O'Reilly Digital Media

Last week while hunting for some info on Apple.com, I stumbled upon Apple’s online seminars website. This is a great resource of high-quality overviews, seminars, and demos, available as streaming Quicktime videos that can be watched anytime. And the best part? They’re free.

The seminars cover topics ranging from remixing with Logic Pro to compositing with Shake. And of course, there are some great Aperture seminars:

• Aperture for iPhoto Users is a 30 minute seminar that answers some of the most common questions that iPhoto users have when considering a move to Aperture.

• Overview and New Features of Aperture 1.5 details some of the features that were added to Aperture with the 1.5 release.

• Extending Aperture 1.5 includes demos of AppleScript and Automator scripting, plus integration with Keynote, iDVD, iWeb, and GarageBand.

Control-click on the loupe for the contextual menu

I set aside an hour and watched the Overview and New Features seminar, and even though I’ve been using Aperture 1.5 for over 6 months now, I still managed to learn something I never knew: to toggle between the standard Loupe and the Centered Loupe, try Control-clicking (or right-clicking) in the Loupe. The contextual menu provides access to all the settings you might want to toggle on or off. This is particularly useful if you’re using the standard Loupe, which doesn’t feature the drop-down menu that the Centered Loupe does.

Even for the seasoned Aperture pro, these seminars are definitely worth a look… If you check out the first or second seminar, you may recognize Joe Schorr, Senior Product Manager for Aperture — he’s a frequent guest on The Inside Aperture Podcast with Derrick Story.

Finally, if you’re interested in a live seminar about Aperture, be sure to check out the Aperture Road Tour, presented by the Aperture Users Professional Network. This multi-city tour will offer in-depth Aperture presentations on weekend days across the U.S. And full disclosure: I’m one of the instructors, so I hope to see some Inside Aperture readers there!

I am still in Siem Reap, Cambodia and I have to say that this experience has taught me that no matter how remote of an area I travel to from now on, I will never again travel without a laptop computer or Lightroom.

When I am not out taking pictures, I am at my hotel recovering from the heat and working on the days images. An added bonus in Lightroom is that it remembers everything you have done in your last session and it always returns to where you were last working. Making it easy to work for short periods throughout the day without losing your place.

The image I am going to work on today is of a young monk who I found relaxing in a hammock, in the fishing village of Kompong Phluk on the Tonle Sap lake near Siem Reap. The monk was having a mid day siesta in his hammock and I really liked the composition and the colours, but I knew that I had to shoot real fast before he started posing for me.

I did indicate that I would like to take pictures and he nodded in agreement but as I had predicted, he sat upright in the hammock and started posing almost immediately. Since I had very little time to get off that first shot, I could not pay very much attention to the background and had to hope that I could later fix it in my digital darkroom.

This is the original image with default Lightroom settings.

Rotation of the image with the crop tool to straighten the tree and column on the right, to me they are the most important vertical lines.

Slight adjustment of shadow Lightness and highlight Recovery. A large dose of Clarity and a slight Vibrance adjustment.

To get rid of the plates from the mid day meal and to focus more on the hammock and the monk, I changed to a panoramic 2:4 aspect ratio. I would love to get rid of the white board in the background too but that would be a major undertaking in Photoshop CS.

The final image.

More images from the same day of photography in Kompong Phluk can be found at http://dpmac.com/angkor/

As the rain continues to fall in Ulefoss, Norway where we are summering, and the children brave the cold water in spite of the wettest summer on record–see photo below–I have plenty of time to ruminate about things that may or may not be all that important. Right now I’m taking stock of Lightroom, wondering how it will be viewed in future years.

Not only does Lightroom make picture-(technically) perfect developing possible in an instant by using the panels in the Basic and Tone Curve sections, you are also given several means of affecting specific regions, colors, and special effects within Lightroom. That’s what I’ll discuss in this segment of the Milburn Lightroom Blog blab. Part IV will be all about incorporating regional processing in Photoshop and LightZone by accessing them from within Lightroom.

In the second part of my Aperture In Slovakia post, I wanted to mention how I used Aperture to plan out the final exhibition. At the end of the week, we made some tough decisions to come up with our final edit of three photographs per student.

One of the main goals of the intensive week of shooting was to get students outside their comfort zones. It is true for many, myself included, that too often we tend to shoot from eye-level, at usual camera-to-subject distances and don’t “work” the photo-taking process enough.

We tried to break free of the usual during this week, encouraging all to take chances and explore new ideas and angles, not thinking but feeling our way through, shooting more than normal and triggering the shutter on gut instinct. In the end, it really worked; the final results spoke to the importance of breaking away from the usual way of doing things to push to the next level in the photographic evolution.

Order

It was important to have a plan and vision for the final show. We had 36 images that needed to be displayed on eight panels, and we had to choose in advance which of the three images would be the dominant one, so it could be printed larger. These decisions needed to be made quickly and in time to get everything printed and ready for framing.

The light table made it possible to “see” the final show, panel by panel, experimenting with different sizes and layouts, insuring the final show would be as good as it could be. By creating a light table for each of the 8 panels in our final gallery show, it was easy to see what worked and what didn’t and to insure all 36 photos would fit.

Students were allowed, one large image, 60×40 cm and two smaller 45×30cm photographs. I made an album of all 36 final selects, and then put them in a general order that I thought would give a nice flow to the show from start to finish.

I then created a light table for each of the eight panels used to hang the work. I dropped the images onto each light table, I then Control>Clicked outside the light table area and minimized the size of the table for a tight fit.

Shirley Anne Wood

Then, by selecting all images on the table and Control>Clicking on one of the images, I scrolled down to “Arrange” and all the images neatly popped into order and I was ready to experiment. Contorl>Clicking on two or more of the images on the table gives you many options, to Align, Distribute and Arrange the images quickly and neatly.

By moving the images around, I confirmed which would be the big prints by making them bigger on the table to see how they worked with the others. Some of the panels would have 6 images, some just three but by the end of the process I knew that all 36 photos were included, and which were big (so I could tell the printer) as well as how everything worked together.

When it came time to mount the images on the panels, it was quick and easy since we had a great idea (short of a few tweaks) of what the final show would look like. Though I didn’t have access to a printer, if I did, I would have printed out each light table representing a panel in the show, for a schematic of the entire exhibition.

In last week’s post, I showed work from half the class. Here’s how the other half shot.

Shirley Anne Wood

Kristina Magdolenova

Herman Viktor Cater

Pavel Motovilin

Miro Kubik

Milan Veliky

We’re currently wrapping up a review of a high-resolution digital audio recorder for O’Reilly Digital Media. This handheld marvel records in Super Audio CD (SACD) format, and our reviewer has been gobsmacked by the audio quality.

The Korg MR-1 records at 64 times the CD sampling rate, using 1-bit converters.

Because SACD burners exist only in high-end mastering labs, the recorder comes with software to convert its recordings to more common formats. The idea is to capture archival recordings and then spin off lower-res dubs. Nonetheless, one of the applications Korg suggests is creating "your own hi-def CDs."

That got me wondering—how does the average Joe 44 do that?

How do you work with landscapes that show an extravagant dynamic range? I was down by the Bay photographing sunset. It was clear to me that the scene had great dynamic range, from the blown-out highlights in the clouds to the deep shadows in the rocks along the shoreline. My normal approach to this situation is a kind of ad-hoc HDR (High Dynamic Range) processing, although whether it really is HDR is a matter of definition. I’ll explain what I mean in a moment.

This time, I decided to take a set of different exposures and see how well the Photoshop CS3 HDR automation worked to automatically combine the exposures (hopefully exposing correctly for both the shadows on the right, the dark ocean, and the bright sky).

To set the HDR merge up, the camera was of course locked down in position on a tripod. I held the aperture constant (f/22), and made ten expsoures, varying the shutter speed between two seconds (the rocks) and 1/10 of a second (the brightest part of the sky).

View this image larger.

I tucked the set of exposures in a single folder (so I could add them all to the HDR automation in one fell swoop). When I looked at them in Bridge, I felt that the dark rocks were still too dark, even with the two second exposure. So I opened all the images in Photoshop, using a generic color balance setting for the RAW conversion, and opened (and saved) several versions of the exposure outliers, manipulating the RAW conversion to create an even greater dynamic range between the files.

After all this fuss, the results of running the HDR automation weren’t terrible, but I wasn’t thrilled. Photoshop also sent me up a notice saying I’d do better with straight, unconverted RAW files, so I tried the experiment again, doing it Photoshop’s way this time. These second results really were terrible.

I tried some pretty wild approaches to fixing the automated HDRs, including combining them and/or combining in some of the original images. However, Photoshop’s image alignment when it did the HDR automation had me very slightly out of register with the original images, so this didn’t really work.

OK, so I’m coming to the conclusion that I’ve come to before: combining images and image variants is something that humans do better than software (at least for the time being). I created the version of the image above using four layers processed at various exposure settings from one of the RAW “negatives” calibrated for the sky, and adding a layer from the two second version (calibrated for the dark rocks). A steady hand and the Photoshop Paintbrush tool is crucial for this kind of thing.

Is this really HDR? I’m not exactly sure: while it does extend the dynamic range of the original capture, it’s really more like a digital version of the zone system: exposing for the the highlights and processing for the dark areas.

This week I’m shooting the 2007 O’Reilly Open Source Convention along with Ubuntu Live 2007. Shooting two overlapping events in one week makes for lots of work. The joy of working these two shows is that they are filled with lots of people who enjoy photography. There’s something about geeks and photography that go well together. One of the major topics I’m asked about by these photo-loving geeks is Lightroom. And, as we talk about Lightroom, there’s an observation that comes up time and time again: “When I look through my pictures, first I see the image and then—POP—I see a tone curve or something applied. What’s up with that?”

Lightoom remembers just about everything you do while image editing, but if you’re tinkering a lot, the History pane can get quite tedious. In addition to History, I’ve started using the Snapshots function. When ever I get to a point where I like what I’ve done, I click the + button in the Snapshots pane, give it a number so I can remember where this adjustment fits in the order of things, and a descriptive label. Then I continue working.

As I continue experimenting with the image, I can always review the previous stages by mousing over the Snapshots title and seeing the preview in the pane above. If I want to return to that stage, I just have to click on the title itself. I could go on and wax about the virtues of non-destructive editing in general, but you already know that. The Snapshots function is a great way to take advantage of that.

In a world that is saturated with color, there is something about the elegant simplicity of black-and-white imagery that gets right to the heart of things. The removal of color allows our eyes and minds to focus on subtleties of shadow and shape in a way that’s different from our everyday visual experience. Creating a beautiful black-and-white image can be very satisfying and relatively easy to do. With Photoshop CS3, you can rob your pixels of color in Photoshop CS3 in many ways, from the classic Channel Mixer to the new Black & White command and Camera Raw’s Convert to Grayscale check box. Happily, each one of these functions put you in charge of the color-to-grayscale conversion process.

I’ll start with this image, from iStockPhoto photographer Joseph Jean Rolland Dube, and give you a glimpse the effects from three different options that Photoshop now provides:

Image by Joseph Jean Rolland Dube courtesy of iStockPhoto

Prior to Photoshop CS3, the best way to convert a color image to black and white was the Channel Mixer. Note that these values I used here add up to 100 percent, thus ensuring a consistency in brightness from color to grayscale. Happily, CS3 now tracks your total as you work so you don’t have to do the math on your own.

Photoshop CS3 introduces the new command Black & White command that gives you more control and flexibility. Instead of mixing channels, Black & White weights colors, making for a more subjective experience. It also means you’re not bound to make the values add up to 100 percent or any other total. Just raise a value to brighten a primary or lower the value to darken it.

Camera Raw 4 permits you to convert an image to black and white nondestructively, whether the image begins life as a RAW file or a JPEG, by using the Grayscale Mix feature of the HSL/Grayscale panel. Now we have dedicated controls that slightly exceed the capabilities of the Black & White command.

Note that many cameras give you the option of capturing a grayscale photograph from the get-go, but where raw images are concerned, it’s a fake. The color information is there, it’s merely turned off by a line of metadata, often one that Camera Raw doesn’t recognize and therefore ignores. But that’s okay, because all that color gives you a degree of post-processing control that didn’t exist in the days of traditional black-and-white photography. My recommendation: Don’t worry about the black-and-white setting behind the camera; save that decision for when you’re in front of your computer.

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

Aperture makes it easy to add a copyright to your images by including an option to add a watermark when you establish presets. The problem is that the colors of generic watermarks are hidden in some images and clash with others. Of course you could create watermarks in a variety of colors, but then you’d have to take the time to specify which one to use for each image you want to watermark. That defeats some of the convenience of using the presets.

My solution is to create a dimensional watermark that looks embossed and uses the colors in the image itself. To create a watermark for email pics do the following:
1. In Photoshop begin by opening a new file roughly the size of the email pics you normally send. For me that’s 600 x 600 pixels at 96 dpi.
2. Make sure to select a transparent background.
3. Next use the type tool to create a copyright. I like Snell Roundhand and use a font size of 24 pt.
4. In the Layers Pane add a Layer Style to the text layer. I use Emboss at the default settings, but you can opt to adjust the settings.
5. Next reduce the Fill level to zero. (If you leave it higher, then some of the original color you used to type in the information will show through.)
6. Crop closely around the watermark. If you leave a little space at the end of your name , the watermark will be placed back a corresponding amount from the edge of the picture.
7. Save the watermark as a Tiff file and be sure to enable transparency in the second save dialog that appears.
8. Open Preferences in Aperture and choose the Edit button by Email Export Preferences.
9. Click the option to add a watermark and choose the watermark you just created. I prefer it in the lower right corner. I’ve found that an Opacity of 0.5 works well for me. When the watermark is created this way and used for email pics I don’t need to use the Scale option.

