O'Reilly Digital Media

At an Aperture class I taught last weekend, one of my students was considering using Aperture as a tool to organize his large scanned image library. He had already scanned thousands of photos and organized them into folders within folders (within folders…) in the Finder. When we got to the part of the class covering the “Import Folders into a Project” option, he was particularly interested, and I realized that this seems to be one of the lesser talked about import options within Aperture. Most folks using Aperture are obviously importing photos direct from their camera’s storage card, but for those that aren’t, this option may be quite useful.

Before I go any further, I suggest that you check out Micah’s excellent article Digitizing Your Film Archive with Aperture. He offers many useful suggestions for those considering Aperture to help in digitizing a film archive. But if you’ve already scanned your photos or negatives and spent time organizing them into a meaningful hierarchy on your computer and you want to keep that organization, you can import a folder of images into Aperture as a project.

When you import a folder of images, the folder becomes a project and any subfolders become albums within the project. If there are many levels of subfolders nested within one another, each folder will become an Aperture folder, with the last level of folders becoming Albums. So plan your folder hierarchy carefully, visualizing the top-level folder as the project that it will become when it’s imported. And remember that any images that are not nested within subfolders will be imported but won’t end up in any of the albums.

To import a folder of images from the Finder choose File > Import > Folders into a Project. This technique also works when you drag a folder of images from the Finder and drop it onto Aperture’s Projects panel. However I prefer the menu command, as it brings up the import dialog, offering options on naming conventions and where to store the images.

For anyone who’s interested in learning more about Aperture, I’ll be teaching a comprehensive one-day course on September 16th in Dallas, Texas at The Westin City Center. The workshop is part of the Aperture Road Tour presented by AUPN. If you’re in the Dallas area, sign up and come on down!

Even though I am pretty used to working with Adobe Photoshop Lightroom now and it is part of my everyday personal workflow, I still do not leave my entire life’s work on Lightroom, at least not all of it at the same time. I work with a number of different computers and some of them are slower than others. I also travel a lot and although I could at times see the reason for taking a large number of images with me, most of the time I only need the images from the specific project (or projects) I am working on at that time.

So therefore it makes sense that I use Lightroom to organize and help me develop images belonging to a particular project. Fortunately we now have the ability in Lightroom to export a group of selected images and create a Catalog (which I think of as a Project Catalog) and save it to a folder on your internal or external hard disk drive.

After I have exported my Project Catalog and made a copy (including the image files) to an external drive, I select New Catalog in the File Menu of the Lightroom Library Module and start the next project with a clean slate.

Export Negative Files - allows you to save all the original files even if you have referenced them in your current Catalog, otherwise if you transport your Catalog to another computer the image files will not be there.

Include Available Previews - will save you time in rebuilding the previews files when you access this Catalog in the future or on another computer.

These (Project) Catalogs can be reopened when needed, or saved to a folder on an external hard disk drive (flash drive, CD-ROM or any other transportable media) for archival storage or transport to another location or computer.

If you look closely at the image above you will see that I have a Firewire drive attached to my computer that is labeled MS-DOS, this is a small Firewire bus powered hard disk drive that I have formated in MS-DOS format so that I can easily swap relatively large files with any computer, whether it is a Macintosh or Microsoft Windows PC.

I organize my Lightroom Catalogs by date and project name but you can basically use the same system that you are now using to organize your files, just remember to give each Lightroom Catalog a unique name so you can locate it easily when you need it.

iPhoto 7 and Aperture work really well together. In iPhoto you can drag in any image from your Aperture library using the Show Aperture Library feature in the File menu. You can also add images directly from Aperture simply by dragging and dropping from Aperture to iPhoto.

However, when you add images to iPhoto, by default iPhoto copies them to your iPhoto library as a new file. This means that you now have two copies of the file living on your hard drive. To get around this simply open your iPhoto Preferences and under the Advanced tab uncheck the Copy items to the iPhoto Library.

Now, whenever you drag images from Aperture to iPhoto, iPhoto will treat the files as referenced masters. In fact, in iPhoto you can Ctrl-click the image and select Show File. A Finder window will pop up and if you had added that image from your Aperture, you will see that the Finder has pointed to the Preview image file within your Aperture library package.

What is really nice about this feature (other than the fact that it saves some hard disk space) is that if you make a change to an image in Aperture, you will see those changes in iPhoto. This holds true of course until you make changes to the image within iPhoto. If you edit the image in iPhoto, a new file will be created within your iPhoto library to reflect the changes. You can always revert back to the original in iPhoto, and if you Ctrl-click the file, you will now see the option to Show File, or Show Original File.

In order for all of this to work, you will need to be sure to set up Aperture’s Preferences to Share Previews With iLife and iWork. You will also need to be sure that Preview files for the images you are interested in have had a chance to generate after importing into Aperture. You can check on this using Aperture’s Show Task List feature found under the Window menu.

This type of seamless integration between Aperture and iPhoto 7 offers some really cool and fun tools. As Derrick mentioned in a previous post, you can sort of think of iPhoto 7 as a giant plugin for Aperture.

Strike the P while any or several images are highlighted in Lightroom to save yourself a lot of time. Striking the P assigns the highlighted image(s) as a Quick Pick. At the bottom of the screen in the Filters bar, click the solid color flag. All the images you’ve flagged will appear in the grid…and all others will be hidden. Just highlight all the images (Cmd/Ctrl + A)

When you get through with any one of these operations, highlight all the files again (Cmd/Ctrl + A) and hit P again. That will turn off the flag for all of the currently selected group so that you can flag another group for another reason.

Here are some of the other reasons you may want to hand-pick groups of files so that you can apply the same thing to all of them (I have made using the following sequence of “picked” files immediately after every Import):

Delete any images you don’t want to keep. If you just delete them one-at-a-time, you have to answer the dialog’s Confirm dialog as to whether you’re sure you want to delete the image from the drive. You then have to wait for the deletion to happen for each image.

