advice to his staff while working on the tornado movie Twister. I was particularly intrigued by the tension between the computer’s power to generate perfect copies with the artist’s instinct to distort and juxtapose.

I was thinking about that after reading an artist’s reaction to my latest podcast, “Seize the Rhythm,” which was about hearing the rhythms all around us and blending them into songs. The sigh of tires on the pavement, the stuttering voice of a nervous caller on an answering machine…there are so many patterns out there to explore.

But what this artist said made me realize that a big part of art is the original vision:

Most of us have camera phones. A few of us use them. I have a practical application for your smartphone that’s bound to help you at least once: Use your camera phone to photograph your parking locations in a gigantic garages so you don’t lose your car.

I started doing this a while back, and suddenly became enamored with some of the images stored on my phone. I started adding a little creativity to the recording of parking spaces, and then it dawned on me that this could be an interesting community endeavor. So I’ve started the “Park by the Numbers” Camera Phone Project.

What began as a simple way to help me remember where I parked my car in big garages, has evolved into a creative look at an everyday function that many of us have in common. You can take a peek at a gallery I’ve begun that will soon include photos from all over the world. I’m already getting some fun entries.

If you want to participate, just drop by the “Park by the Numbers” home page for all the info.

Apple is offering a series of Test Drives and Workshops for Wedding and Event Photographers. These are free events led by Aperture experts and photography professionals. It’s a great opportunity for you to learn more about Aperture firsthand, or for someone you know who is curious about this professional photo management software.

Upcoming Test Drives are in Baltimore and Cupertino, and the next Wedding Workshops are in Baltimore and Jackson, MI. You can check the latest schedules by clicking on the “Register” button on either the Test Drive and Workshops for Wedding and Event Photographers pages. I’d bookmark them :)

Adobe Lightroom has the best grayscale conversion technique I have ever used. It is so intuitive and easy that I find myself converting a large number of my images to Grayscale. In the Develop Module, at the top of the right panel there is a choice of Color or Grayscale. By clicking Grayscale your image is automatically converted to black and white.

And by using the Before and After split screen you can see how you are adjusting the black and white image with the color version referenced just next to it as in the image below. To create the split screen click on the X|Y icon in the toolbar (2nd from the left).

Once you have the images next to each other in both color and grayscale you can use the Grayscale sliders (see image below) to adjust the black and white tones. The Grayscale Mixer box is just below the Tone Curve box, the third down from the top. Lightroom gives you very specific control of each color channel and since you can see which color you are working on it is a very intuitive process of working up your black and white image.

The grayscale mixer palette shows up with auto adjustments already made but you can adjust the sliders individually to adjust the grayscale image. Also, don’t forget that you can still adjust your exposure, curves, contrast and vignetting as well. Using the Targeted Adjustment Tool in the Grayscale panel allows you to adjust the tones any where in the image just by clicking on that section and moving the mouse up or down. This is a super slick method for working directly on the image. [See my earlier blog post on Targeted Adjustment Tools if you don’t know about these.]

I prefer to adjust the individual colors in the Before and After mode so that I can see which colors are where and which grayscale slider I need to use to adjust that color. In the image above I have also introduced a small amount of vignetting to drive the viewers attention to the center of the image. This collection of tools along with the grayscale mixer makes for a powerful combination.

I normally create a Virtual Copy (right click on image > Create Virtual Copy) of my image before converting to black and white so that I have both a color and a grayscale version of the image. When you export grayscale images out of Lightroom and open them up in Photoshop you will notice that they come in with an RGB profile. I normally convert them to Grayscale in Photoshop so they take up less space on my hard drives.

That’s it for this week. Black and white photography isn’t dead yet!

Adios, Michael Clark

Late last year, when Apple was showing off the great new features of Aperture 1.5, I was lucky enough to work the Aperture booth at the PhotoPlus Expo in New York City. There were about 20 Macs running Aperture and Apple had created a custom configuration to show off some of the new features of 1.5. Some of my favorite customizations were the Adjustment Presets that had been set up to create artistic and creative effects.