You may need to create additional watermarks at other sizes for use with other Presets, but once you create them and set them up as presets, you can use them on any image.

One of the most common questions I hear Aperture users asking is “how should I organize my library?” At first Aperture seems pretty straight forward as far as organization goes. You create Projects which contain the images from a single shoot, and then you can create Albums, Web Galleries, and Light Tables below each project as you wish. You can use Queries to create Smart Albums within your Projects and so on and so forth.

Well, this all works just fine until you have amassed a few hundred Projects or more. And, if you are one of those photographers out there who is adopting Aperture midstream in your digital lifespan, you probably already have a pile of “Projects” waiting to be imported.

So, I have talked with numerous Aperture users and everyone seems to have a different way of managing their Library. Some prefer to keep things simple and just create a running list of Projects. They tell me things like “it is so easy to just scroll down the list and find the project you are looking for alphabetically.” Okay, well that works just fine if you always name your projects with some consistency.

Then there are the photographers who opt for the chronological approach. By using a hierarchy of “blue” folders these photographers arrange their Projects according to the date they were shot. Seems pretty simple, but finding projects based on your memory of when it was shot can be pretty tough, especially if you shoot a few times a week throughout the year. “What year did I go on that trip to Peru again?”

The truth is, Aperture allows you, the user, to organize your images just about any way you wish, with a few caveats. The main caveat being that an image must reside in a single Project. You can move images from Project to Project at any time, but a single image can never reside in more than one project.

So, I thought I would share a few tips that I find useful for organizing an extensive Aperture library. Of course, these are just tips and suggestions, so please don’t forget that each Aperture user (including yourself) will have a somewhat different approach to organization that works better.

Tip Number 1 - Use Favorites

At the top of the Projects pane you will see a few drop down menus. One of them says “All Projects” and the two on the right look like a plus sign and a star shape. You can mark any Project as a favorite. Just click the star shape drop down and click “Add to Favorites.” Whenever you want to view your favorite projects simply click the All Projects drop down and click Show Favorites. You can mark Albums, Smart Albums and everything else that you can see in the Projects pane as a favorite, and it’s a pretty handy way to filter your projects.

Tip Number 2 - Use Folders

Aperture offers the ability to organize your projects within folders. At first folders can seems a little strange in Aperture. Sometimes they are blue, sometimes they are sort of yellow. Well, it is pretty simple. If your folder exists at the top level above any projects, it will be blue, and in fact is an actual folder inside the Aperture library file. If the folder is beneath a Project in the hierarchy it will be yellow. So, blue folders can contain multiple projects, and yellow folders are folders within a single project.

Tip Number 3 - Use Albums and Smart Albums

Albums are a great way to add a more complex level of organization to your projects pane. Unlike Aperture’s Projects, Albums can contain images from any project, regardless of where they reside in the hierarchy. And, an album can even reside at the top level, outside the scope of a Project. So, albums offer a great way to group images from multiple projects together, or to separate images from within a project into subgroups. Lets say for instance you have shot five basketball games for your home team over the past few weeks. You probably imported each game as a separate project. Within each project you can create an album for your selects, and then, later, you could create a top level album containing a tighter edit from those selects spanning all five games for a portfolio. You could also do this with Smart Albums, they work the same way in the hierarchy, only they use a query to fill themselves with images.

Tip Number 4 - Use Folders To Organize Albums

One thing you might notice if you begin to create top level Albums or Smart Albums is that they get thrown into the list of projects alphabetically. If this seems to disorganized for you, simply make a top level blue folder and move your Albums or Smart Albums inside. Following the above basketball example you could make a blue folder at the top of the hierarchy called Best Basketball Shots. Within this folder you could have multiple albums or smart albums drawing on images from your entire catalog. You could even create a smart album that is a query search of this blue folder and contains only the 5 star images. The possibilities are pretty much endless!

Tip Number 5 - Decide What a Project Means to You

My final word of advice would be to decide what a Project means to you. For many a Project is probably a “shoot.” But, a Project can be just about anything. So be sure to come up with some type of standard. Some people prefer to think of a Project as “everything I shot in 2004.” Within the Project 2004 they might have numerous albums for each month. This is fine, but just remember the one rule in Aperture that is a Project can contain no more than 10,000 images. If you plan to take more than 10,000 images in a year, this approach might not work for you. Also, it pays to keep Projects fairly small in size as they can be easily exported and transfered to other Aperture libraries. Personally, I like to think of a Project as a shoot or an assignment. Sometimes an assignment will span multiple days and consist of a long list of “shoots.” At some point I have to decide if I want to organize the entire assignment as a single project, or perhaps as numerous projects within a single top level blue folder.

Luckily, Aperture is pretty flexible, I can always change my mind later, and reorganize things as I wish. I am always interested to hear how others organize their libraries, so please reply in the comments section.

Often, when I’m asked to speak at amateur photo events, the organizers have specific topics they want me to address. For example, last weekend I covered Adobe applications at Popular Photography’s Digital Days. Adobe, Sony, and a handful of other sponsors helped fund the two-day workshop.

Event organizer Phil Mistry working with attendees and models during a shoot at Digital Days. Photo by Derrick Story.

I think the current crop of Adobe applications are well designed, and I like showing budding photographers how to better use them. But I’m noticing a trend that I wanted to share with you. After the formal presentations, when I’m answering questions one on one, I always get, “But what about Aperture?” My first response is typically, “Well, you’ll need a Mac to run it.” That never seems to be a problem.

Then the conversation flows into Aperture’s features and how they stack up to those I just discussed on the stage. Anyone using Aperture knows that it compares very well to any photo management tool.

I’m posting about this because I think there’s a genuine interest in Aperture among amateur photographers. I know that Apple’s target customer is the pro shooter. Good choice — the app is perfectly designed for that level. But I think there are some real opportunities with the amateur crowd too. Many of them want the best possible tools, and they will do their homework before making a choice. Live presentations help that research.

Based on the questions I’m getting, maybe Apple should get more involved in amateur events… People want to hear what they have to say.

So, now that we have the fancy new sharpening sliders in Version 1.1 of Lightroom, the big question is what are the magic numbers to dial in for capture sharpening for your camera. The defaults are as in the image below: Amount = 25, Radius = 1.0, Detail = 25 and Masking = 0.

Before we get into the tool itself lets define a few things. There are three generally accepted forms of image sharpening:

Capture Sharpening: Sharpening applied to a RAW image that has had no in-camera sharpening. Basically because cameras have an anti-aliasing filter in front of the lens to slightly blur the image and avoid artifacts such as moiré and some other color issues we need to introduce a small amount of sharpening in the RAW processing to counteract this blurring effect and bring the image back to where it should be.

Creative Sharpening: This is basically sharpening used as a creative rendering of the image, and is sometimes only applied to parts of the image instead of the entire image.

Output Sharpening: Output sharpening is the last step in a workflow used when you resize an image for output to the web, print or for a slideshow. This is usually a much stronger amount of sharpening so that the images look nice and crisp when printed or for web output. Whenever you resize an image some of its apparent sharpness is lost and depending on the paper it might need an extreme amount of sharpening. An example of output sharpening is the sharpening options in the Print Module.

Now, let’s get back to the big question. During Photo Arts Santa Fe this past weekend here in Santa Fe, New Mexico I had the opportunity to ask Tom Hogarty of Adobe about the new sharpening sliders and their relation to capture sharpening at a Lightroom seminar. The word is Adobe has gone in and tweaked the setting so that for each camera the defaults are just about right for capture sharpening. To clarify, the default of 25, 1.0, 25 and 0 maybe appear to be the same numbers for every camera but they correspond to different amounts of sharpening based on the camera model. So a Canon camera which has a stronger anti-aliasing filter would have a stronger amount of sharpening applied (with the default settings) than say a Nikon camera which has a slightly weaker anti-aliasing filter.

What this boils down to is that you can pretty much leave the sharpen settings at their default for capture sharpening if you don’t want to mess with it. Because of the Detail slider it seems that the capture sharpening is a little more focused on the edges and not the fine details which is very nice for skies, skin and other parts of an image you wouldn’t want to introduce sharpening to - and in effect extra noise.

Of course, the new sharpening feature can be used as a creative tool as well so it is a capture sharpening tool plus a little more. If you have portraits you may want to accentuate sharpening in the eyes but not on the skin. In this instance the use of the Masking slider can really help out and give you a capture sharpening and some creative sharpening as well.

In my experimentation, I have found the defaults to be very good with my Nikon D200 and D2x. I have decided to decrease the Radius from 1.0 to 0.5 for my images just because I wanted to have a finer sharpening effect and not overdo it with the capture sharpening. I might change back to the defaults depending on my subject and with more experimentation but for now those are the numbers I am using with a D2x, my main camera.

For a very in-depth and complete explanation of the new sharpening sliders check out Martin Evening’s sharpening article over at Lightroom-news.com:

http://lightroom-news.com/lightroom-11-update/sharpening/

We now have a much improved and vastly more powerful set of sharpening sliders than ever before in the RAW processing stage of an Adobe product. They are fairly complex so reading Martin’s article would be a good idea - but once you get the hang of them they are very useful. Please note, I did not intend to write an in-depth blog post on how the sharpening sliders work per se. Only to comment on their use for capture sharpening and the relevant settings for that use. There are much more knowledgeable and qualified Adobe experts than I who have written excellent tutorials on the sharpening sliders like Martin’s article above.

That’s it for this session. See you next week….

Adios, Michael Clark

This is cool: Simply adding &loop=1 to a YouTube <embed> tag makes the video loop forever. Check it out with this short clip of a Pong-playing watch from Make magazine. (Be sure to click the small play button below the video, not the big one in the center.)

Despite just writing an article on hacking embedded videos, I never thought to mess with the YouTube embedding tags, which are right out in the open.

Jake Luddington, on whose excellent blog I first saw this trick, also explains how to make an embedded YouTube video play automatically. Both his techniques involve removing the <object> tag and modifying the <embed> tag. I’m not sure if there’s any downside to that besides losing XHTML compliance.

I originally got this cool Iris ensata ‘Azuma-kagami’ as a bare root plant from White Flower Farms, planted it in my garden, and forgot about it. Yesterday, we saw this flower. It struck me as surpassingly beautiful, and I photographed it yesterday and today in-studio.

For this shot, I photographed the Iris ensata ‘Azuma-kagami’ (I do like how the name of this flower rolls off my tongue) vertically with a light box behind it. I lit the flower from the front with a tungsten spot equipped with a diffuser and barn doors.

To make the photograph, I used my 85mm perspective correction Nikon lens. This is a really neat hunk of glass, but entirely manual. You even have to stop the diaphragm down manually with a push button when you’re ready to make the exposure. Weird to be so analog in the digital era, but hey if it works…

Iris ensata ‘Azuma-kagami’, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

The base exposure on the Iris ensata ‘Azuma-kagami’ is (at ISO 100) 3 seconds and f/48 (one of the nice things about this lens is how far it stops down). I layered in a second, darker exposure for parts of the flower at 2 seconds (still at f/48).

Related stories: Iris, Scanning the Iris.

I don’t shoot much digital video. In fact, I don’t own a camcorder, so any video I shoot gets captured as an .avi file on my Canon point-and-shoot. So it may seem surprising that I have any use for iMovie. But as I’ve written about before, Aperture makes its library available to all the iLife and iWork applications through the iLife Media Browser. So if you start to think of Aperture as the content hub in your photography workflow, you can begin to think of applications like iMovie, iWeb, and Keynote as modules that let you create multimedia content with your images. Any adjustments or organization decisions you make in Aperture are reflected in the Media Browser, and images can simply be dragged-and-dropped right into your video, Web, or presentation projects.

Back to iMovie as an example. Next time you have a few minutes and you’re feeling creative, pick five or six compelling images from your Aperture library and try creating a 30 second video project in iMovie:

First, in Aperture, create a new keyword named “iMovie Experiment” and add it to the metadata of your selected images. Then, create a new Smart Album at the root level of your library and set it to match images whose keywords contain “iMovie Experiment”. Now you’re done with Aperture. You can even quit it at this point to be sure that you are maximizing the system resources available to iMovie.

Now launch iMovie and create a new project. Name it “Aperture Experiment” and pick a video format. For our example I’ll choose DV Widescreen, but for larger, high-definition video you can experiment with the various HD formats. Click Create, and iMovie fires up with your project ready to be edited.

Click on the Media button in iMovie and choose Photos from the top tabs. Both your iPhoto and Aperture libraries will be available here, so be sure your looking under Aperture and select the iMovie Experiment album. Click on your first photo’s thumbnail and iMovie will preview an animated video of this photo with the Ken Burns effect applied. Try experimenting with the Ken Burns effect settings: choose different start and end points, try different cropping and speeds. Or simply turn the effect off. When you’re satisfied, click Apply and iMovie will render video of this image to your timeline. Repeat the process for your other images and try experimenting with the transitions available under the Editing button: choose a transition and drag it in between two video clips in your timeline.