Set Rating. All you have to do is strike the number for the number of stars or the color you want to assign and it’s assigned to all the picks for that number or color at once. Furthermore, doing them all at once gives you a last minute chance to make sure this is the collection you want to give this particular rating to.

Assign Keywords and Metadata to groups of files. Doing it to whole groups at a time insures that all the images that deserve this set of keywords or metadata will get the identical keywords or metadata. So your subsequent searches will be much more accurate.

Use the Eyedropper to set the white balance for all the images at the same time. I find that I’m more likely to get the adjustments just right if those adjustment are being made on images that already have the correct white balance. If there’s nothing in one image that has a color that is absolutely neutral, there’s a greater likelihood that there will be at least one in the group.

Process all similarly shot similar files at the same time. Obviously, this cuts your developing time to a fraction of what it would be if you processed each image individually. Just be sure you don’t try to do this on a series of images that have been bracketed for either exposure or white balance.

You’ll probably come up with a few other suggestions of your own. See ya next week.

It’s normal this time of year to ask, “What did you do for your vacation?”
Yesterday I ran into Adobe’s Bill Stotzner and he told me he took Lightroom underwater for his vacation. Let me explain.

Traveling with your camera is a secret dream of many of us. There’s no question when you’re in a new and interesting place, all your senses are stimulated particularly your visual sense and it almost feels like pointing your camera in any direction will yield more interesting stuff than when you’re at home.

Of course this is not necessarily true, but traveling is a rich and rewarding life experience and it can and often does inspire great photography.

But the mundane details when traveling with your camera need to be addressed to make your shooting experience an enjoyable one.

Electrical

Make sure you have the right adapters to insure all your electronics will work at your destination. For a complete list of world plug adapters, check out this site or the many like it. Most of our gear from laptops to chargers, work on a dual voltage system so all you need are the right adapters for the countries you plan to visit. Apple makes a World Travel Adapter Kit they sell for $40.

There’s some great information here.

Equipment

It’s always a struggle to pack for a long trip, particularly when traveling in Africa. When I’m working on my own projects, I can pack a bit lighter, but when you’re on assignment, you want to have the stuff that will get you the shot, not matter what. So, I end up taking a bit more stuff than I might otherwise. I talked about dumping out my stuff into gray bins at security last week, here’s what I was carrying.

My LowePro Versa 200 Backpack is small enough to make the carry-on cut for most aircraft, yet will contain a lot of stuff. I also picked up a Crumpler 7 Million Dollar Home bag, a nice mid-sized bag that can accommodate my medium format or Nikon cameras and lenses, depending how I configure my gear.

I’m going to Angola and Mozambique and I expect the conditions won’t be luxurious–I need to be able to move around quickly and this set-up will allow me to. Or so I thought, but the jury is still out on the ease of use of the following package. I really like wheeled cases, but most of them are just too big, and I haven’t found one to work on a trip like this.

Nhararai Janissone, 43 and his wife Maria Brute Simango 40, inside their home in Mossurize District, Manica Province, Mozambique. His name means ” keep quiet, talk about only what matters, don’t make war”. Copyright Steve Simon.

Here’s a list of my gear in the backpack:

Nikon D2x
Fuji S5
17-55mm 2.8
70-200mm 2.8
2-SB-800 Flashes
SC-29 off camera flash cord
Gary Fong Diffuser
Epson P-2000 Card Reader/Storage Drive
WhiBal Card
Edirol RD9 Recorder for collecting sound
MacBook Pro 2GHz with 100GB Drive (1-Firewire 400 Port)
OWC 7200rpm 200GB bus-powered Firewire/USB2 Drive
LaCie 5400 Firewire 250GB bus-powered drive.
LaCie 5400 160GB Rugged bus-powered Firewire/USB2 Drive
Western Digital Passport 160GB bus-powered USB2 Drive
25 DVD’s
3-Lexar 300x 4GB CF cards
1-Lexar 8GB 133x 8GB CF card
2-Lexar 133x 4GB CF cards
2-Lexar 300x 4GB SD cards
1-Lexar Secure II 8GB Jump Drive
FireWire Reader, USB2 reader
32-AA Duracell Ultra Batteries
Chargers, Lens cloths
Lasolite Reflector
Visible Dust Sensor Cleaning Kit
Velbon El Carmagne 540 Carbon Fiber Tripod w/QHD-61Q Head

Those of you who follow this space may remember that last time I traveled to Africa, I lost my 160GB FW bus-powered drive before we landed. You can see I’ve increased my Gig-age and will no doubt keep a closer watch on my indispensable storage. I plan on keeping my main Aperture Library on the OWC 200GB and dedicate the LaCie 250GB drive for my vault. (It is recommended however, that the vault be an identical drive to the one holding the Aperture Library).

In the Crumpler Bag:

Mamiya 645AFDII Camera Body
Mamiya ZD 22 Megapixel Digital Back. (Not yet supported by Aperture it comes with Lightroom! Which I will promptly ignore and shoot Raw/JPEG till Aperture supports it)
75-150mm f4.5 Zoom
Kata Raincover
Stickers for the kids
Little LED Flashlight that hooks onto my Domke vest, a lifesaver in remote areas with no electricity.

In my suitcase: Quantum Battery
Plastic Bags
Domke J2 w/inserts

This is a lot of gear to lug, but the medium format is for a specific project I will work on after my assignment, and I will leave it with a friend in Johannesburg where I return after my assignment. Which brings me to an important point.

Many people have bicycles but many still have to walk long distances for everyday tasks like fetching water or going to the clinic. We picked up these grateful women and gave them a lift in the back of our pick-up, on our way to church. Copyright Steve Simon

I will follow up in future posts just how my decisions to take what I did positively or negatively impacted my work. I said it last week but it’s worth repeating, make sure all your gear is insured, and insured for its replacement value. More on my big trip next post.