I recently recreated some of my favorite Presets and I’ve had a fun time exploring the effects that can be achieved with this technique. For each of these, make your adjustments to a sample photo and then click the Preset Action pop-up menu and choose Save as Preset.

A few Presets I’ve been experimenting with lately:

• High Contrast, Muted: In the Exposure Adjustment, drop the saturation to .50 and move the brightness up to .20 and the contrast to .35 or so.

• Desaturate Cools: In the Color Adjustment, drop the saturation for green, cyan, and blue to -100.

• Desaturate Warms: In the Color Adjustment, drop the saturation for red, yellow, and magenta to -100.

• Invert Colors: This one’s more fun than practical, though it can yield some interesting results: in the Color Adjustment, drag each color’s hue adjustment to 60 and the range to 2.00.

One thing to keep in mind: Each adjustment has its own Preset Action pop-up menu. So there’s no way to create Adjustment Presets that apply multiple adjustments at once — say an Exposure Adjustment and a Color Adjustment at the same time.

Are other Aperture users creating Adjustment Presets for creative effects as well? Please feel free to share your favorites in the comments.

Here’s some examples of the Presets above:

Original Image

Desaturate Cools Preset

High Contrast, Muted Preset

Invert Colors Preset

What has a flexible rubberized tube, like a short version of the hose you find on a vacuum cleaner, and a piece of optical glass at the end? Why, my Lensbaby, of course: a specialized interchangeable lens that fits Nikons, Canons, and other dSLRs. The point of this somewhat bizarre but dearly beloved piece of photo gear? To allow a photographer to control the portion of a photo that is in focus. Lensbaby adherents call this in-focus area the “sweet spot.” Another way to put this: a Lensbaby is an SLR camera lens that allows selective focus with one area of a photo (the sweet spot) in sharp focus surrounded by gradually increasing blur.

View this photograph larger. Read more about this image made with a Lensbaby.

Lensbabies come in three varieties: the original Lensbaby, Lensbaby 2.0, and the recent addition to the Lensbaby family, the Lensbaby 3G. The original Lensbaby and the Lensbaby 2.0 are pretty much the same conceptually, although the Lensbaby 2.0 is “brighter, sharper, and faster” as well as more expensive than the original Lensbaby. The Lensbaby 2.0 has a better piece of optical glass on the end, stops down to f/2.o rather than the f/2.8 offered by the older version, and costs $150 versus $96 at retail.

As you can easily see in the pictures below, the Lensbaby 3G (it retails for $270) is an altogether more elaborate affair than either of the classic Lensbaby models.

Original Lensbaby Lensbaby 2.0	Lensbaby 3G

Whichever Lensbaby you use, don’t expect electronic communication with your camera. You focus by positioning the camera with Lensbaby attached where you want it, and by pushing and pulling the vacuum hose part of the Lensbaby. This sounds a little wild, but actually focusing the Lensbaby works pretty well. (Note: the Lensbaby 3G also has a collar you turn for fine focusing.)

You set the diaphragm of the lens (this is the lens opening, also called the f/stop) by placing a magnetic metal disk with a round opening in the front of the lens. Lensbaby calls these aperture thingees “levitating aperture disks,” and a complete set of these comes with each Lensbaby, along with a handy-dandy levitating aperture disk holder attached to a tool for removing the disks from the lens.

For the most part, you make exposures in manual mode based on trial and error, although with some cameras (such as the Nikon dSLRs) aperture-preferred metering does work.

Once you own a Lensbaby, you may be struck by the need to dress your Lensbaby up. You’ll be glad to learn that there are a full line of accessories for your Lensbaby, including close-up filters and “creative” aperture disks (these last are disks like hearts and stars, and even blank disk slugs that let you cut your own shapes). The ability to capture close-ups with the Lensbaby adds a very important facility to this lens.