The possibilities here are endless, and you’re not going for perfection. Just try exploring iMovie and seeing what the possibilities are for creating video content from your photos. When you’re done, you can export your project as a Quicktime movie, or send it to iDVD for burning to disc.

Are experienced Aperture users out there using iMovie for this type of video authoring? Feel free to post comments, suggestions, and links to your video projects in the comments.

I’m sitting at the event in Denver today which is the last stop on our West Coast leg. The events have all been really fantastic and there are some great developers out there looking to build on Adobe AIR. But it’s also been fun for us as a team to do this trip.

We’ve all gotten to know each other really well and shared a lot of fun times. Going on a 2 week bus trip with your co-workers may not sound like most people’s idea of a good time, but I think all of us would do it over again (heck, we’re doing it again in 3 weeks). We’ve stayed in a lot of fun hotels and been able to see parts of the country in a way that we wouldn’t normally see. From standing in the middle of the desert at 3:00 in the morning to dealing with record breaking heat in Vancouver, BC, it’s been quite a trip.

I’m looking forward to the East Coast leg, so if you’re on that side of the country, come check it out. We’ll see you in Atlanta!

Why Aperture has a very nice collection of image adjustment tools, it lacks the ability to perform any kind of distortion correction. If you’re shooting with a wide-angle lens that has trouble with barrel distortion, then you won’t have any way to correct these issues inside Aperture. Photoshop provides excellent barrel and pincushion distortion through the Lens Correction filter, but if you don’t have Photoshop you’re out of luck.

LensTweaker, a $30 application from TweakerSoft.com gives you a simple way to perform barrel and pincusion distortion. LensTweaker provides an interface consisting of a single dialog box that provides sliders for adding either barrel or pincushion warping to an image. So, if your image has a bit of barrel distortion, you would warp it back to normal by adding a little pinchushioning.

LensTweaker provides two different sliders with different degrees of effect. The first slider is fairly coarse and allows you to make broad changes to your image. The second slider adds a degree of fine-tuning.

For automatic correction, LensTweaker allows you to profile a specific lens at a particular focal length. To profile a lens, you print out a test pattern and then shoot a picture of it with the lens at the appropriate focal length. LensTweaker provides an assistant that will analyze that image and create a profile designed specifically to remove the appropriate distortion from images shot with that lens at that focal length.

LensTweaker can’t handle raw files, so you’ll have to tell Aperture to export versions in TIFF or JPEG format. You can then correct these images in LensTweaker and import the results back into Aperture (or you could define LensTweaker as your External Editor, and round-trip your images from Aperture into LensTweaker). LensTweaker also provides straightening controls, and some simple image adjustments, though you’ll probably want to perform these operations in Aperture.

Most images that suffer from barrel distortion also have trouble with vignetting. Unfortunately, LensTweaker offers no tools for vignette correction, and neither does Aperture. Photoshop’s Lens Correction filter remains the best way to remove vignetting.

LensTweaker delivers good quality, although extreme corrections can end up a little soft. It’s definitely not suitable for dealing with extreme corrections, such as turning a fisheye image into a corrected rectilinear image. For 30 bucks, though, it offers a handy feature that Aperture sorely needs, and checking out the free demo is time well-spent.

Well it is official now, Angkor Wat is not one of the New Seven Wonders of the World. Here in Siem Reap, the town just down the road from the Angkor Temples, there is of course a lot of disappointment. But the news does not stop the tourists and the photographers from arriving here in ever increasing numbers.

Unfortunately this is the extremely rainy part of the rainy season, so I have stuck close to the town and not had a chance to explore the temples yet on this trip. What I have done so far though is put together an on-line trip report about traveling overland from Thailand and generally enjoying the town of Siem Reap, in those moments that the rains decide to let up.

My trip reports can be found at - http://dpmac.com/angkor/

My traveling camera is a Nikon D40, I decided beforehand that my main lens for this trip would be the Nikkor 12-24mm DX. I have several other lenses with me but so far I have not used them and have now decided to just leave them in the room while I go out, so I can travel lighter. I am doing a lot of walking, so even a few ounces less weight is making a big difference.

I took my trusty Mac laptop with me on this trip and to make things easier (in case I take a lot of pictures) I exported my previous catalog (image database) out of my computer (to an external hard disk drive and a DVD) and started with a clean catalog for the trip. I also took a small (80GB) FireWire pocket drive with me for back-ups, this drive is powered by the computer so no extra power supplies are needed, only the one for the computer.

Every time I come back to my hotel room, I immediately download my memory cards to my internal and external drives and then import the new images from the internal drive to the Lightroom Library. I still don’t let the application do the import and back-up directly from memory cards (old habits die hard) and I import directly from the internal drive file location (choose the - Import photos at their current location - selection of possible file import methods). This leaves plenty of room on my internal drive for more new images.

My first task in Lightroom after importing the images, is to find suitable images for my daily trip reports. Since I am limited on computer time while traveling and the trip reports are mainly aimed at cross-country travelers, I just do some very quick editing of the images in Lightroom. The editing mainly consists of Crop, Exposure, Lightness, Clarity, and maybe a Curve or two. I then I export the images to the appropriate file folder in the on-line version of my website. After placing the image on the page, I then add some descriptive text and upload the new pages and images to my website.

As a side note of interest to photographers, I am currently staying at the Peace of Angkor Villa in Siem Reap, which is run by British photographer Dave Perkes and specializes in providing services and tours for photographers visiting the Angkor Temples.

The Peace of Angkor Villa - http://peaceofangkor.com

Next week we will hopefully have a report on photographing (and processing in Lightroom) the Angkor temples themselves.

I spent most of the morning recently photographing water drops on a single pink Gerbera daisy in my garden. This was engrossing, fun, and satisfying. As I worked, I realized the task required a great deal of patience. But not much fortitude: my garden was my model, I did not have to shlepp my equipment very far, and I literally had the comforts of home. I also thought about the paradox of macro photography. The heart of the matter in these water drop photos is shown within the world of the reflections. To successfully capture the reflected world I distanced myself with a complicated apparatus including a telephoto macro lens.

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

While it is possible to create wide-angle macros, my normal process is to use equipment that disturbs my models (for example, a water drop on a Gerbera) as little as possible.

View this image larger.

Forget about auto-focusing. There’s no way this technology works for the macro, and it is annoying to hear your poor lens chug back and forth, searching, always searching, for the point of focus that is never to be found.

It’s never easy to successfully find the best point of focus on a very small and constantly moving subject like a water drop. I find it works to concentrate on an idealized water within the water drop, and to focus to bring out the water drop essence that I’d like, paying only partial attention to the water drop that seemingly is (as seen in the camera viewfinder). This is a sideways, allusive focusing technique. It helps me capture the heart of the matter.

After three years of “community” Mandrake Linux, my work PC has run out of steam. Lots of rubbish and out of date: time for a spring clean and a new operating system!

So I decided to do things the easy way: go down to the newsagent and pick a nice looking distribution from a magazine DVD and install that. So off I went, and returned with Linux Mint. Reading up on it sounded good: Ubuntu. multimedia, some nice extras.

The bottom line: Linux Mint is a really nice distribution for vanilla home systems, and good for office PCs. I haven’t got everything working yet, and but the package management and file service systems are really good. The desktop has a couple of problems in the version I am using, but overall it feel small, neat, unbloated. It is certainly the most un-UNIXy UNIX I have used; several times I found that I was much more successful in fixing a problem by thinking “What would I do in Windows or on a Mac?” that “What do I do in the shell?”

Taking the DVD out, I was a little disappointed: it turns out that the version was Bianca Linux Mint Light, which is several months old and fairly stripped down. But at least it takes me from 2004 software to 2007! So not to worry.

The first hurdle in installing was that my DVD player was, in fact, bust. Lose an hour for that. Then I found that it wouldn’t boot from the disk unless in safe graphics mode. Lose an hour for that. Then it still wouldn’t boot, until I took out the second graphics card. Lose an hour for that.

Finally, it installs and boots OK. Setup is OK, and the partition manager is really great, even if it fails to resize properly the first time through. At last I manage to break free of my 1980’s system administration expertise and just have one big fat partition.

User account: My first freakout: it doesn’t ask for a root password, but uses the control list style Adminstrator permissions system: in fact, I cannot even find anywhere what the password for “su” is. But “>sudo sh” is just as good.

Next stop is the networking: it boots up using DHCP but I have static IPs. It configures OK, but there is a little icon on the desktop telling me there is no networking: it lies and confuses me. Lose half an hour. Rebooting doesn’t make the little icon work properly: I guess it just likes DHCP.

Next for disk mounting. First I have to change the UID and GID so that my system matches the servers. Nice utility to do that. But it isn’t smart enough to change the permissions on my home directory. So when I reboot, it fails and hangs. Oh dear. Reboot again, and cancel out into a shell, then use good old chown -R. Reboot and it all works fine.

What is nice, though, is that the old NTFS disk just comes up. And I have a little difficulty with figuring out how to mount remote disks. Under a control called “Shared Folders” it tells me I should download Samba and NFS support, I do that, and still a mystery. “Think Windows or Mac!” I say to myself, and sure enough in the File Browser I can look at the PC network and select directories to mount. The mount command on the menu is “Connect to this server”. The names of menu items are so un-UNIXy is it quite discombobsyouruncle.Rebooting, and the remote file mounts come up again properly: great.

Not so much luck with printers. The various forms provided don’t match the kinds of information from the config files I saved from the old Linux system. I’ll leave it to later.

I’m switching to Evolution for email for now. It configured very easily, no difference from Thunderbird really. Clicking on a PDF that the old Mandrake gv viewer barfed on earlier today, and it comes up in something called “Document Manager” and displays well. Good.

The download manager is very nice indeed. Much nicer than Mandrake. I install some updates fine, and Sun’s Java, but the shells don’t get the Java path added, however it looks like it has configured Web Start properly. Mint is just not oriented to shell users! Something to get used to.

Open Office comes up looking much nicer than it did on Mandrake. I guess that is GNOME rather than KDE.

The only downside of the Desktop GUI so far is that the buttons on the menu bar don’t bring the application forward. Very odd; must be a bug?

So still to get working: dual monitor, printing, and fixing that irritating wrong networking icon: not bad at all despite the poor start earlier. I am happy enough with Linux Mint that I might just move up to the newer Cassandra version immediately: it is certainly good enough that I have no inclination to try out another distro. (If I find anything to change my mind, I’ll put it as a comment below.)

I’m here in beautiful Liptovsky Mikulas, a four-hour train ride from Slovakia’s capital Bratislava, teaching a workshop on digital documentary photography. Of course, I have brought along Aperture, which has proven to be a teacher’s best friend and assistant extordinaire.

Arriving in this beautiful year-round vacation village popular with Slovakians for skiing in the winter and hiking in the summer, I didn’t expect to see an Apple Store–but there was a small Apple Authorized Reseller near the main square, selling iPods, iMacs and Macbooks.

I am here as one of 16 international teachers from nine countries at the Summer Photo School, a place where passionate amateurs and professionals pay just 200 euros to attend this intensive 9-day workshop, culminating in a final exposition where the work created here is showcased.

My class has students from all over Europe, including the only other Aperture user, a recent photo grad from England. Most of the students are from Slovakia, The Czech Republic, Russia, and thankfully, they all speak English.

Dominic Bugar

Eva Benkova

Rodion Yurga

Inside the no-frills communist era sixties-styled building, is our classroom, equipped with five PC’s. Seven students have their own laptops, of which two are Macs.

I have talked about Aperture as a teaching tool before, but this was to be an intensive test to see how Aperture performed, in a mostly PC environment.

In my opinion, the beauty of using Aperture as a teaching tool is how quickly and seamlessly I can bounce around the various images. I hop in and out of full screen often calling up the Adjustments HUD to make minor changes quickly.

I crop and toggle the M for Masters key to see the before and after to compare–all without interrupting the flow of conversation, actually encouraging the critiquing process, taking it to a higher level.

Dealing in an overwhelming PC environment in this small country of 5 million people in Eastern Europe was not a problem for me or Aperture. I had students save their best work from each assignment in a folder with their name on it on their desktop.

The daily takes were transferred onto their flash-drives or mine, and I then imported “Folders into Projects” and immediately, I have all the class work neatly stored in individual albums in seconds. For each student’s work, I batch- changed basic metadata and copyright info in seconds and edited overnight, rating the selects to a manageable number and I was ready to start the critique the next morning.
There were a variety of different cameras being used and I encouraged RAW Format shooting.

During the critiques, I would constantly choose several images at a time to compare them, which was great for making a point of comparison and I would often summon the loupe to magnify a small detail for critical viewing, in a split second.

This allowed me to show and compare subtle details in facial expressions and gesture, to emphasize their importance and that these small differences often make the difference between good and great photographs.

I have to tell you that the speed and usefulness of the editing features in Aperture were a joy to use in the teaching environment. Everything I do on my screen is projected onto the wall for all to see. The only limitation seems to be the quality of my older projector, where subtle adjustments are sometimes difficult to see clearly.

Maria Matejkova

Ivana Kucirkova

Patric Pavlacik

As you can see from some of the work here, the images the students produced were inspiring. More on my Slovakian/Aperture experience next week.