Fourteen minutes into last week’s Digital Media Insider podcast, "Secrets of the Demo Gods," I asked longtime reviewer Mark Nelson if any recent music-making gear had surprised him.

Mark started praising the M-Audio Black Box, a digital guitar effect co-designed by Roger Linn, the drum-machine pioneer (and a fine guitarist himself). "It was just…inspiring. Amazing stuff would happen," Mark enthused.

Coincidentally, Roger just wrote to say his company is now shipping Version 3 of the Black Box’s big brother, the AdrenaLinn. In case you missed our Black Box review, the AdrenaLinn crosses a drum machine with a guitar-amp simulator and "beat-synched multieffects." Plug in a guitar (or other electrified instrument) and the AdrenaLinn makes it groove by applying rhythmic processing that syncs to the song’s tempo.

This is a Rhino3D model, but the real AdrenaLinn III is now shipping. Click the image for background and bigger graphics.

According to Linn, Version III "a pretty significant step up from AdrenaLinn II." It improves the quality of the amp models and drum sounds; adds stereo reverb, compression, a tuner, new modulation effects, and more MIDI control; and much more. What I find especially interesting in these days of disposable products is how easy the company has made it to upgrade the AdrenaLinn. For $99, it will send you an upgrade kit containing the chips, a chip-puller tool, a new faceplate, and step-by-step photographic instructions. A new AdrenaLinn III costs about $375.

And what of the Black Box? While editing Mark’s review, I was seriously tempted to buy one myself, even though I’m not a guitarist. With this upgrade, the AdrenaLinn pulls further ahead in tweakability, but the two boxes still target different audiences. You can read a comparison on Roger’s site.

For more on the joys of tempo-synced effects, see my article "Sync and Grow Rich" and podcast "(((Echo)))."

In The King of Elfland’s Daughter, Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Lord Dunsany, wrote about magic beyond the fields we know. You step out into the ordinary, everyday fields that you see all the time. Maybe these fields are right next door to your house in suburbia. Willy, nilly you may be swept into a magical realm where nothing is ever the same.

I take Dunsany’s fantasy as a metaphor for photography. If you are willing to look carefully, and are open to the spirit of adventure, you never know what magical territory you may visit. If you have been changed by the experience, well that is no affair of mine.

View this image larger.

We were on family vacation in a rental house in Sea Ranch. Our house was in a suburb of vacation houses. (Although Sea Ranch isn’t supposed to be suburban, I know a suburb when I see one.) Across the street was a brown field. The fog came in, and on our last morning I used my macro lens to explore the magic that lies beyond the fields we know.

[105mm f/2.8 macro lens, 157.5mm in 35mm equivalent terms, 36mm extension tube, +4 diopters close-up filter, 1/3 of a second at f/32 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

In several discussions and talks with multimedia audio specialists, game composers, music technologists and the like… one of the startling conclusions that many have come to is that “game audio” is over. (!) Not to say that it no longer exists, or that all there is to listen to has been written; the general consensus was that we cannot develop it any further than it has become. We have CD quality or better, we have DSP on demand, we have plenty of storage and throughput on all the leading entertainment platforms; we even have “interactive” music engines for changing one’s tune based on user-directed game play. And of course there are the various flavors of “3D” interactive audio, 5.1 surround systems and so-called “synthesized space” that makes us believe we are really in the game. But guess what? All of that sound is still coming from the same two sources: the left speaker and the right speaker. (Or the same 5.1 speakers if you are lucky enough!) It’s still pretty much a stereo world.

In fact all sounds electronic, digital, or otherwise amplified are coming from just the same old pair of vibrating diaphragms we call speakers. We don’t hear the strings plucking, the horns tooting or the drums banging. We hear the speakers vibrating, and replicating all of these instrument sounds. Sure, it sounds realistic but the universe doesn’t emanate from a couple of speakers with a left-right mix. The sound of nature is millions of tiny sound sources contributing to this mass of noise that we are capable of sorting through with our ears. Each source is a vibrating entity, spread out in a natural field of space, each of it’s own material, each uniquely placed with it’s own volume.

So let’s go back a century or so to the early days of automated music and so called audio technology. Mechanical devices such as player pianos, band organs and calliopes were primitive and tempermental beasts; not to mention expensive and hard to move around. But these playback systems had several if not hundreds of sound sources; a different one for each note!

A present-day composer, Trimpin, has made a career of building computer driven instruments in the same vein. Mechanical, orchestra instruments, (or parts of) that are driven by MIDI. The complex power of the computer married to live mechanical sounds. His most popular piece however, betrays the idea of multiple sound sources. "IF 6 WERE 9" is a pile of automated electric guitars, but the guitar outputs are all mixed down into a pair of headphones!! All that plucking squeezed into a stereo signal. Back to square one…

By far, my favorite innovation in game audio is the Nintendo Wii. There are just too many cool things about it to love. The sound system seems to be a typical wave playback but the user interface is more fun than a laser pointer! Gesture based game controllers will probably be the savior of the game industry. But what was that I heard? A whoosh of the golf club… a smack of the tennis racket. Not only are the wireless controllers being waved wildly around the room, but each one has a speaker in it! Ok, so we’re back up to 6 sound sources (as opposed to 5.1) coming from 4 controllers and a stereo TV. But the big difference is that the sound sources are constantly moving around as the games are played. This is actual dynamic surround sound; gesture based localization! And it really sounds cool…. If the next clever game composer could use this array of musical sound placement, I would be the first in line to buy it. Hell, I’d like to write my own tunes for this thing!

Getting copies of your developed & processed images (whether they be JPEGs, PSDs, TIFFs) or your original RAW files out of Lightroom is just as easy as getting your untouched originals in to the application: simply select which files you want and select File → Export from the menu.

