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!