I’m visually oriented. Give me a well-designed UI and I’m happy. I have a limited memory for keyboard shortcuts. One keystroke is ok. Two is pushing it. Three or more… forget it. I especially like keyboard commands that follow some logic. Like “T” for toolbar. Maybe I’m getting old, but my brain is filling up and it takes a while for keyboard commands to stick. After using Lightroom for quite some time now, here are a few keyboard commands that have finally stuck:

The Clarity tool is a great addition to Lightroom 1.1. It’s become one of my favorite tools to use as it gives just the contrast bump that I’m typically looking for in an image. Most of the time, it gives just the right amount of pop and I’ve found that nearly all of my images benefit from some amount of its use. And, it’s surprising how many images I have that can tolerate a heavy application of the tool.

I’ve started running into a few cases, however, where the Clarity tool can give a bit too much pop or even the wrong kind of pop if used at too high a setting. So far, I’ve noticed this mostly on edges where there’s a very strong white edge against a medium toned background and the edge is very sharp. In these cases, I’ve found that it doesn’t take too much Clarity to produce an unnatural looking effect.

Now we’re at the point in the Lightroom workflow where we’re ready to move into working in the Develop module. Well, almost, anyway. Just before we do that, it’s a good idea to put the Library’s Sorting Order to User and then drag and drop to group shots that have the same white balance, exposure, and contrast considerations so that it’s easy to select the whole series for simultaneous developing.

For some types of shoots, you may need to send images to a client or colleague before you actually take the time to develop them. After all, you’ll spend less time developing if you only have to develop the images that are actually going to be used. So I flag all the images that I’m going to submit for consideration, make Virtual Copies of them in the Library Module, and then Auto Adjust each of them before exporting them to a JPEG folder that will be uploaded to the client. If the situation demands showing the client exactly what the finished develop might look like, I’ll also pick one shot for the series and develop that according to the workflow below. About half the time, it ends up being the chosen shot and then there’s no need to waste time on the rest of the images unless and until the time comes when you want to use them for other purposes.

Our Los Angeles event went really, really well. We had great turnout and the entire thing lasted over 12 hours with a lot of people sticking around for the whole thing. After the event, which ended at around 9:45, we all took a cab back to the hotel to pack and shower. Then around 1:00 we headed out for the looooooong drive from Los Angeles to Dallas. Google says the drive is about 22 hours, but for us it was more like 24. Luckily we had a lot of stuff to do on the bus, so we didn’t go *totally* crazy. Most of the time was spent coding or watching some movies in the evening.

Some of the guys woke up at 3:00 in the morning that night while we were driving in the Mojave Desert to stop, get out, and look at the stars. I wasn’t one of them because I was sleeping, but they said it was really cool and that it was the clearest they had ever seen the Milky Way. They also said they saw satellites and a couple of shooting stars. We ended up getting into Dallas about 1:15 in the morning, which was 3:15 Dallas time, so we checked in and went to bed.

We’ve got a chat application up on Ted Patrick’s website now, so if you want to chat with us while you’re watching the live video feed, you should check it out. Plus we’ve got a lot of photos up on the Flickr feed.

One of Aperture’s features is its ability to integrate with external editors, like Photoshop. But given the image adjustments that we can make within Aperture, one has to wonder why we really even need Photoshop. After all, between buying expensive cameras, lenses, and computers, it’d be great to not have to spend even more money to buy a very expensive program. Heck, I was just out on a photo trip for the past 10 days and only launched Photoshop once. I did all of my exposure, color, levels, etc. work in Aperture and didn’t need Photoshop.

Well, why did I launch Photoshop, you might ask? I had a task that Aperture can’t do at all–combining images. I’d taken a few sets of images over the week that I intended to combine, panoramas as well as montages (multiple exposures, something Canon digital cameras sadly can’t do in-camera although some Nikon cameras can). For the panoramas, CS3’s improved automerge tool is really amazing, and just by exporting my images, selecting them in Photoshop, and waiting for a few minutes, I had a great-looking panorama. Creating the montage images was almost as simple, except I needed to manually drag each image into one master image and adjust each layer’s opacity. But if I hadn’t shot any sequences like this, I probably wouldn’t have opened up Photoshop at all during the week.

However, I might be deceiving you a bit at this point–as much as Aperture gives me while actively shooting and doing coarse adjustments/editing, I am sure that I’ll take a number of these images into Photoshop before calling them done. For instance, I have a very nice image of a honeybee in flight, but I want to adjust the lighting (think dodging and burning) to help emphasize the honeybee. This complicated processing involves layer masks, adjustment layers, and various other tasks that again, I can’t do in Aperture. I probably also have a number of images that I’ll want to run through a noise-reducing tool before printing or trying to sell, just to make them look even better.

Speaking of making things look better, my sensor would look a lot better if I managed to clean it completely. About 200 images have this glob of dust on them that look like Pac-Man throwing up. Although I can get rid of most small specks of dust with Aperture’s spot patch tool, I always need to use Photoshop’s clone and heal tools, which just let me paint whatever shape I need, for these odd-shaped globs. To some people, this is part of the finishing process, but I like getting rid of dust as early as possible, even before posting a small version of an image to the web, whereas I’ll do other things like noise reduction and sharpening at the desired output resolution towards the end of my workflow.

To answer the question I posed initially, I think that yes, Aperture users do still need Photoshop. Even if you’re like me and 80% (or more) of your workflow is now exclusively in Aperture, that other 20% matters a lot. How do you readers feel? What do you use Photoshop for?

So I read in this article on Salon.com about SoundExchange’s “deal” with Web broadcasters. After pushing internet radio to the brink of extinction, they now graciously extend their hand and offer salvation - for a price.

I recently came across a cool add-on for Aperture. David Riecks, who currently chairs the SAA Imaging Technology Standards Committee, has a small but very useful product called Controlled Vocabulary. The keyword dictionary is available for Aperture users as well as Lightroom, iView Media Pro and a list of many other popular image management applications. For $69.99 you get over 11,000 keywords organized in a hierarchal structure and a 1 year subscription of updates. David was nice enough to send me an evaluation copy and I have finally gotten around to taking it for a test drive, so let’s have a look.

Installing the Controlled Vocabulary is as simple as hitting the Import button in the HUD and pointing to the aperture.txt file found in the downloaded folder from Controlled Vocabulary. It may take several minutes to load the list of over 10,000 words, and as stated in David’s install instructions “resist the temptation to use the Force Quit option” during this import process. Once you have loaded the keywords you are off an running. The keywords will be appended to your current keyword list. Once you have added the list, it might be a good idea to click the “lock” button in the Keywords HUD. This will prevent the accidental addition of other keywords and will maintain your “controlled” list.

David has some really great advice on keywording images on his website. He also has a pretty good tutorial for Aperture users on how to use the Keyword HUD and metadata inspector. Keywording can become an art for some, so be sure to check out David’s advice.

Up until now, I have been one of those people who basically just types out the keywords for an image as I go. I usually just look at my picture and type a list out by hand. Now that I have a controlled vocabulary, I will be able to search for terms and add them from the HUD. It is a different way of working, but I have a feeling that in the long run using a controlled vocabulary will make finding my images much easier. I can always add a few special keywords to the list if I need to, but for the most part, I plan to stick to the list.

If you have ever worked with a stock agency you will know how important keywording can be. Many agencies use their own controlled vocabulary, so it will be interesting to see how David’s list matches up with places like iStockPhoto who ask their photographers to go through a process called disambiguation for each photo they submit.

For more information on David’s keyword list, check out his website at http://www.controlledvocabulary.com

If you glance back on my previous posts, you’ll notice that I’ve largely written about ways I try to increase my productivity workflow in Aperture. Like many of you who process large volumes of images, I’m always looking for hacks and tools that reduce the amount of clicks and steps I need to go through to complete tasks.

Many of us use Aperture and other similar programs because of its batch processing functions. We learn the shortcut keys and we try to organize our photos by image date and stack them so that we can more effectively batch process several photos at a time.

Well, I’ve already written about a customized Aperture-focused keyboard that may help you with shortcut keys for the batching process, and now I would like to share another little tool that I use called SteerMouse. It’s been around for a while, but if you’ve never heard of it or are not using it, believe me you’re missing out on a great time saving tool.

Basically, SteerMouse is an advanced driver for USB and Bluethooth mouses in which the buttons, wheels, and the cursor can be customized to perform various keyboard and cursor actions.

Right now I have a simple three-button, click wheel Logitech USB mouse. Nothing really special about it, and I need to seriously upgrade. But with SteerMouse, using this simple mouse can be is a time saver. In SteerMouse, you can apply different controls for different applications. So while you have the default controls for basic selecting, right-clicking on items, or scrolling, you can change the function of the buttons and wheels for different applications.

Lifting and Stamping with Steer Mouse
Because I do a lot of lifting and stamping in Aperture, I have programed the scroll wheel of my mouse to help me perform those functions. I push the wheel forward to lift metadata and scroll it back to apply/stamp copied metadata. When I use the SteerMouse functions this way, there’s hardly any need to use the equivalent shortcut keys or to even right- click for those same functions.

I’ve also programed the click wheel function of my simple mouse to show and hide the Project Panel (shortcut key W), which is another action I perform regularly in Aperture.

I use these same buttons and scrolling wheel in slightly different ways for other applications, but now I’m looking for a more advance USB mouse that provides a few additional buttons and functions to get even more out of SteerMouse.

From my brief experience with this driver mouse tool, I can say that Apple’s MightyMouse, though elegant in design, is way too simple for what SteerMouse can make it do. And because there’s probably at least four or five functions we repeatedly use when working in Aperture, an advance mouse is essential to productivity.

To license SteerMouse, you pay a cool $20. I’ve used my license on three computers so far and haven’t had to pay penny more. It performs extremely well. I’ve experienced no problems with the driver, and it’s seriously easy to set up and make customizations for Aperture and other programs. And finally, the SteerMouse homepage shows a nice list of mouses the driver works with. Why Apple hasn’t created a driver like this is beyond me to understand.

Several days ago I spent an afternoon talking about digital workflow with a few fellow professional photographers here in Santa Fe: Nevada Wier and Jamey Stillings. Both are incredible, world-class photographers. During the course of our workflow discussion I started to think about the Photoshop & Adobe Camera Raw (ACR) versus Lightroom question. Nevada tends to shoot thousands of images while on assignment in remote corners of the globe - just as I do. On the other hand, Jamey has different workflows depending on the assignment. For some assignments he shoots a large number of images. For others, mostly advertising shoots, the number of frames captured is relatively low. So for him it made sense that he has two different workflows, one for each type of assignment.

After talking with Nevada and Jamey last week I thought I’d blog about a Photoshop/ACR workflow versus a Lightroom workflow. Both are valid workflows. What it comes down to is what makes more sense for the type of shooting that you do. Below are some pros and cons for both workflows (and I am sure I have missed lots of pros and cons - feel free to let me know any I’ve missed):

Lightroom Pros:
• Super Fast Image Editing
• Spectacular User Interface
• Logical workflow progression
• Ability to Print and create Web Galleries directly from RAW image files
• Quick Metadata and Keyword Insertion
• Much faster editing and processing of a large number of images

Lightroom Cons:
• Have to Import images to work on them
• Slows down with over 10,000 images in the catalog
• For processing just one or two images this is a slower workflow

Photoshop Pros:
• ACR has the same RAW processing controls as Lightroom
• ACR Histogram is specialized to the chosen color space (Lightroom is locked into ProPhoto RGB color space with an sRGB tone curve)
• Don’t have to Import images to open in Bridge or ACR
• Ability to customize processing of RAW images with Photoshop Actions

Photoshop Cons:
• Slower, less precise editing features in Bridge
• Processing lots of images requires actions and can be slower than exporting images from Lightroom
• Much slower with editing and processing a large number of images

In the end I think it really comes down to the number of images you need to edit because Lightroom, at least in my experience, is many times faster in the editing phase of a workflow than a Bridge, ACR and Photoshop workflow. In my work, shooting adventure sports, I shoot many images even on quick stock shoots. I am almost always shooting at 5 frames per second or more so Lightroom makes more sense because it allows me to compare very similar images easily and mow through images quickly to find the real gems.

In contrast, as in Jamey Stilling’s case when he is shooting an ad campaign and fires off less than a hundred images the faster editing advantage of Lightroom isn’t such a big deal. The reality is that only one image is needed. And the odds are good that image is obvious even before the photo shoot is over because an assistant and the art director are reviewing images as they are being shot - so in this case working up that RAW image in ACR 4.1 which has all the same features and power of Lightroom makes a lot more sense. It doesn’t make sense to waste time importing images if all you need to process is one or two images.

If you are on the fence as to whether or not Lightroom is worth the extra $299 then maybe this will help. But for me, I’d say if I have to edit more than 100 images at any one time then Lightroom is the way I’d go for sure. Even in some cases where I only shot 50 images for an assignment, I have used Lightroom because I knew that I wanted to make virtual copies for black and white conversions.

The good news is that with the XMP sidecar files being written to your images (if you turn on that feature in the Lightroom and Bridge preferences) then Lightroom and Photoshop are totally compatible. So it is a win - win either way you go.