And in much the same way that Metadata & Develop Presets can save you some work by getting a jump on developing and cataloging your images as they are added to your library, Export presets and actions can save you some effort by saving you from rummaging through your folders and performing the same basic actions on your images every time they’re created.

Last week, a coworker of mine asked two great keyword questions, which have inspired this week’s blog post. The first is that he’s ended up with a number of identical-yet-different keywords, such as “bob,” “Bob,” “BOb,” etc.. He was wondering if anyone knew of a good way to consolidate them to just be “Bob.” Another coworker had a great suggestion:

1. Make a smart album with all images having the keyword “bob” or “Bob” etc..
2. Assign a new keyword “RealBob” to all of those images (make sure to then update your smart album).
3. Use tip three from here to remove all the old keywords.
4. Assign “Bob” to all of the images and remove “RealBob.”
5. Open up the keywords HUD and remove the unwanted keywords.

One important thing to remember is that if you have another library with images that have the unwanted keywords, when you load the library, Aperture will add those keywords back to the database. It won’t reset the keywords on the images from the first library, but the unwanted words will be in your keywords list again. Be careful!

My coworker’s second question was if he could make a smart album showing all images that don’t have the keyword “Bob.” Unfortunately, there is no “keyword is NOT” option. What I would recommend is to use IPTC keywords. When you set keywords, Aperture automatically adds them to the image’s IPTC keywords field. To filter on them, add an IPTC entry to your smart album, and set its field to “keywords.” Then, in the next popup, choose “does not contain.”

This is where things get a bit funky. You would expect that the IPTC keywords search would be smart enough to divide up its comma-separated list of keywords into individual keywords, checking each one individually. That way, “is not” would do exact matching on keywords and “does not contain” would do substring matching. That doesn’t seem to be the case (at least from my experimenting). Instead, it seems that “is not” only works if you have just one keyword, and you’re pretty much forced to use “does not contain.” Even weirder is that sometimes, “does not contain” doesn’t seem to work! For example, in an image with the IPTC keywords field: “cook bay, hibiscus flower, mountain, palm trees, sailboat, water,” when I set my smart album to all images where IPTC keywords does not contain “water,” that image didn’t go away. Furthermore, doing IPTC keyword searching can be slow because Aperture (to the best of my knowledge) doesn’t do anything to make searching this field faster.

Yes, there are other things you can do (mostly tricks, potentially involving custom metadata fields) to make these “keyword is not” smart albums, but despite all their shortcomings, I still think IPTC keywords are the easiest option.

If you have a better method to do either of these tasks, feel free to post your thoughts in the comments!

One of the things that really surprised me about my last post on the Inside Lightroom blog was how visually effective scrubbing through an image history is. I was amazed at how well it let me see the evolution of the photograph and I’ve since gone back and made some more tweaks to the photo based on what I saw. It’d be really nice to be able to easily scrub back and forth through your edits in Lightroom the same way you can in the movie I made. Of course, going and making a screenshot based movie for each photo edit session is a bit extreme, so I decided to dig a little deeper and how I could make what’s already in Lightroom work better for me.

When I started my wedding photography business a little over a year ago, the volume of my digital images shot up over a hundred percent. No longer post-processing an occasional 50 or so family or street photography images from a typical shoot, I now on a regular basis shoot and import 800-1200 photos at a time. And because I don’t like putting all my eggs in one basket, I still shy away from capturing all my images on a few 4 or 8 gig size media cards. I feel much better filling up about eight 1-2 gig cards per wedding. I could maybe scale back to six cards, but that’s as far as I would like to go right now.

So with eight cards and a pretty fast SanDisk reader, it takes me anywhere from 20 to 30 minutes to import images from those individual cards into Aperture. Each of my media cards is numbered (a tip I learned from Tom Lee’s very useful book, Digital Capture and Workflow for Professional Photographers) so I can know exactly what order I shot them, and each imported card is reflected in a separate project file in Aperture, so I’m assured that I’ve imported all the photos I took at the wedding.

While the numbering of cards has been helpful to my workflow, I didn’t like the time it took to import each card. So two months ago I lucked upon a very good used Epson P-2000 40 gig media storage and playback device from H&P for like $250, which is what I think the original price should be. Other more costly models with higher storage memory and improved features for RAW photos exist on the market today, but the P-2000 model fits my needs for now.

Using the P-2000
First off, using this device provides me a great way to back up my RAW image files while I’m on the shoot. I have the P-2000 and my media cards in a pouch that I wear on my belt at all times during the wedding. After I feel up a card, and when the time permits, I simply slip the card in the P-2000 and set it to import. While it’s importing, I put the device back into my pouch and go about my job of capturing the wedding. The import process is slow (about 15 minutes per card), but it’s not an issue when you’re off doing something else.

Tip 1: While it’s easy to just allow the P-2000 to import your images and put them in folders for you, you’ll find that when you hook up the device to your computer to capture in Aperture, you have to search through several folders or directories to find the actual photos you captured. It’s a serious waste of time.

The folder/directory structure of the P-2000

So while on the shoot I found that it was best to have the P-2000 both import images and put them in a custom named album. It will take about twice as long for images to be imported into the device when you tell it to also copy images into an album. But it only takes a few seconds to create a new album with a custom name. You don’t have to be fancy with the naming. The object is to just get those photos quickly stored and managed. The P-2000 also comes with pre-named albums that you can you use.

As I import more cards, I simply have the P-2000 capture and copy them to the same custom album. That way, by the end of the wedding shoot, I have all the photos I shot and copied to one album, and a unique folder for each imported card. Equally important, I now have an almost instant back-up of all my images. Of course, I never reformat my cards until I actually prepare for another client shoot.