It was great to be able to control the sweet spot of focus with the Lensbaby 2.0, but one significant drawback was that this usually meant positioning the bellows tube of the lens by hand. There was no way to lock it in place. This was a significant limitation, because it meant that long exposures were out of the question. In addition, if you had pulled or pushed the Lensbaby tube, you couldn’t expect to repeat what you had done exactly making bracketing and controlled exposures difficult. The Lensbaby 3G overcomes these obstacles, although it also introduces a degree of complexity into the Lensbaby universe.

With the 3G, in addition to the tube, lens, and place for aperture discs, the 3G sports a mechanism for locking the Lensbaby down, focusing posts, and a barrel focusing ring. You squeeze release pins together to unlock the 3G, and you use the focusing post knobs to fine-tune the positioning of the “sweet spot.” See Not Your Father’s Lensbaby for more details on using the 3G.

Lensbabies have been used for every conceivable type of photography, from romantic wedding shots, to creative product and fashion work, and for stunning flower macros. So why should you try out a Lensbaby? I’m a great believer in a new lens as a way to jump start new ways to see, and certainly the Lensbaby is new. It’s easy to use, will give you a different view of the world, and its distinctive simplicity will give a boost to your creativity.

View this photo larger. Read more about this image made with a Lensbaby.

For more information about Lensbaby: Lensbabies website; Not Your Father’s Lensbaby; Lens Baby Burning Flowers Bright; Working That Lensbaby Macro.

Next to attaching keywords to digital photos, rating them in any digital management program is a necessary hassle. And it doesn’t make the process any easier when you have hundreds or thousands of images to rate on a regular basis.

So for this post, I thought I’d share my current ratings process. I’m always looking for better, faster methods, but this approach seems to work best right now.

Though most digital management rating systems typically offer some range of 1-5 stars, I found that it takes too long figuring out if an image is a 2 or a 4 star photo. Three and five stars are easy, but ratings in between are just an agonizing waste of time. So for my purposes, I rate photos either as Reject (the number 9 on the keyboard), 3, or 5. No Command key needed. Click and rate. That simple. However, even though the clicking is easy, it’s still a challenge to separate the wheat from the chaff.

So here’s how I make the process a little faster.

Delete, Delete, and Delete Before Import

First off, I try to reject as many photos as I can before the importing into Aperture. As I’m shooting, I’m constantly looking back when there’s a lull in the shooting process and deleting photos that will absolutely not make it. We all know what those photos look like. They’re underexposed like burnt crisp toast. They’re overexposed like a white sheet of paper. They’re the ones with drooping and closed eyes; the back of someone’s head dead center; a fuzzy out-of-focused shot that has no redeeming creative value; or deep shadows that undermine the photo so badly there’s not a single feature in Aperture that will save it.

So I delete, delete, delete as often as I can. And sometimes when I start the import process in Aperture, I take a quick look at the selections that I may have missed and deselect them so they won’t get imported.

Reject, 3, or 5 Stars

Next, I wish Aperture had a way of rating photos as they are imported. But not yet. So after I import my photos into a project, I select all of them. I check to make sure the Primary Only feature is de-selected (the S key or Edit>Primary Only), and then I just hit the number 3 key to give all my photos for a project their first rating. If I need to quickly find if there are any unrated photos in a project, I just click Control-7 or select Unrated in the Search field at the top-right corner of the browser.

Most nearly all my photos for wedding projects are and will be 3 stars. That means they are on average okay shots and are acceptable for nice 4×6 prints. Many of the reception dance shots and candid group shots fall into that category, whereas portrait shots or powerful candid captures often get rated higher.

For my particular purposes as a wedding photographer, 5 star photos are ones that I think will stand out for my clients. They’re ones that I think might work well in an album or in a frame. They’re ones that I might include in a slide show or blow up for larger viewing. These favorite photos are rated from the perspective of my clients. Most of them don’t make the cut for my portfolio collection, but they stand out amongst the hundreds of other photos I took.