That’s it for this session. Hopefully you can get away from your computer and go have a few adventures. Now, please, for your own sanity, step away from the computer! It’s ok. It will still be there later. It won’t miss you too much…

Adios, Michael Clark

If you’d like to check out Nevada or Jamey’s work here are their websites:

http://www.nevadawier.com/
http://www.jameystillings.com/

that’s right, it’s my blog, and i say what i want! (and hey, if i don’t, who will?)
so, here’s a few odd places my work has shown up in recent popular culture:

1. Night At The Museum

i’m particularly proud of this one, because the kid in me loves that movie. my grandmother lived on riverside drive in new york, and i have fond childhood memories of walking down 81st to the museum in autumn, crisp air, leaves on the ground, and then … the grand entrance, the big echoing halls, and, oooo DINOSAURS!

so when they make a movie about all that cool stuff brought to life by the magic of digital photography, i’m there with bells on, baby! xmas day, imax 80-foot screen (that dinosaur gonna be BIG!), popcorn, soda, i’m five years old again …

early on, there’s a scene to establish larry’s (ben stiller) motivation: an encounter with his uber-geek arch-nemesis, Don, the “batman of stockbrokers “. As Don sips a latte and makes inane banter with our hero, the conversation is (mercifully) cut short by one of the six mobile devices attached to his belt playing a ringtone … and it’s one of mine.

In the Eisenhower-era movie The Incredible Shrinking Man, the hero begins shrinking after accidental exposure to radiation and insectiside. In the end, always growing tinier, after numerous battles with house cats, spiders, and successively smaller creatures, the hero keeps his dignity and soliloquizes, “So close - the infinitesimal and the infinite. But suddenly, I knew they were really the two ends of the same concept.”

With similar spirit and gusto, it amazes me how easily photography ranges from the cosmos of stars in their journey to the universe of the macrocosm.

When I looked at the scene of water drops in my garden on a sunny morning, I realized that to capture the sense of the macrocosm as a universe I needed to get down in the middle of the scene:

To accomplish the feeling of being right in the middle of the “water drop forest”, I knew the camera couldn’t be positioned to look down. There had to be a sense of being right in the middle of the universe of freesia and water drops. So I used a special tripod modified for close-to-the-ground macros, the Low-Boy from Kirk Enterprises. By the way, this tripod is also great for taking photos of small kids, it gets you at exactly their height.

Besides being low in height, I needed to be close-in to the drops and flower stems without disturbing them. To accomplish this, I used my 200mm Nikon macro telephoto lens. One of the neat features of this lens is a tripod collar, making the switch from horizontal to vertical very easy. In 35mm equivalency terms, on a Nikon dSLR, this would be a 300mm lens, bringing you approximately six times closer than optically “normal”.

I stopped the lens down to f/40 for maximum depth-of-field. One of the nice surprises was the star effect on the water drop on the left (a natural effect, not added in Photoshop), reminding me that the universe of the macrocosm has stars too.

We spent our first night on the bus last night. We got into Portland in the afternoon with not much time to spare. We had a lot of traffic between Seattle and Portland and also got into the wrong line at customs which delayed us a bit. The Portland event went really well with a great, enthusiastic crowd that was excited about Adobe AIR.

After the Portland event we went to the hotel a bit before getting on the bus at 1:00 AM and hitting the road for Las Vegas. We cranked up the volume on the bus sound system and watched Spinal Tap. After Spinal Tap we watched some episodes of the IT Crowd. Everyone slept well in the bunks so I’d say the first night as a success. We’re heading through California now and you can follow along on the tour website and the live cam!

O’Reilly Missing Manual editor Pete Meyers tries reading on his new iPhone. Check it out.

In the past couple of years of specializing in the workflow of digital photography and processing, there are two lessons I’ve learned above all others: (1) Any organized plan for a regular working procedure will save you hours of time and disaster over having none…and (2) One man’s workflow is another man’s folly. This is especially true of Lightroom, which continues to surprise me with its richness and power because it’s so well designed to look simple. Every day I seem to discover some useful new tweak, so I just roll it in to my listed routine and re-write the list if I decide the addition is worthwhile.

This series of blogs is what I’ve come up with so far. Part I here starts with my procedure for downloading images from the camera. Actually, I never download from the camera because I don’t want to get into that habit and then discover I have to use the camera while I’m downloading. Besides, using an external high-speed USB 2.0 card reader is faster.

First, I take the card out of my camera and use the standard routine to transfer the contents of each card into its own folder. I have one master folder on each drive called Drivename Photos. Each of the folder names in that folder starts with six digits that describe the date the folder was created, in this order: yymmdd.

That way, my folders are always sorted in perfect chronological order from oldest to newest. Following that date is the name of the subject matter that most broadly describes where or what was shot on that card. If the shots were taken for pay, that subject name is the name of the client or of the assignment or an abbreviated combination of the two. If there are several cards shot on the same day for the same assignment, I put all their contents into one folder. Then it’s much less likely that I’ll loose track of part of the assignment.

Aperture is great for adding metadata to digital photos, but I recently discovered a shortcoming while trying to modify some metadata on a series of images. Last week, after importing photos from two cameras into Aperture, I realized that the cameras’ clocks were not in sync and my photos would not accurately sort by date. I assumed this was no big deal, figuring I could simply use Aperture’s Batch Change operation to change the Image Date field on the affected photos.

Non-editable Image Date Field

Not the case. The Image Date field is not user-editable in Aperture: it’s generated during the import process from the EXIF information in your photos. If the imported photo does not contain this EXIF information — for example, a scanned photo — Aperture will use the file creation date as the value for the Image Date field. In either case, there’s nothing you can do within Aperture to modify this metadata. Micah detailed this dilemma in his article “Digitizing Your Film Archive with Aperture”.

Enter Timeature from developer Adam Tow. Timeature works in tandem with Aperture: select the photos whose Image Date you want to modify, then launch Timeature and it will automatically populate with the names and image dates of the selected images. You can adjust Image Dates in three ways: by date, setting a specific date; by increment, adding or subtracting time; or by EXIF, reseting the field to its original date.

Timeature with Name and Image Date Populated

Timeature is a handy little utility — for me it was incredibly useful and performed exactly as expected. It’s shareware: the download is fully functional, and will occasionally remind you to register. A license costs $15 US.

I just posted about our Vancouver stop which was a lot of fun. It’s been almost non stop since we left Seattle. We’ve been playing some Guitar Hero and people are spending a lot of time coding. Lee Brimelow and Mike Chambers have been updating the on AIR Blog and Ted Patrick is building a chat application for our live video feed. Kevin Hoyt is coding up an AIR app that will let you geotag your photos by dragging them onto a map.

Luckily we made it through customs just fine and we’re rolling to Portland via Seattle. Portland starts at 5:15 and then after that we’re starting the leg to Las Vegas. We’re going to be sleeping on the bus for that leg so hopefully I’ll have some good stories. We’ve become addicted to Bubble Gum Pop Rocks which should give us a nice sugar rush for that leg.

Madrid, Spain: My Lightroom Adventure book has been at the printer for almost two weeks now. For me, the time between a book going to the printer and the time when it is bound and shipped and actually in my hands is always an emotional roller coaster. This has been especially true for this book.

When it comes to color correction–skin tones are probably the most difficult to get right, and the most closely scrutinized. After all, if the skin tones are off, we immediately know something is amiss and it’s hard to get past that.

I have seen work where skin tones are missed on purpose for effect, but for the most part, you need to get them right.

In Landscape photography and other work where people are not the subject matter, there’s more latitude. There’s room for interpretation of the color in the scene; it’s a subjective decision, even when you’re trying to create the most natural looking rendition.

Landscape color correcting leaves you with room to interpret; you were there, you know what you saw and felt while shooting. A slight decrease in exposure with the exposure slider along with moving the highlight slider to the right, allowed me to recover more detail in the sky.

I haven’t tried it, but these days many landscape photographers are trying out HDR or High Dynamic Range shooting, which allows them to combine different exposures of the same scene, for an incredible dynamic range with detail in all tones from highest highlight to darkest shadow.

But without HDR, the reality of landscape shooting means you’re often confronted with scenes where the highlight to shadow exposure difference is more than the digital capture (or film) can completely deal with. So if you’re shooting in the “traditional” digital way, and you’re subjects are landscapes/cityscapes you often need to make a choice. Expose for the highlights or shadows?

The rule of raw that I had always subscribed to, was to underexpose a little (like with shooting slide film) to insure highlights with full detail. This is generally still a good idea. But overexposing raw a little, allows for maximum information in your digital file, since you can recover lost highlights in Aperture and the slight overexposure lets you keep more shadow detail.

But it’s a fine line. If you go too far, you may not be able to recover lost or clipped highlights. I have found that overexposing in RAW about half a stop works best. It’s a good idea to look at your camera’s histogram while in the field, to insure highlight “clipping” is kept to a minimum.

Slightly overexposed highlights are there to recover with the exposure slider in Aperture and the increase exposure provides better signal-to-noise ratio in the shadows.

So, to recover temporarily lost highlights, move the exposure slider to the left. The Highlight Slider, which doesn’t actually recover lost information in theory as does the Exposure Slider, but reveals data that is there, just not visible, in effect, recovering highlight information.

By moving the Shadow Slider to the right you can bring up shadow detail. This combination of Exposure Slider and Highlight and Shadow Sliders in Aperture is extremely powerful and effective.

As great as these controls are however, they are not miracle workers. Many landscape scenes have a range too great to save everything. Short of HDR, it would be impossible to save all detail in scenes with backlit trees for example, or shadows in the valley as the sun sets in the sky.

When you open up the shadows too much, digital noise becomes more apparent. Like most things in life, moderation is the way to go. Less is more.

For Landscaped and most general purpose shooting, the color sliders in Aperture give you tremendous range and flexibility. You can choose a specific color, deepen it by adding saturation, or the reverse–or finesse colors using the luminance slider, which only affects the brightness of the color for more subtle emphasis or de-emphasis than with saturation.

I find that with landscapes as with skin-tones, moving the Yellow Hue Slider to the left toward red, often gives warmer more pleasing renditions. You might want to combine changes with both blue and cyan sliders to get the right blue sky.

The range slider allows you to make even more subtle changes by increasing or decreasing the combination of color adjustments made with the Hue, Saturation and Luminance Sliders, allowing minor refinements to what you’ve done to that point.

When working on complex images, you might want to make new versions so you can come back to what you’ve done with fresh eyes and decide ultimately which ones worked best.

One of the most popular uses of digital recording is capturing people talking. Of course, most people aren’t that good at talking extemporaneously on command, and you usually need to help them along somewhat. Fundamentally, that is what most interviews are: helping someone talk about something intelligently and with some structure.

Since most people who record are asked to do an interview (or at least help with one) at some point, I thought it would be useful to share some basic tips that will help you when the opportunity arises:

Always talk to your subject before you start the interview

If you only have a few minutes before you start the interview, talk for those few minutes. If not, talk while you are setting up the recording gear. This will give you a feel for the interaction to come, and will make someone who is nervous about being interviewed feel more comfortable before the microphone comes out. If you have more than a minute or two, talk to your subject about what they expect from the interview, and tell them what you expect. Tell them who the audience is. Don’t talk too much about the interview topic itself or you might end up with a lot of confusing answers that start with “Like I told you before…”

If you are interviewing someone for their story or opinion, ask them what they would like to have covered before you start. Remember, you don’t have to use everything you record, and they may present you with an angle you hadn’t thought of before.

Be prepared

This isn’t always completely doable, but you should always be as prepared to the best of your ability. Know your interviewee and how they fit into what you are trying to do. Know the kinds of things you are going to discuss. Always make sure your recorder and headphones are working properly before you start. The “talk to your subject time” can help you test your equipment and feel some of these things out.

When you are doing your first interviews, approach it as kind of like being a lawyer: don’t ask questions you don’t really know the answers to. Of course this is a rule to throw out as you get better, but it is a good way to start out with confidence.

If you prepare questions beforehand, don’t read them verbatim from the page!

I rarely have prepared questions, as I prefer to just have a conversation that follows the theme I keep in my head. Doing it this way makes transitions from one topic to the next more natural, and keeps you from sounding like a robot when reading the questions.

If you must write out your questions (this is actually a good idea when you are starting out), don’t read them from the page. It is better to write out notes or sentence fragments instead of full-blown questions — it forces you to make up the actual wording of the questions on the fly and makes the conversation more natural-sounding.

Make it a conversation

This goes along with the previous tip, but is worth expanding upon a bit. If you were talking to a friend, you would react, interrupt with questions, and stray from the topic a bit. Do the same things in an interview. If something amazing or funny is said, go ahead and react to it. The listeners will follow your lead and be drawn further into the interview.

Of course, there can always be too much of a good thing, so make sure that your interviewee is doing the vast majority of the talking. All I’m saying here is that you don’t have to be an interviewing machine; you should be yourself, but in a background-kind-of-way. Your personality should be evident in the interview, but it should not be dominant. You are interviewing your subject, not yourself.

Avoid yes-or-no questions

One-word answers don’t make for very interesting listening. Instead, ask open-ended questions: “Why did you … ?” is better than “Did you do that because … ?”

If you do slip up and ask a yes or no question, don’t accept a one-word answer. A good trick for this is to just remain silent after the answer is given rather than jumping right back into the interview. A little uncomfortable silence can go a long way — your subject may just keep talking to make the situation less awkward and you’ll have what you need. Of course if this doesn’t work, don’t be afraid to ask your question again or ask your subject to explain further.