Tip 2: There’s two ways to quickly check if your photos were actually imported. In the Home window of the P-2000, there’s an icon for Latest Data. You click on that and it will display thumbnails of all your last imported images. You can also click on the Saved Data icon and it will show you folders of each of your imported cards. Each import is put in a separate folder which is numbered and dated. So if you imported six cards on particular shoot, you have six unique folders that reflect that day’s shoot.

Now the problem with having the P-2000 import and copy files to an album is that it of course requires more battery use. The battery last a good amount of time, but on a few occasions it has gotten too low for me to import the last card or two of the day. I had to wait until I plugged the device into an electrical outlet to finish the importing. My goal however is to get all the cards imported during the shoot or at least during my drive home. So I’ve ordered a car battery charger for the device to solve this problem.

Importing to Aperture
With all the cards imported into the P-2000, I simply set it up to capture in Aperture. This process is pretty simple; however, it would be great if the custom name I gave for an album would actually show up in the Finder instead of the number title assigned to each created album. But other than that, I can now import all my 800-1200 wedding photos into Aperture without having to babysit the process of importing one card at a time at my desk. With this method each wedding shoot goes into one project file.

The Album folder structure for the P-2000

There are similar devices for portable image storage, but I simply like the design of the Epson P-2000 and the ability to actually see the photos I import into the device. Other less costly devices only tell you that files have been imported, but you can’t actually see them. I don’t trust that. Plus, though I haven’t done it yet, you can use the P-2000 to plug into a television set or projector and run a slide show on the spot. Clients can also view their photos right on the device itself.

My goal is to complete wedding projects in a 1-2 weeks with no more than six hours of post-processing time for a typical wedding. Using the Epson P-2000 with Aperture is certainly helping me reach that goal.

I had the weirdest thing start happening recently: every time I connected a camera or card reader, Canon’s CameraWindow would lanuch. It was driving me crazy. I thought Aperture controlled this function.

Well, the culprit was iPhoto ‘08. It had somehow picked up Canon’s CameraWindow as the application to launch when my card reader was attached. And the darndest part of it was that iPhoto changed my Aperture preference too. Whoa, dude!

So I changed the setting in iPhoto ‘08, double-checked the preference in Aperture, and moved on. So, if you’ve just installed iPhoto ‘08, keep an eye out for this one.

In my last blog post, talking about the Tom Hogarty interview, I decided to investigate just how well Lightroom would work as a digital asset management tool. I must say that I am reporting the facts as they are here for my hardware and images, these results may not be the same for your hardware and your images, especially if you only shoot jpegs. Below is part of my last blog post:

At the moment, I have about 5,200 images imported into Lightroom. This week I plan to import about 20,000 images just to see how much the program slows down and if it slows down at all. As a test to see how fast or slow Lightroom is working, I will render 1:1 previews for one folder that contains 287 images as it is now (with 5,200 images in the catalog), then repeat this test once I have imported the new images. With 5,200 images total in my catalog it took 38 minutes 54 seconds to render the 1:1 previews for a folder containing 287 images. I will also of course work on images and see if there are other ways in which the program slows down or if it seems to run just the same as it does currently.

Before we get too far along here I would like to share with you some hardware specs because these matter. I conducted this test using an Apple G5 dual 2.0 Ghz tower with 4.5 GB of RAM. All of my images and the Lightroom catalog were on a SATA hard drive. And all of the raw images, save for one folder, were Nikon D2x raw image files which are approximately 12 MB in size.

Earlier this week I imported another 4,929 images into Lightroom bringing my grand total to 10,129 raw images in my Lightroom catalog. I ran the same test as before, rendering 1:1 previews for that same folder of 287 images and with 10,129 images in the catalog it took over twice as long to render the 1:1 previews, clocking in at 1 hour 28 minutes 15 seconds. I wasn’t really surprised by this number too much but it wasn’t too exciting either. On a separate note, most of Lightroom’s functionality seemed to run at about the same speed - changing to the Develop module and working with images was just as it was at 5,200 images in the catalog. It was only rendering previews or selecting large groups of images and trying to add metadata that took much longer than it did previously.

I continued to import images to find out what the numbers would be at 15,000. But by the time I got to 11,365 and tried to render 1:1 previews the progress bar didn’t move much at all and Lightroom became much slower than I would have wanted. Again using the Develop module didn’t seem that much slower but going to 1:1 on any images took quite a while for it to snap sharp. So, I never made it to 15,000 images and finished my testing at 11, 365. While I found that Lightroom was quite slow at this number of images this is not a defacto standard for everyone. Read on and I’ll go more into how different computing power and image size will affect just how many images you can import into Lightroom before you see a significant slow down. It is all relative.

While importing images from an assignment mid last week I decided that I needed Lightroom to run faster - so I deleted about 8,000 images out of Lightroom (bringing my total number of images in the catalog down to around 4,200). The catalog did not fair so well after that and it took a few hours for Lightroom to get back to it’s normal self. It seems like it took a while for Lightroom to remove all of those previews from the catalog after I deleted approximately 15 folders. In the end, I had to make a new catalog to work on another set of images because the old catalog did not seem to recover from the massive importation of images and their subsequent deletion.

Hence, the bottom line for my computer, my raw files and my workflow is that while Lightroom may be able to manage 10,000 images, the speed of operation takes a big hit. I won’t go so far as to say that Lightroom will not work as a digital asset management (DAM) tool but for right now with my workflow and hardware the application was a little slower that usual. If I was shooting with a lower resolution camera and had a wicked fast brand-spanking new Mac Pro tower with some serious RAM then I’m sure I could go up to 20,000 images in a catalog without any issues.

As it is now, my workflow with Lightroom works fantastic as long as I keep the number of images below 7,000 images. Not a big deal since I tend to use Lightroom as a raw processor with perks. I import images into Lightroom, render the previews, edit and process the raw images, create slideshows and web galleries then when I am finished with an assignment I delete the folder out of Lightroom. If I need to access those images again I can view them in Bridge CS3 and work with the exported tiff files in Photoshop CS3 or even reprocess them using Adobe Camera Raw 4.1 (or re-import them into Lightroom). It works just fine.