Because I only rate photos as Rejects, 3, or 5 stars, there’s no need to run a slideshow to rate individual photos. I’ve tried the slideshow rating system in the past and I simply found it a laborious method, even if I listened to my favorite music while doing so. Also, because I set up a Smart Albums to capture only 3 and 5 star photos, all the rejected ones disappear and show up in the Rejects Smart Album.

After rating all my photos with 3 stars, I either start selecting and adjusting photos that I think qualify as 5 star favorites, or I might (and should) keyword them all first, set up Smart Albums based on the keywords, and then work from there to Reject or increase the rating as I make adjustments.

The only other way I can think of to rate photos a little faster is to use a program like SteerMouse where I can configure my mouse to select and assign say a 5 star rating with a click of one of the mouse buttons. It’s something that I haven’t tried yet, but I’m always on the lookout for tricks that will reduce the time. Perhaps a programer will figure out a way to make a rating feature in which end users rate images based on what corner of the image they click. Not sure if that’s possible, but I’m sure there will be faster methods in future versions of Aperture.

In the meantime, I’d like to hear your approach to rating images. This is an area of my workflow that I’m always looking to improve, and I bet I can learn lots from you.

Adobe has just released a new version of Camera RAW and acknowledged that the next version (or update) of Photoshop Lightroom will contain the new features found in Camera RAW 4.1.

The main current features that have been improved are Sharpening and Noise Reduction. The brand new Basic color enhancement tool is called Clarity.

Sharpening - is really the main new tool in Camera RAW 4.1, those of you who are familiar with Photoshop and the Unsharp Mask filter will recognize the interface, with a slight twist to new and more powerful tools. The sliders available for controlling the sharpening are Amount, Radius, Detail and Masking.

Amount - self explanatory, allows you to control the degree of sharpening applied from a value of 0 to 150.

Radius - lets you determine the number of pixels on either side of the sharpening edge.

Detail - is the new word for threshold, a new word had to be used because this slider allows you to use the sharpening tool as a straight sharpen filter or as an unsharp mask filter, going from one extreme to another.

Masking - allows you to do on the fly masking of the non-edge areas with a high degree of masking variation from a value of 0 to 150.

Noise Reduction - I am personally not a big fan of noise reduction but do make (very conservative) use of it.. The main reason being that I would rather have a slightly noisy sharp picture, than a clear mushy one.

Clarity - I have not played with Clarity enough yet to say how much I will like it but I will for sure make use of it. The Clarity slider can be found together with Saturation and Vibrance sliders. It will take some testing to see how it fits in with the other settings. As near as I can figure it Clarity is a low contrast area enhancement filter, which in the right images could be very useful.

These are some fantastic new tools for Photoshop CS3 users and hopefully soon for Lightroom users too.

I work as a developer, and one of my interests is UI (user interface) design. I place so much value on this that I even started using the Mac platform more because I prefer the OS X user interface over that of Windows XP and Vista. Yes, working environment is that important to me.

Lightroom also has a very good UI design. Working within the Lightroom environment is more exciting for me than working in Photoshop and other similar programs.

What’s interesting to me is how Lightroom is logically divided into 4 modules to help the user maintain a good workflow. Prior to Lightroom, I used four different applications and had to navigate among these programs to export and import photos, build and export annotations (keywording), and even copy photos to make sure the originals didn’t get effected. With Lightroom, photos are only imported once and can then be organized, developed, printed and exported to the web as one task or exported in various format and sizes. Jumping back and forth in the workflow is quick and easy with all changes to pictures in modules instantly visible in other modules, no special action required, and without affecting the original images. The interface design helps even the most scattered photographers maintain a certain degree of organization.

Lightroom’s well-designed user interface compelled me to switch from other applications. And because it runs on both Mac and Windows, I had the freedom to change platforms too.