Get what you need. Interrupt if you have to.

On the other hand, if your subject is droning on about something you think is unnecessary, jump in with another question. If they say something you think the audience will be confused by, act confused yourself and ask for clarification. If you are really unhappy with the way an answer is going, try to find a way to come back to the topic. If that doesn’t work, come up with a reason that you have to start that part over (say you heard something strange in your headphones, or that the recorder’s battery is dying if you have to). As a last resort, explain to the person — as diplomatically as possible — that you aren’t getting what you need and would like to do the section again, offering suggestions to make this second take the better one.

Don’t be too smart

Unless the interview is billed as a discussion between peers (e.g. you are a security expert talking to another security expert and the audience is just listening in), the interview is about the interviewee, not the interviewer. Keep your questions short without making them abrupt. Don’t answer your own question while asking it. Don’t use complicated technical language to show you know the topic unless your audience will also understand that language. If you think your audience might need clarification of a statement, ask for that clarification even if you understood it perfectly.

Basically, put yourself in the listeners’ shoes while you interview. If your mom (or your children, or your astrophysicist uncle, depending upon who your target audience is) would understand what is being said, keep going. If not, clarify or do it over.

The end of the interview isn’t the end of the interview

When you are done, thank the person for their time and ask them how they thought it went. They may want to redo a part you also thought was weak, or tell a story you didn’t ask about. That second part is very important — always ask if there is anything else they’d like to cover. I’ve discovered important points (and even whole wonderful stories) that I knew nothing about just by asking if it felt like we’d left anything out.

Oh, and leave the recorder on while you talk afterwards! Even if you don’t get a good recording of something valuable, you’ll have a way to accurately re-tell the story yourself if you need to. (If you listen to the end of my Bob the Evangelist episode of Boston Behind the Scenes - linked below - you’ll hear me do just that.)

If all else fails

If you find yourself thrown into an interview situation without some time to prepare, don’t panic! If it fits the situation (and in many cases it does) you can always ask:

“What did you think this was going to be like before you started, and then what was it really like?”

You’re guaranteed to get a story of some kind.

Lastly, PRACTICE and LISTEN

You get better at anything through practice and the observation of those who do it well. Therefore, you need to interview people to learn how to interview people. So pick up you recorder and go out there. Interview friends and family and strangers. Always record your interviews, even if they “don’t count” — you might just get a great recording of Grandma you can share with the kids someday.

And when you are on your way to those interviews, listen to interviewers you like. Don’t copy their style, but certainly learn from it. If you listen to the best, you have something to aspire to — and you’ll be inspired when it is time to take out the recorder.

Interview Sample: Bob The Evangelist

One of the most useful advantages of the digital evolution has been the histogram, but surprisingly few people know how to interpret them. Simply put, a histogram is a graph of the tonal values in an image - whatever they are, ranging from black to white. For convenience sake we speak of histograms as having 256 values from 0 on the left for pure black to 255 on the right for pure white. (These numbers were based on the number of tonal values available in each channel in an 8 bit image, which is 2 to the 8th. Even though 16 bit images have considerably more values, it’s easier to conceptualize and interpret a histogram while considering it to have 256 potential values.)

A spike on either end, particularly when the graph looks like a mountain that was abruptly sliced off, indicates there is clipping. This means that there is a group of pixels that are pure black or pure white without detail, as long as the histogram is a luminosity histogram.

The catch is that some cameras and software use luminosity histograms, some RGB histograms combined into a single set of data, and others RGB histograms that show each individual channel superimposed upon one another. In Aperture you have the choice of a multi channel RGB histogram, a luminosity histogram, and individual channel histograms.

Which is best? If you are outputting to print and your main concern is to ensure that there are no areas of your image that are pure white (where the paper itself would show through, showing whatever shade of white it is), then the luminosity histogram is the most efficient.

Recently, I acquired a new addition to my photographic tool chest in the form of a new Canon 1D Mark III. This is the first 1-series camera I’ve owned and I’ve been spending a lot of time going through all of its features and doing test shoots with it before I take it into an assignment. As part of this exploration the other day, I played a bit with the built-in microphone and made some voice annotations to go with some test photographs. This seems like a really cool feature of the camera as you can make a quick note of a subject’s name or note some shooting detail that you want to remember later. But, I wasn’t sure how useful this would be in my typical workflow. After all, the first thing I do with my images is import them into Lightroom. And I didn’t figure that the audio files would be playable from Lightroom.

So it was a surprise to me when I imported this particular batch of photographs into Lightroom 1.1 and noticed that the .wav files were listed as sidecar files. Additionally, for the images that have these sidecars, a new metadata line shows up indicating that Lightroom knows that these are audio files. Here’s what it looks like:

Even better, there’s that arrow next to the Audio File metadata field. Press it and the audio file plays! Eminently usable. It’s quite simple and works just as you’d expect it to. Neat! This is genuinely useful. I’m going to make an effort to try and work audio file annotations into my workflow where they make sense. The only thing I can see being an impediment to using voice annotations in my workflow is that you can only see if a file has an annotation in the metadata viewer which means that you might have to hunt around your images a bit to find an annotation that you remember making. It’d be nice if a little audio icon showed up in grid view for images that had voice annotations.

After doing a bit of digging, it turns out that this is a brand new feature in Lightroom 1.1 that wasn’t in 1.0. It’s also a fairly stealthy feature. It isn’t referred to anywhere in the help or in Adobe’s knowledge base. In fact, about the only other mentions of it that I can find on the web are in a web article by Ian Lyons and a mention in the Adobe Forums. Like Ian, I wonder what other stealth features might lurk in this release.

Why put an iPod on your waistband when you can sport a bulbous red guitar effect instead? The pioneering digital kidney bean of tone now comes in a battery-powered version called the Pocket Pod.

Five inches wide yet loaded with 300 digital effect presets and a guitar tuner, the Pocket Pod retails for around $129.

I’m reading the wonderful Aubrey-Maturin series of sea stories aloud to my oldest son, Julian. If you stick around “lucky” Captain Jack Aubrey, you’ll surely come to recognize his motto, “There’s no time to be lost!” Funny, but I don’t often think of landscape photography as something where rushing is important. But the theme of three recent photo sessions, all involving tripod mounted photography, has indeed been that there is no time to lose.

In this photo of the channels in Drakes Estero at low tide, the beautiful glow of reflected sunset clouds vanished seconds after my exposure ended:

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

In this photo of the moon rising behind the Golden Gate Bridge, shortly after my exposure the moon cleared the clouds and the dramatic lighting was lost:

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

In this photo of the Golden Gate in the incoming fog, after I made the thirty second capture, clouds overwhelmed the bridge and the delicate blues went black:

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

As a side note, I’m photographing the Golden Gate more than usual these days because my book , 100 Views of the Golden Gate, is reaching completion. With a March, 2008 pub date I only have a couple more months in which my photos can be included. So there’s no time to be lost.

And speaking of no time to be lost, in landscape photography some other sayings apply. Fortune does indeed favor the prepared mind. If you know what lens and other equipment you are likely to use in advance, you won’t fumble and miss a photo. And, she who hesitates is truly lost. If I dither with indecision, I usually don’t get the photo. The correct mode is clear, calm, deliberate: realizing, of course, that there is no time to be lost.

I guess I’ve been reading Make too long, but when I wanted to hear Internet radio in the spare room the other day, I quickly devised this wacky solution:

The Apple AirPort Express receives the Wi-Fi music signal from iTunes, converts it to analog, and then injects it into the old boombox through a car cassette adapter. The belt raises the tweeters to brighten the sound.

All components were items I salvaged from closets, including the boombox-with-no-line-input, the Old Belt, and the cassette adapter, which I hadn’t used since I’d replaced my factory car stereos.

The AirPort Express had also spent its first year in the closet after I failed to get it working with my non-Apple router. Every few months I’d haul it out, blast it with configuration commands via Ethernet, and then give up in frustration before finally stumbling on the correct settings. (I forget what they were, but it involved lying to the software.)

Here’s a more heroic image of the setup:

Come to think of it, hiding a Wi-Fi speaker in a closet could be pretty fun on Halloween…

We’re off and running on the bus tour. We changed the front page of the site so you can track exactly where the bus is at any given time. We got off to a later start that we had planned but we had to do some promotional filming and get everyone’s stuff on the bus. We also had to clear space because George P. Johnson, the company that helped us with the tour, left us a bunch of goodie baskets and Media Temple, one of our sponsors, gave us each a bag with slippers and some sleepy items in it.

So far we’ve been loading up on some XBox and getting used to being on the bus. Robert has been feed reading (I think we’re going to try and get him to play some Guitar Hero today) and everyone else has been slowly waking up and making faces at the live video feed and various cameras.

Recently, I reported that Apple has scheduled a series of lectures titled Aperture in Action. If you tried to register for this tour and didn’t receive a confirmation email, try re-registering again. Apple experienced a database glitch that has now been fixed - so try the web link again if you planned to attend this educational and fun event. Some top sports shooters, such as Bill Frakes and Dan Donovan, will be presenting along with the Apple Aperture product team.

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.

The new catalog structure in Lightroom version 1.1 solves a lot of problems many photographers had with Version 1.0. The biggest solution it offers is moving images between computers. I wrote an extended blog post on XMP metadata files a while ago and how those could be used to re-import images into Lightroom and retain all of the crucial settings when moving images between computers. All of that can pleasantly be forgotten now - save for a few points about the usefulness of the XMP sidecar files.

In Lightroom 1.1, the catalog structure allows easy transportation of the RAW images, the XMP sidecar files, all previews and the Lightroom settings in one easy step. In this blog post we’ll explore just how that works along with a smattering of catalog settings.

So, lets say that you need to move a set of images you have partially worked up from your laptop to your desktop computer. First select the folder of images - then either select all of the images you’d like to export as a catalog or the entire folder of images (if you want to export all of them). Next, go to File > Export as Catalog as in the image below.

A dialog box (as below) will appear and you can choose where to save the catalog and select whether or not you’d like to include “negative files” and previews. By negative files Lightroom means the original RAW files or alternatively the Tiff or Jpeg files you were working on. As you can see below I have chosen to export the RAW files with their previews to my laptop’s desktop.

Once I have copied this catalog to an external hard drive I plug it into my desktop computer and copy over the folder. When you open the catalog folder you’ll notice that there is a folder with all of the full resolution RAW images in it along with the XMP sidecar files, the previews data with an .lrdata extension and the catalog file with an .lrcat file extension as in the example below.

To import the Lightroom catalog onto my desktop computer now I just go into Lightroom and select File > Import from Catalog.

Once Lightroom is finished importing images, I generally go back and move the RAW images folder (in the exported catalog folder) to one of my main image hard drives. In Lightroom it will ask where those images disappeared to and I’ll just select the folder of images and direct Lightroom to their new location. Pretty simple, but this helps me keep all of my images organized.

Now, just a note on the XMP sidecar files and Lightroom Version 1.1. I still very highly recommend that you turn on the “Automatically write changes into XMP” check box in the catalog preferences in Lightroom Version 1.1 as in the image below. This preference is in a new dialog box but it does all the same things just as before. To get to it, open the main preferences dialog, then in the bottom of the General preferences is a button that will take you to the Catalog preferences dialog.

Using the XMP sidecar files will slow Lightroom down just a bit but it also allows one to delete folders out of Lightroom, then if needed in the future re-import those images with the same settings as they were before deletion. This is a nice option and keeps thing nice and tidy in Lightroom until it becomes a full-on Digital Asset Management tool. Using the XMP sidecar files also helps with seamless integration in ACR 4.1 and Photoshop CS3.

That’s it for this session.

Adios, Michael Clark

Podcast producer Daniel Steinberg has a unique audio editing technique: he uses a Wacom pen controller in one hand and a Countour Design Shuttle controller in the other. I asked him to write a tutorial on his system, which obviously works well because he cranks out a huge amount of high-quality material. We hope to have it online soon.

In the meantime, I was intrigued enough to order my own Wacom pad. DealNews.com found them on sale at J&R Music, so in bargain-hunter mode, I also peeked at the site’s audio clearance section, where I found this beauty: 8GB of royalty-free WAV files for $9.97.

For ten bucks, I got 10,000 royalty-free sounds in WAV format. The catch? Using them on commercial productions requires displaying the Magix logo.

The Magix Sound Pool Collection 2005 DVD is listed as a Windows product, but in reality it’s a two-sided DVD containing 10,282 16-bit WAV files and a handful of documents designed to import those files into Magix’s music-arranging programs. I had no problem loading them into my Mac.

The package arrived today and I’ve been plowing through the sounds with RapidPreview. (I’ll soon switch to AudioFinder, which has a killer rename-by-BPM feature.) Many of the sounds are goofy, and the pitched ones are often repeated in six keys, but at a tenth of a penny a piece, I’m still smiling.

What audio bargains have you found lately?

This is a very long time exposure taken from the top of Half Dome. It was around 1AM. I pointed the camera straight up towards the sky facing north. Here’s what I wrote in my diary:

I am taking photos after midnight, the camera on tripod open for half an hour at a shot. It is cold. Not so much my torso, but my legs and feet. I look around and see mosaics in the rock of Half Dome. This cannot be true. Looking close by flashlight, taking care not to disturb the sky exposure, I see the “mosaic” is made of lines of frost, the moisture gathered out of the air.