Please note that this is not a slight on Lightroom, I wanted to see for myself where the limits were for my hardware and my workflow. I had been warned by others that going over 10,0000 raw images in Lightroom would severely slow down the software and well, I found that out for myself. And I understand perfectly now why Adobe does not put out any concrete numbers or limits on how many images one should import into Lightroom. The application speed depends on so many factors that no number would really be accurate. My aging Apple G5 tower seems to work extremely well with Photoshop and all of my other applications but I think this test has exposed some of weaknesses of a 2 year old computer. If any of you have different experiences I would love to hear about them. If any of you have 100,000 high res raw files in a catalog and Lightroom continues to run like a champ I would really like to hear about that. Perhaps it is time to upgrade to a Mac Pro.

Either way, Lightroom is still the application of choice for my workflow. I don’t really need it to be a digital asset management application and I am sure this is high on the list of things Adobe is working on for version 2.0 (I don’t know for sure - just guessing).

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

Adios, Michael Clark

For the last year I’ve been pretty much Lightroom-centric but now I’m updating my Photoshop RAW book to CS3 and I’m straying back into the world of Bridge, Camera Raw, and Photoshop. It’s giving me a chance to write about the many improvements to the three applications that make up CS3, but it also makes me appreciate what Lightroom has to offer.

With the recent release of iLife 08 and iWork 08, I thought I’d spend a little time sharing how I use Pages to create layouts with my photographs. I’ve been using Pages as my full-time word processor for a long time now, and iWork 08 has brought a few welcome changes, including dedicated word processing and page layout modes and a context-sensitive Format Bar. But it’s probably the new layout templates that are most exciting for anyone that uses Pages as a quick design tool — and for photographers, the poster and flyer templates are potentially the most useful.

Next time you have a few minutes to experiment, try creating a quick poster or flyer in Pages using one or more of your favorite photographs from Aperture:

Launch Pages and from the template dialog, click on Posters. You’ll see a handful of pre-designed and customizable templates in a variety of different design styles. For our example, I’ll choose the new Movie Poster Small template and click Choose. Pages opens a new document based on our template, and ready to be customized with our photograph and text.

In order to get our photograph from Aperture into Pages, we’ll need to access the Media Browser: from the View menu choose Show Media Browser. Click the Photos tab in the Media Browser and you should see your entire Aperture library — Projects and Albums intact. Choose a favorite image and drag and drop it onto the placeholder image in our Pages layout. You can modify your photo’s placement a few ways. Single-click on the photo to bring up the Edit Mask HUD which allows you to zoom in or out on your photo. Double-click on your image and your cursor will change to the familiar hand icon, allowing you to move the image within its mask.

Editing the text is easy: just click and type. But here’s a neat tip for customizing your layout’s colors: click on a colored object in your layout — in my example, I’ll use the large red color block at the bottom of the poster. To change the red color to something that looks smarter with your photo, click the new Fill square in Pages’ Format Bar. You could simply click one of the existing color swatches, but instead, let’s click on Show Colors to bring up the Colors Palette.

Try using the Colors Palette’s eyedropper tool (the one that looks like a magnifying glass) to sample a color directly from your photo. In my example below, I sampled the burgundy color of the car’s paint, and then used the color wheel to select a contrasting color from across the wheel. I also deleted some of the template text, and moved my title text down a bit. Not bad for a few minutes of work.

Now, a little sidebar information based on some questions I’ve received in the past. When you drag and drop your photograph from the Media Browser into Pages (or any other iLife/iWork application), you are placing that photo’s JPEG preview into whatever project you’re working on. There is no link between that JPEG and the image in Aperture, so if you make adjustments to that image in Aperture, you’ll need to re-drag it into your iLife/iWork project.

Before and after: the original template on the left, and my custom layout on the right.

I am currently on vacation. On Wednesday, I took a ferry from my home in Dominica to Guadeloupe, a French island just to our north. The trip was really nice. We left around 8 pm and it took about two hours. Guadeloupe is a busy place, and much more built up and modernized than Dominica. It feels like being in France, minus the Louvre and add some palm trees.

Before leaving, I contemplated what type of photography equipment to bring. Normally, I have a LowePro Stealth backpack that I fill up with cameras and lenses and my laptop. It’s the perfect bag for a trip like this because I can stuff a good deal of equipment and accessories in the bag and still have easy access to things like passports, and other travel items.

However, for this trip I decided to do something different. Instead of packing up my entire arsenal, I decided to try an approach that I really found useful back in college. I brought with me one camera, and one lens, nothing more. I chose this option not simply because it would allow me to travel light, but really, because I have found it to be a great exercise in creativity.

I used to do this back in college all the time. Though, back then it was even more restrictive. I would take my Nikon F3 and a 24mm lens, two or three rolls of film, and go out shooting for the day. Every time I did this I came back with really great photographs. It causes you to really slow down and think about what you are doing. It forces you to compose, and move around physically, looking for better angles. It challenges your creativity, and the next thing you know, everything is flowing.

For this trip, I decided to bring my Canon 20D and my 10-22mm EF-S f/3.4-4.5 lens. I really love this lens even though it is a little slower than my 17-35 f/2.8. It is pretty compact, very sharp and the wide angle (16-35mm equivalent) is really nice. In addition to the camera and lens, I brought a card reader and my laptop.

Sometimes I feel like digital photography can limit our creative juices. There is just so much immediacy. It allows you to be more liberal with your shooting, and sometimes can cause you to become a little lazy. There is always more hard drive space, and you don’t have to pay for processing. You don’t have to wait either. As soon as you shoot you can see your image.