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

More from my journal:

It is so cold I can’t sit or lie down. I must pace, it seems forever. I have a small, flat area I know it is safe to pace. Like Gandalf on the top of Orthanc. When my batteries are gone, photography is over.

For the story of how and why I was on Half Dome at night, see Yosemite Valley from Half Dome, Moon Shadow of Half Dome, Snakes and Ladders, Half Dome by Starlight, and Midnight Rambles. Also check out Digital Night by Harold Davis.

In my first post about my new iPhone, I wrote that I wasn’t interested in uploading its photos to Aperture. Now that I’ve had a few days to explore my new gadget, I’ve started using its camera, so I decided to give Aperture a second look as a tool for managing my iPhone photos.

Getting your images from your iPhone into Aperture is as easy as you would expect: simply connect your iPhone to your Mac and launch Aperture. The Import Panel will slide down immediately and you’ll be able to preview your photos right off the iPhone — the same way you would with your other cameras. Choose which photos you want to import, add metadata, and import.

I wanted to see how good (or bad) the iPhone’s image quality is, so I took some shots side by side with my Canon Rebel XTi. I created a new Project in Aperture named “iPhone Test” and I imported all the photos. I created two Smart Albums within the Project, one for each camera’s photos. To do this, I created a new Smart Album and on the Query HUD that appears, I clicked the “+” icon to add EXIF as a new criterion. Then I was able to choose “Camera Model is” and type my camera model into the field.

The iPhone’s photos are JPEGs at 1600px x 1200px and range in size from around 100KB to 500KB, depending on the amount of compression used. And the results? Pretty impressive actually. I’ll echo what many others are saying about the iPhone’s camera: when the light is good and your subject is still, the camera takes surprisingly good snapshots. With low light or moving subjects, the results are less impressive. I’m including some sample photos for comparison below.

Canon Digital Rebel XTi (f/6.3, 1/400, ISO100)

iPhone — good light, good photo

Canon Digital Rebel XTi (f/1.8, 1/30, ISO1600)

iPhone — lower light, mediocre photo

Aperture’s Highlight Hot Areas command (which you can access from the View menu, or by pressing Option-Shift-H) activates a highlight clipping display in the Viewer pane. This display shows any pixels that have clipped highlights. You activate this feature by choosing View > Highlight Hot Areas, or by pressing Option-Shift-H. Aperture will display any clipped pixels as red.

With clipped highlights displayed you can then use Levels or the Exposure Slider or the Brightness slider to darken your image until the clipped areas are gone.

However, if you’ve used the tool much, you may have noticed that it will sometimes indicate that there are no clipped pixels, even though a tiny spike remains on the right side of the histogram. This behavior is not a bug, it’s actually by design. If you look in Aperture’s preferences, you’ll see a slider labelled Hot Area Display Threshold. This controls what actually “counts” as a clipped highlight for the Hot Area Display. By default, this slider is set to 94%. You can’t set it to 100, but you can move it up to 99% if you want a Hot Area Display that corresponds more closely to the clipping that you’ll see in the Histogram.

The idea behind this control is that not all printers have the same white point. Some actually max out before the white that is displayed on your monitor. So, Aperture allows you to change the clipping display threshold to more accurately reflect the white point of printed output. For most instances, the default behavior will be all that you need, but if you want to make extremely refined adjustments to the very brightest highlights in your image, then you might want to change this parameter to a higher value.

The Cross-Roads Restaurant & Motel, Pembroke, Maine

I was going to write about some of the new features in Lightroom 1.1 again, but then I remembered one of the first rules of Lightroom, to enjoy the program and have fun with your digital images. So I hope you don’t mind if we just play with an image today and see what develops.

When I was still in school one of my favorite TV programs was the Twilight Zone. I could never get enough of those weird towns, truck stops and twisted characters, who lived alongside the now long forgotten two lane highways that crisscross America.

Route 1 in the cold north eastern state of Maine is still 100 percent Twilight Zone territory and the once popular Cross Roads Restaurant & Motel in Pembroke (close to the eastern most point in the US) could well have been in an episode. Adding to the mystery of the now almost deserted establishment is the fact that many food reviewers have rated the restaurant as one of the best in Down East Maine.

The original full color image

I was actually planning to simulate a black and white infrared look in this picture, but I ended up going for what I think is more of a hand colored black and white look instead. The original Twilight Zone episodes where black and white and had a strange eerie feeling about them. Full color would not suit them.

To make the changes in the image I used only the HSL (Hue, Saturation and Luminance) controls. To determine where to apply the HSL changes, I used the Target Adjustment Mode button.

The HSL adjustments

Hue - I did not like the color of the grass so I clicked on it with the Target Adjustment Mode button and cranked up the color. It came out a real nice green but the adjustment was actually +100 Yellow

Saturation - The big change was in the color of the sky from deep blue to grey. Again I used the Target Adjustment Mode button and it resulted in -100 Blue. I applied the same technique to the red trim of the building but it gave me a funny orange color so I set the red to +100 in the Saturation Panel and reduced the Orange setting.

Luminance - To give the red trim on the building a little more punch I applied +85 Red in the Luminance panel.

That was basically it, I kind of like the results because it reminds me of a time and place that I really enjoyed in my youth, and still enjoy to this day.

It’s easy to get excited about Lightroom 1.1’s obvious new features such as Clarity, catalogs, and its powerful new sharpening controls. But there are many less sexy yet helpful improvements that all add up to make 1.1 a fantastic upgrade. Take for example, Color Label Sets.

UPDATE: After I’ve wrote this blog, a reader pointed out very politely that I was wrong. Color Label Sets were in LR 1.0. MY BAD! I aplogize for my mistake. But I still think Color Label Sets are really cool, as you’ll see if you read on.

It is so easy to add keywords to whole groups of images that I’d be willing to bet that a lot of images have inherited keywords that you never meant them to have. For instance, you can highlight a whole series of images that contain the same category of subject matter. However, chances are that many of them also contain other types of subject matter. So you tend to put all the types into the Keyword Tags box and then hit Return/Enter…thus assigning them all to all the images. Then, because you’re always in a hurry, you select the next group and do the same thing.

Before you know it, you have hundreds (or even thousands) of “stray” keywords in your images. Later, you go to the Find Panel and enter Man. Though you suddenly see hundreds of pictures of men, you also see a few pictures of kids, a pretty fair number of pictures of women…and even a few kitty cats that have no man in the frame with them. Well, you can get rid of the pictures that don’t pertain by highlighting them and then deleting the errant Keywords that show up in the keywording panel. To be sure, that is a big help in itself. But why not just clean up your whole library? The next paragraph will tell you how:

One of the greatest resources for learning Aperture is made available by Apple, 24 hours a day in the form of tutorials on their website. When you go to www.apple.com/aperture and click on “Tutorials” you will see a range of QuickTime videos that can help you master this program. In real time, you see specific Aperture functions being performed. This makes it easier for you when you try these feature sets having already seen them in action.

The great thing about these tips and tutorials is that you can save them to your computer and watch them at your leisure, perfect for when you’re in transit or away on an assignment and want to spend some educational down time.

To save them, you need to have QuickTime Pro, which is a $30 download that gives you a bunch of features not available with the free Quicktime version, including the ability to save QuickTime movies.

Simply view the tutorial. Click on the bottom right corner of the QuickTime video and a pop-down menu appears. Scroll down to “Save as QuickTime Movie” and save it for later. If it’s grayed out and won’t let you save, make sure the tutorial has played through and saved in your browser’s cache. You will be able to save it then.

View and download them all and you’ll be well on your way to mastering Aperture after a few views.

To all of our American readers, happy 4th of July! When we think about the 4th of July, the first thing that comes to mind is that we get the day off. The second thing is fireworks! Fireworks are a lot of fun to see, but shooting them can be tricky!

To shoot fireworks, you need four things: a good location, a sturdy tripod, a cable release, and a dark card. Ideally, you should know where the fireworks will be so that you can visualize your shot ahead of time. Some safe assumptions are that if you’re close to where the fireworks will fire from, bring a wide lens, and conversely, if you’re far away, bring a standard lens.

Once you have a good location, place your camera on the tripod, set your camera to bulb mode, and connect the cable release. In terms of other settings, I’d recommend shooting at ISO 100 (you don’t want to blow out the highlights in the fireworks and you want the least amount of noise possible in the sky) and f/8 (with a wide lens, that’ll give you a fair bit in focus; you should also experiment a bit with different depths of field).

When the fireworks start blasting, what you will do is press your cable release so that it’s holding the mirror up. Then, in between bursts, place the heavy card over the lens, blocking all light from entering. After a couple of bursts (depending on how big/bright they are–make sure to experiment with how long each exposure is), release the cable release and advance the frame.

Later on, when you import the images into Aperture, I’d recommend using the white balance, saturation, and highlight/shadow tools to enhance your photos. White balance matters because you will find some creative effects by playing with it in fireworks photos. Saturation will help bring out some of the color that can get lost in the bright fireworks (be careful not to over-saturate the photo), and shadow/highlight helps bring out any detail in the dark area.

Have fun shooting!

A few weeks ago, Scott Kelby, editor of Photoshop User magazine, invited me to submit a 5-minute technique for his weekly NAPP TV podcast (formerly Photoshop TV). It was a tough decision: Say “yes” and become a regular adjunct on an insanely popular video podcast or say “no” because . . . frankly, I never did come up with a reason. I deliberated on the matter for the obligatory 0.01 second before ultimately acquiescing and saying, “Hell yeah!”

The gang over at lynda.com (better known as the best gang on Earth) helped me assemble a few episodes. The first of them is running this week (July 2). It’s all about the Multichannel command, which has been around since Photoshop 1.0. Although few folks know it’s there and even fewer use it, Multichannel is actually a great command. It allows you to switch from one color space to another — say, RGB to CMYK — without performing a conversion.

If that sounds like one of those why-in-the-name-of-fried-ice-cream-would-I-want-to-do-that? operations, check out the podcast. (You can launch it in iTunes. Look for Episode 88.) I have another Multichannel trick in the works for next week. After that, I’ll show how to make lasers blast out of a cigarette-smokin’ scientist’s eyes. At least, that’s the plan. Lasers and cigarettes can be a volatile mix, so we’ll see how it goes.

(In case you’re curious, I first divined these Multichannel techniques for a video series called Photoshop CS3 Channels and Masks, due out in a few weeks. See lynda.com/deke for more. A book on this same topic should be available by the end of the year.)

One of the things I’m sure many photographers thought when they saw the iPhone for the first time is, “What a wonderful way to take my portfolio with me wherever I go!” With its brilliant screen and easy pocket-ability, it’s a natural way to take your work with you and show it to anybody you happen to meet. But what’s the easiest way to get images from Lightroom to the iPhone? After a few hours playing with all the other features of the iPhone, I took a bit of time and set out to find out for myself.

Now that Mikkel Aaland has sent his Photoshop Lightroom Adventure book to the printer, he’s had a little time to put together a terrific PDF download titled, The Lightroom 1.1 Library Revealed. It’s a quick tour of the key elements of the Lightroom 1.1 Library module, including an explanation of the new “catalogs” (formerly known as libraries) concept. Very nice.

Soundsnap.com launched yesterday with 30,000 free audio samples. As far as I can make out, the sounds are both free to download and royalty-free, so you can use them in your own commercial music productions.

Like the popular Freesound Project, the Soundsnap site has audio and waveform previews, so you can see quickly if you’re getting an individual drum hit or an entire groove. Unlike Freesound, Soundsnap has simple licensing terms and a clean layout.

I also like Soundsnap’s Web 2.0-esque “tag cloud” of popular search terms. When I poked around yesterday, drumloop and impact were the biggies, followed by metal, percussion, drop (?), bass, guitar, and piano. I got forest onto the list by searching for it a few times, but I imagine it will drop off quickly as more people discover the site. Anyone over 18 is allowed to post or download original sounds, so it should bulk up quickly.

Soundsnap’s tag cloud shows that most people are still looking for meat-and-potatoes samples, but I bet that will branch out as they upload files.

The quality of the samples was decidedly mixed, but there again the waveform preview helps. I found the wimpy-looking waveforms generally portended poorly recorded sounds. Check it out yourself. Here are quick search buttons for Soundsnap and two other free sound sites I’ve covered.

I really like the way Aperture deals with cropping and resizing on export. For some reason it makes perfect sense to me. However, many people I talk to just can’t get their heads around it.

Let’s say for instance that you want to take one of your full resolution images, crop it, and make it 500 pixels wide for use on the web. In Photoshop, it’s a pretty straight forward process. You simply use the crop tool to make your desired crop, and then change the image width to 500 pixels in the Image Size dialog box. If you have clicked Constrain Proportions, all you have to do is click OK. Of course, you will have to be sure to save that image as a new file in order to preserve the original full resolution file.

In Aperture things are slightly different. Because Aperture is a non-destructive image editing application, you can make as many crops as you like without affecting the image itself. If you crop an image, you can easily bring it back to the original crop, simply by deselecting the checkbox next to “Crop” in the Adjustments Inspector or HUD. You can create an individual crop for as many versions of an image master that you would like, and any of these crops can be removed or changed at any time.

But the confusion seems to be in the way that Aperture deals with resizing. The truth is, unlike Photoshop, where you create the final image size within the program itself, Aperture doesn’t do any image resizing until you export a Version. So, I often find novice Aperture users struggling with the crop tool, thinking that this is where the pixel dimensions should be placed.

When you open the crop tool you have the option of either making a freeform crop, or entering some numbers with which to constrain the crop tool. These numbers can be selected from the drop down box of Common Sizes, or you can enter them yourself.

What I find many people misunderstand is that the numbers in the crop tool relate to an aspect ratio and not actual pixel dimensions. This can be a little confusing for some people, especially those who are used to Photoshop, and those who are somewhat new to photography.

So, here is a quick tip that might help make things a little easier. First, set up a new Export Preset in Aperture. To do this, simply click the Aperture menu in the top menu bar and select Presets and then Image Export. A dialog box will appear and on the left hand side you will see a list of presets. Pick one that is fairly generic, such as “JPEG Fit Within 640×640.” This is one of the presets that comes packaged with Aperture, so unless you have for some reason deleted all of these, this one should be there waiting for you.

Make a copy of this preset by selecting the present and then clicking the “+” button on the bottom left. Once you have created this new duplicate copy of the original preset, rename it to something along the lines of “JPEG Custom.” Next, drag the preset up to the top of the list and click OK.

Once you have created this custom preset, a really quick and dirty workflow can go something like this:

1. Crop you image in Aperture using the crop tool so that is simply looks the way you want and contains the portion of the image you care about.
2. Right click the image and select Export->Version.
3. Select the drop down box labeled Export Preset. You will see your “JPEG Custom” preset at the top.
4. You can either use the current settings (fit within 640×640 from the preset you copied) or scroll to the bottom to where it says “Edit”, and quickly make a change to the export dimensions.

Don’t think of this preset as a preset. Just think of it as a way to set up custom dimensions on the fly, right before you export your images. You can put in any dimensions you want, and change them at any time. Whatever setting you select will remain present until the next time you change them. So, if you find yourself using the same numbers over and over again, then it’s time to set up a permanent preset for those numbers.

Despite plunging CD sales and a sour stock performance, Warner Music Group chairman Edgar Bronfman, Jr. displayed strong optimism during an interview last Wednesday. “This decline is steeper than we expected, but in some ways it means we’ll get to the bottom faster — and after that there’s growth,” Bronfman said during a discussion on CNBC. That’s one way of looking at things. Hmm…..discuss.

Hi! I’m the newest enlistee to the O’Reilly Digital Media blog, Ryan Stewart. I work as a Rich Internet Application Evangelist at Adobe and I’m going to be going to be blogging from the road during our on AIR bus tour that’s passing through the western part of the United States starting on the 9th of July. This space will mostly consist of my notes from the road. At our events I’ll be talking to developers and on the bus we’ll be talking about Rich Internet Applications and Adobe AIR. I’m planning on capturing most of those thoughts here so you’ll have a front row seat to how we hatch ideas and what’s going on with the tour.

I’m also hoping that this will be an outlet for you to ask questions and get responses from the people on the bus. On the Adobe side we have Mike Downey, Mike Chambers, Daniel Dura and Kevin Hoyt. We’ve also got Andre Charland from Nitobi and Lee Brimelow from Frog Design, so there will be a lot of interesting conversations and if you want to chime in or ask questions, comments or my email are a great way to do that. I’m looking forward to the trip - I’ll see you next week.

Keep this in your back pocket… You reset the iPhone by holding down the top power button and the Home button for about 6 seconds or until you see the Apple logo.

At the end of June this year, the full moon rose in the eastern sky at about sunset (although by July 2 after dark). This cosmologic timing gave me the chance to consider extravagant dynamic range. In other words, what can you do with captures in which the dynamic range is simply too great to process for both bright areas and dark areas?

It’s always best to start with the best capture possible. This is less of a tautology than it seems, and is often ignored by photographers who think Photoshop can fix anything.

In fact, post-processing can fix many problems with the range of an exposure. But the contrast between a bright full moon and a landscape at dusk (or in darkness) is immense (see the photo below). As a first pass, a full moon nicely lit by reflected light from the sun at ISO 100 should expose properly at about 1/250 of a second and f/8. An evening landscape might properly expose at ISO 100 at 15 seconds and f/4 (if it is a cityscape with some ambient sunset light remaining) to 30 seconds and beyond if it is a true night landscape.

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

This extravagant dynamic range is greater than you’ll find in most photographic situations, and well beyond the capabilities of RAW multi-processing. RAW processing gives you -4 stops to +4 stops in dynamic range, although this entire eight f-stop range is not usable due to factors like noise introduction (it takes considerable Photoshop skills to even get close).

Back of the envelope, the eight f-stop theoretical range within a single RAW exposure proves a dynamic range of 2^8 (or 128). As I just noted, this entire range is not practically usable. In contrast, the dynamic range between bright moon and night sky is about 3,000 (the number you would need to multiply 30 seconds at f/4 to get to 1/250 of a second at f/8). It’s easy to see that you can’t expose a single digital RAW capture for both ends of this 3,000:1 ratio.

But wait! Isn’t there a good solution to this problem using HDR (High Dynamic Range) merging tools? A Merge to HDR Automation ships with Photoshop that will automatically blend a whole exposure range of different captures of the same subject. If this interests you, you might want to consider a speciality tool (it comes standalone or as a Photoshop plugin), Photomatix, which uses tone mapping to create HDR blends of multiple exposures (and does a rather better job than the Photoshop automation). And, no, this is no panacea that deals with the problem in extravagant dynamic range between moon and night sky.

There’s some concern that HDR blends tend to look artificial. Leaving this aesthetic issue aside, there’s a bigger technical issue when it comes to the moon in the night sky. Namely, at least some of the exposures involved are going to be lengthy, probably well over a second. This time lapse means that you can’t take static multiple images (the moon will move from one farme to the next), and the HDR blend will not appear seamless.

Another post-processing technique to consider using with the bright moon and dark landscape is to simply fire off two exposures, one for the moon and one for the landscape, and combine them. For the record, this can be done with film as well as digital. And the problem here is that except in really unusual circumstances the results will look highly artificial.

So what is to be done? Photographers must fall back metaphorically on the cunning of the coyote and wolf, animals that enjoy the moon, and seek images that create attractive “natural” renditions of the dynamic moon-landscape spread within a single RAW capture. One strategy: employing softness so that is OK for the moon to lose details in the highlights (this is what I used in the photo above).

Another tactic: photograph the moon and landscape early enough so the dynamic range isn’t so extravagant (but things are clearly tending towards dusk). This may only give you a narrow time window of a couple of minutes, and it requires the right moon-rising time, but works for the photo below:

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

As Charlie mentioned in his iPhone post, there’s a nice two-way connection between iPhone and Aperture. I’m not as interested in uploading my iPhone images to Aperture, but using the iPhone’s beautiful display for my Aperture photos is very appealing.

The process is easy. I decided to create an “iPhone Album” in Aperture to serve as a drop box. I added a few shots from the Giants/Diamondbacks game that I shot on Saturday (Giants won 4-1, yaay!). Then, when I connected the iPhone to my Mac, I choose the Aperture Album under the Photos tab. When I synced, iTunes optimized the images for display on the iPhone and added them to the device.

The iPhone display is perfect for showing off your photos. I really like the saturation and brightness, plus, all I have to do to change image orientation, is rotate the phone. So you can mix verticals and horizontals at will.

The iPhone might not be great at image capture, but it does a fine job of display.

I went down to the Apple SoHo Store on Friday night to witness the craziness that was the iPhone launch. Took some photos of the line around the block and the mob of press at the front door.

The store was incredibly efficient at moving through customers and by about 7:15pm the line had evaporated. So, credit card in hand, I took the plunge. I won’t bore you with a review or my impressions — I’d recommend looking here and here — however here are two iPhone tips for Aperture users:

First, Steve Jobs wasn’t kidding when he said the iPhone is the greatest iPod ever. Just sync your iPhone with iTunes and copy over whichever of your Aperture projects or albums you choose. Unlike previous iPods, the iPhone features 480-by-320-pixel resolution at 160 dpi — nearly twice the resolution of my MacBook Pro’s display. So photos look absolutely gorgeous.

Second, an unexpected feature… when I connect my iPhone via USB to my Mac, not only does iTunes launch (for initiating a sync), but Aperture launches as well! This is because Aperture sees the iPhone’s built-in camera and I’ve chosen the preference to open Aperture when a camera is connected. This was kind of neat the first time, but now it’s more of a nuisance. To prevent this behavior, I simply went into Aperture’s preferences and chose to “do nothing” when a camera is connected.

More iPhone/Aperture reports soon.

Lightroom version 1.1 is finally here. And the good news is there are some major improvements. Check out Mikkel’s post about his favorite 1.1 features. The new catalog system will solve the issues a number of pro photographers have been wrestling with - mostly starting to work up images in Lightroom on their laptop - just after an assignment and then the struggle to get those images onto the imaging computer for fine-tuning back in the office.

Other hot new tools include advanced sharpening, the clarity tool (which we’ll discuss here), noise reduction, the ability to edit metadata presets (HUGE!) and an advanced Chromatic Aberration tool as well. I am going to ramble here a bit before getting to the Clarity tool and exactly what that is and does. I might be one of the few, maybe the only detractor, but I wasn’t too excited about the new sharpening sliders in Lightroom. For a RAW image workflow the old sharpening system seems to work just fine for me - and since it was a capture sharpening tool specifically I didn’t really feel it needed an upgrade. So, now with the new fancy version it seems very confusing - especially when trying to just add capture sharpening. I have emailed a few of the gurus to get their take on this and I’ll report those findings here when I hear back. If it turns out that sharpening is something we now have to tweak individually for each image I am not looking forward to it and may have to revert to something else for my capture sharpening. I will say the sharpening sliders are mighty powerful and useful; I just have to figure it out again now that it is all changed.

But, I wanted to talk about the Clarity tool here and give you some background on exactly what that tool is doing which will hopefully help you understand how to use it and when. The clarity tool resides just above the Vibrance and Saturation sliders in the left hand panel of the Develop Module.

The clarity tool adds “punch” to any image - basically it is a contrast tool but it isn’t as simple as that. This unusual technique has been used extensively by many photographers in Photoshop with an Unsharp Mask technique called Local Contrast Enhancement, which was reported on Luminous-Landscape by Michael Reichmann. In Photoshop you simply used Unsharp Mask with a low amount and large Radius (as in the image below), thus increasing contrast in your image and simultaneously increasing the noise just a bit to give it some feeling. I have used this technique on a lot of my images - and this technique has become de rigger for many in the advertising industry as a method to give your images a gritty look and feel.

Now the Clarity tool in Lightroom version 1.1, works with this same Unsharp Mask contrast building principle but with a twist. To avoid adding noise to the image it builds a mask of the image so that the USM is only applied to the mid tones. Without the mask using Unsharp Mask in Photoshop brightens the highlights and darkens the shadows dramatically - this might be a very nice effect for some images but by building a mask for each image the Clarity tool only affects the mid tones which is very nice.

If I had to guess, I would also say that some amount of noise reduction is being applied when using the Clarity slider since there is very little noise build up like there is using the Unsharp Mask trick described above. Either way, the Clarity tool is sure to add a little dramatic flair to many images.

This past week I was shooting some rock climbing here in New Mexico with some world-class climbers and while working the images up I experimented with the new controls. As an example, one of the images I shot of Brandi Proffit (below) seemed like it could certainly use a little enhancement with the Clarity tool.

You’ll notice that I have added some vignetting in the image above as well to move the viewers eye towards the center of the image - and yes, it is really that overhanging. I also cranked up the Clarity tool to around 41 for this image. And as you can see in the before and after image below, the Clarity tools adds significant but subtle contrast to the image’s mid tones. To really see where it affects this image look at the right side of Brandi’s face in the before and after images.

I would encourage anyone using Lightroom 1.1 to read Jeff Schewe’s excellent overview of the new sharpening, noise reduction and clarity tools. Jeff is the Photoshop master himself and consults very closely with Adobe on Photoshop and Lightroom. He wrote a piece on photoshopnews.com describing these new features in Adobe Capture RAW 4.1 but they are the exact same tools in Lightroom 1.1. Here is the link to that article:

http://photoshopnews.com/2007/05/31/about-camera-raw-41

That’s it for this week. There is a lot more info to come in the following weeks on the new and improved features of Lightroom 1.1. Enjoy!

Adios, Michael Clark

This was news to me, so I assume it’ll be news to others. I’ve been living, teeth clenched, with the noisy audio output on my G5 Mac since I bought it a few years ago. Apparently the knowledge of how the quiet the durn thing down has been around since 2003, but I’d never found it, despite a few “I can’t stand it any more!” Google searches. And apparently it was also news to Electronic Musician, because I came across the fix in their May, 2007 issue.

The problem is this: despite the G5’s wonderful suitability as an audio platform, its analog audio output can produce a LOT of background noise - and it’s ugly noise, to boot (the digital audio output is fine). When I first heard this crap coming up through my mixer, my first instinct was, of course, to blame my Wintel PC - that’s how ugly this noise is. But lo and behold it was the Mac. Kind of like reflexively blaming the cat, and this one time it turns out to be the dog.

Anyway, it turns out there’s an easy and free fix (requires OS 10.4.3 or higher):