So, I am going to limit myself digitally. As I shoot, I plan to refrain from reviewing my shots on the LCD. I plan to download my cards into Aperture when they fill up, but I am not going to look at the shots. Maybe I will set up Aperture in List Mode so I can’t see the thumbnails. I am planning to wait until I return to Dominica to look at my images. Maybe I am crazy, but I think it will help. I am really interested in revitalizing some of my creativity. I have tried all types of things in the past, but this time I am going back to my roots. One camera, one lens, one 4 gig card. I may even tape down the zoom ring and fix it at 21mm.

Since I began using Aperture, I have really enjoyed being able to develop my images on the fly, quickly and easily, without any hesitation or workflow constraints. I can make as many versions as I want to, and I can try things out and decide that I don’t like them later. It’s really an amazing way to work that I believe has truly helped my creativity in some ways. But, this time, I am going to use Aperture as a storage facility. Aperture will keep my photos safe, secure, and organized until I return home. At that point I will open my Aperture library, turn on the normal viewer mode and begin my editing process.

I am hoping that my experience will be similar to picking up my three rolls of Velvia at my college lab. It was such a reward to open those film bags and lay the rolls out on the light table. They just jumped off the table, rich with color and ready to be looked at. I miss that experience, and I miss that type of creativity. So, stay tuned next week when I post my results of this little experiment in creativity. It should be interesting!

I was going to write a Lightroom post this week but who are we kidding? Nobody is thinking about Lightroom right now. Everybody is still in shock from the newest camera announcements from Canon and Nikon.

Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III

First on the 20th of August came the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III, WOWEEEE, I’m not a Canon DSLR user, never have been and probably never will be, but 21.1 million pixels full-frame in a 35mm format body, using the full range of lenses designed for 35mm, this is big time news for photographers.

A lot of studio photographers are going to either sell their Hasselblad H series digital equipment or cancel their orders. At only $8,000 for the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III body and $1,000-$2,000 a piece for a few pro quality Canon lenses, they can afford to go out and buy a new Porshe with the money they save not buying the Hasselblad gear.

Lightroom users should note that RAW image files from the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III will be approximately 25 megabytes in size. Meaning that a 1 Gigabyte Compact Flash card will hold only 40 images. So to shoot 400 images in one session, you will need 10 Gigabytes worth of Compact Flash cards.

If you are planning to go out on location or on a trip and downloading your images to your laptop, you will have to have a minimum of 100 Gigabytes of storage space available if you are planning to shoot 4,000 images.

Other Canon photographers are of course oooohing and ahhhing a lot too, but it is the commercial photographers who will immediately put themselves on the waiting list for the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III, for them it is money in the bank.

Nikon D3

On the 23rd of August Nikon dropped a smaller bomb, with such precision and skill that many Canon users declared the war over and that Nikon had won by producing the best camera for journalists and sports photographers yet. Very surprising really, because Nikon has not even labeled this camera as a sports or journalism camera (no H designation), but the specs speak for themselves. 12.1 million pixels full-frame, ISO 200 to 6400 (can be boosted to ISO 25600), nine frames per second with AF tracking (11 frames without), 51-point AF sensor, a virtual horizon function that can tell if you are holding the camera level, etc., etc. This camera is loaded and it will sell for around $5,000.

Perhaps the biggest threat to Canon is that the Nikon D3 is not intended to be competition for the new Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III. Nikon’s giant slayer has not even been announced yet and is not expected until sometime early in 2008. The D3 was instead targeted at the Canon EOS-1D Mark III (10 million pixel, APS size) and has effectively blown it off the playing field. As one Canon sports photographer put it, we are going to start seeing black lenses among the white again.

Which means that Nikon has an at minimum six months free pass to watch Canon either succeed or struggle with the new Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III and then to drop another bombshell on them.

More detailed information on the Nikon D3.

More detailed information on the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark III.

I’ve already written about the Slideshow module in a general way in an earlier O’Reilly blog. This blog is just to emphasize it’s use as a quick way to communicate the results of a shoot to a remote client, fan, or editor.

I’ve found it important to rank, title, do preliminary exposure and white balance adjustment, and crop the images that I’m going to place into the slideshow before I send it to the client. One advantage of sending it to a remote client is that there’s a smaller chance that the client will see images that you’re not particularly proud of, for whatever reason.

Next, create a User Template called Client Slideshow by clicking the Add button. Then all the settings I’m going to recommend below will be automatically made, so it will speed the process for you.

From the Lightroom Templates panel list, choose Default.

In the Overlays panels, check all three boxes. I like to make a custom identity plate with the name of my business at the top for presentation slide shows. That way, anyone the main client calls in to take a look at the show gets to be reminded of who the photographer is. I also check the Text Overlays and Rating Stars boxes. Text Overlay shows the file number. You can cheat and show the file number and a slide title at the same time if you’ve actually named your files with a title in them in addition to the camera’s file number. Then punch the number of stars (0-5) that you want to give to each image to let the AD know which pictures you want to use.

Now all you have to do is Export your slide show, so click the Export button. You can see the dialog below.

The beauty of it is that you can scale and specify the slideshow just as if it were a JPEG. So you can make it very easy to email. I’m showing the Export dialog below, so you can see how easy it is to access the sizing and quality options.

I’ve said it before, my travel fantasy is to be all packed and ready, looking at my watch to see if it’s time to mosey on over to the airport and check-in.

But the reality is always a bad case of chickenwithoutaheadia, because there’s so much to do to make sure life continues in my absence–bills to be paid, plants watered etc.

So in the next few posts, I thought I would talk about everyting I do to prepare for a six week assignment for Oxfam UK , visiting Angola, (if my Visa comes through) Mozambique, South Africa and maybe more places.

I won’t talk about the obvious- the vaccinations that are needed and anti-malaria medication (I chose Malarone). That stuff is readily available on the web or at your local travel clinic.

Instead, I will provide you (and myself) with a checklist that we can go over the next time we have the good fortune to take an extended journey with our cameras. In coming posts I will also talk about the shoot, show some pictures and provide info on my workflow with Aperture–internet connections willing.

Don’t forget to breathe and everything will be okay. Copyright Steve Simon

Containment

Like many photographers I know, I have a bit of a “camera bag problem”. You can never have too many is my reasoning, since each assignment demands different equipment configurations. My strategy is to find the lightest, strongest bags I can, since I’m always close or exceeding weight limits, a fact I’ve resided myself too. That said, I pack as light as I can. Ikea sells a bag for a dollar made of a durable material that lets you hold a lot of heavy stuff in a pinch, and folds small.

I have a medium-sized suitcase on wheels, a Crumpler “7 Million Dollar Bag”, a LowePro Versa 200 back pack and a Domke Vest and a smallish fanny pack. Because this is an assignment and not strictly personal work, I feel the need to take some extra stuff to make sure nothing needed gets missed.

When I finally loaded myself up and haled a cab, I realized I may have been a bit optimistic in thinking I can lug all this around with some ease. But the jury is still out; it all depends on how secure my base will be when I’m out in the field. If not, taking too much stuff can really hinder shooting, so I’m hoping I can leave some stuff safely behind and take what I need, when I need it.

I like to get to the airport early, especially for guys like us carrying so much stuff, with wires, batteries and chargers bursting out at the seams.

On this occasion, a new TSA rule had just been implemented: “WASHINGTON, D.C. — The TSA has announced a new security enhancement that could affect the way you pack your carry-on bags.
Effective Saturday, August 4th, passengers must remove all electronic items, such as DVD players, video cameras, and MP3 players, from their carry-ons at security checkpoints for inspection”.

I did not know about this.

My security guy, required me to remove all the electronics from my bags, and place them in those gray bins! Well this is a first for me, but I’ve heard many a nightmare- airport security experience and this one ranks up there.

I managed to unpack my backpack and camera bag quickly, into four gray plastic bins with expensive loose unsupervised gear, (not a happy moment) taking a ride through the X-Ray machines. Fortunately, I was able to get it all back in the backpack and camera bag safely, but if this was to be the new norm, I would have to come up with a better strategy for carry-on stuff.

As I re-conbobulated my stuff, another (nice) security person I chatted with briefly said that yes, you’re supposed to take out at least the big items, but not necessarily everything, and she said, whenever a new rule is enforced, some take it to extremes especially at the start. She also mentioned that she thinks the old way works better. The luck of the draw I guess.

These are not the security guys that made me empty the contents of my carry-on camera bags into gray bins. Photo Copyright Steve Simon

But I digress. Here’s the stuff I’m taking. I’ll list the equipment next week.

Travel umbrella
Sunglasses (Polarized)
A light foldable Gortex hat for protection against the sun and elements.

I throw a bright-colored ID tag making it easier to see checked baggage and I always like to get to baggage claim early to insure I see the bags quicker than any potential thief would.

It should be mentioned that I think it’s best to have the expectation that stuff is going to get lost, stolen, or broken. It’s not a doomsday scenario as much as being professional, and having a back-up plan should bad things happen. Have your stuff insured for full replacement value. Make arrangements to have stuff sent to you when possible if you need it. Make sure you have travel health insurance.

As far as what you take on, you need to be able to function when your suitcase is lost, so make sure you have everything you need, including chargers, plug adapters, drugs of course; with you. I tend to maximize (exceed) carry on allowance weight by keeping my bags small (but heavy, about four gray bins worth) and wearing a vest packed with essentials, which allows more carry-on stuff “legally”.

Shadow of my big jet reflected in the clouds. Copyright Steve Simon

My recent photographer-meets-airport-security experience, was not pleasant, and I have heard that some countries and airports can be better or worse. Therefore, you need to know there is a chance your carry-on could be refused and moved to check baggage; so have some sort of quick fix to handle that unfortunate case. (Ikea Bag or vest with big pockets)

More airport/photographer stories here. I’d be curious to hear your photo-travel strategies. More on my big trip and the stuff I take with me next week.

Seasoned recording engineers often audition their mixes in mono to check for phasing problems that might occur on the mono speakers in TVs and PA systems. Collapsing a stereo signal to mono also gives you another perspective on how well sounds are blending. But because I run audio straight out of my computer into powered speakers or headphones, I’ve never had an easy way to monitor in mono.

That shortcoming became more annoying when I started recording telephone interviews for the Digital Media Insider podcast. I like to edit audio in BIAS Peak, so to gain access to both sides of the conversation, I usually created a stereo audio file containing my voice on the left channel and the interviewee’s on the right. Those “dual-mono” files are easier to edit, but listening to them without going crazy required an absurd pile of adapters.

While working on a recent episode, I stumbled on a simple (and free) solution: I open the MDA Combo or Image plug-in and set it as follows:

These settings pan the left and right sides of a stereo file to the center. You’d need to run only one of these plug-ins at a time, of course, so I’ve bypassed Combo here.

The MDA plug-ins run on Mac and Windows in both AU and VST format. I also found an even simpler AU/VST plug-in called Monomaker from DestroyFX. At last, I can return the ridiculous adapter chain to the parts box!

Have you stumbled across unexpectedly helpful plug-ins too? Please leave a link.

After playing around with Lightroom you’ll grow familiar with its two faces: the first is that of a management & cataloging application (the Library module), the other is akin to an image editor (the Develop module). While I—and I’m sure I suffer from the same problem that afflicts most readers of this site—rarely have problems finding the time to adjust my images in the Develop module to make them look better, I almost always have problems finding the time to properly assign keywords and other metadata in the Library module. I’d like to think that it’s not my fault: humans are hard–wired to give priority to what we see (especially when we&rs