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’re paying the bills with our sense of vision), and given the choice between looking at something and cataloging it, well… we both know which of the two options will be given priority.

Luckily, Lightroom can ease the burden in entering the same metadata information when importing your photos. In addition to initiating the development process when importing, you can also create metadata presets to save yourself from going back through your photos and appying the same metadata over and over again (Lightroom’s Sync tool can relieve some of the burden of having to apply the same metadata over and over to different photos).

When Aperture v1.5 was first released, I was sure that I wanted to generate previews for all my images. Being able to generate high res JPEGS for slide shows and share them with other iLife applications made sense and seemed like a good idea.

I travel a lot and so my workflow begins on my MacBook Pro. I import the images, generate previews, edit - or at least try to do a rough edit - while in the field. (BTW, I also download the images to two backup drives I bring along.) When I get home I relocate the masters to my RAID 5 setup and I export the project to my main computer, and then import it into my “Ultimate Library.” I had been leaving the projects on my MacBookPro (with the masters stored on the Raid at home). That way I could generate custom slide shows while on the road to showcase my portfolio.

Convenience comes with a hefty price tag in terms of memory. After awhile I noticed I had significantly less free space on my MacBook Pro … and I realized that I can’t afford to have previews for all the images in all the projects. I was constantly having to juggle for space. (Yes, I’d love a new MBP with more than twice as much storage, but eventually I’d face the same issue.)

The other morning I was up unusually early, thanks to a hungry cat, and was able to photograph a great sunrise over Portland. It’s not often that I’m up for sunrise, but whenever I am, I always sort of wish I were a morning person. But, I digress. The shot turned out to be a good one and as I processed it in Lightroom, I found myself again enjoying the fact that a RAW workflow opens up all sorts of creative opportunities to refine an image even after the shutter has been released. To show this in action, I’ve put together a quick video showing the processing I did to my sunrise shot.

In June, Steve Simon and I had the good fortune to teach a two week photography class to the photo students at the Oklahoma Summer Arts Institute. Celebrating its thirtieth year, OSAI is a two week arts camp for 14 to 18-year-old Oklahoma students. Held in the beautiful Quartz Mountain State Park in southwestern Oklahoma, the program offers photography, writing, ballet, modern dance, orchestra, acting, film and video, and chorus, the camp is unique both for the faculty it attracts, and for the cross-disciplinary experience that the students get. Our students got to shoot performances of many different kinds, collaborate with writing students, learn to shoot head shots and portraits, and more. As a teacher, one of the most startling things about OSAI is the calibre of the students, both in terms of dedication and focus, and in terms of the quality of their work. The students have to work hard to get in to the program, and once there, they make the most of it.

What also impressed me this year was how much easier it is to teach and manage a lab using Aperture.

Thanks to Holland Hall, a private school in Tulsa, we had a luxurious lab of 18 iMacs (this is in addition to the exceptional darkroom facility) and the students worked exclusively on Aperture. Not one student had used the program before, but quite a few had Photoshop experience. I was expecting a bit of a learning curve, and so tried to initially keep them to simple activities - importing, browsing, and rating. Within a day, though, they had - on their own - discovered the loupe, stacking, and many editing functions. We quickly threw out any planned teaching agenda and just tried to keep up with the students’ questions.

Part of the ease that the students had stems, of course, from the fact that they’ve used complex software their whole lives, and so are not afraid to explore. But I think it’s also a testament to Aperture’s design that completely novice students could take to the program so quickly. When we first showed them Aperture, a few students expressed disappointment that they weren’t going to be learning Photoshop. These were also the first students to say, a few days later, “how much does a Mac like this cost? I’d like to get one so that I can start using Aperture.”

As a teacher, Aperture presents many advantages. First, since the toolset is the same for raw or JPEG, you don’t have to teach separate workflows and editing processes. Yet you can still teach the full range of raw tools and advantages. In the limited time of a two-week class, this is a huge bonus. Most importantly, thanks to Aperture’s comparison features it’s very easy to focus on the photography end of digital photography. Whether working with individual students, or presenting to the entire class, the ability to throw up multiple versions of an image was crucial to discussions of what makes one image work and another one not.

Managing a lab of eighteen computers can be a real headache, but Aperture offers some important advantages that greatly streamline your IT concerns. First, because all of our machines were networked together, it was simple enough to perform Vault backups to a central server, which was a critical function given the electrical storms that raged during the two weeks, and regularly knocked out power. Of course, this also facilitated the ability to restore, should a student accidentally wreck some work.

Ultimately, each student was working towards a selection of three images that would go in the final gallery show. By asking them to place their best images into specific albums, it was easy for us to move from machine to machine to see the student’s final choices. From there, we could work with them to narrow their best images into a final three, which went in their own album. It was then easy for us to, when the students were away, find the correct images and get them assembled as needed.

I wanted to return the computers in the same state that they were loaned to us, so I used OS X Server to facilitate the configuration of each machine. I created a user account that was configured precisely the way I wanted it (with many applications removed so that the students wouldn’t be distracted) and all printer settings pre-configured. Using Server, I was able to automatically install this image onto each machine over the network. After camp, it was an easy process to use Server to restore the machines to their original state.

Of course, I don’t need to sell most of you on the merits of Aperture. But even with all my Aperture experience, I was surprised to discover some previously hidden advantages of using it as a teaching tool.

You can view a full selection of shots of the lab, as well as the final student gallery here.

Social Networking is exploding — that much is clear. But did you know that sites such as Facebook, Friendster, and MySpace are more than online watering holes where kids gather and socialize? They’re creating social change in tandem. Facebook recent launched a “Causes” application tab, allowing members to participate in what the creators have dubbed “equal opportunity activism”. Over 35,000 members sign up each day. The user’s chosen cause is referenced in his profile, and he can then encourage friends to join and raise money for his selected charity. Apparently, “Causes” exceeded $250k in donations during the first two months. Causes on Facebook run the gamut from those that are serious to those that are goofy and more eccentric.

Facebook isn’t alone in encouraging members to make a difference. Friendster recently began allowing non-profits to create profiles, and MySpace launched its “Impact” channel earlier this year — which encourages political activism and lets users participate in a wide range of charities. And one final example is a fashion brand launched by my friend and colleague Ben Bajarin of Creative Strategies. His new venture, 61 Brand is focused on donating a significant portion of the sales of its clothing line to end global slavery. He designed the company from the ground up with that vision. An example of the new “Millennials” in action. More about Millennials in a future entry. Bottom line: this generation can actually change the world while socializing in online communities.

Two weeks ago, Apple introduced iLife ‘08, the latest version of their multimedia software bundle - and that means a new version of the impressive GarageBand audio software. Of course, impressive is a strong term, but I would definitely apply it to a piece of software that gives you powerful and easy-to-use recording, mixing, and editing tools as one fifth of an $80 package.

I picked up my copy at the local Apple Store the first day they were available, and I’ve used the new version for about 15 hours of recording and editing in the last week (including the episode of my Boston Behind the Scenes podcast on Boston’s iconic Swan Boats). This review will focus on the new features (both good and bad) I’ve seen in that time, and list a few things that I think were left out.

Click “Continue reading” below for the full review.

It’s the summer of 2007 and it’s a bit daunting to pick a point in time to think back on. Where to begin a recap of my exposure to what had been referred to as multimedia? In particular, how did I get here from my original intent of being an electronic music composer?

From the start, all things electronic were cool. Using synthesizers to create music seemed to me to be the final frontier in composing beyond rhythm and pitch; the ultimate in color and orchestration. But the technology seemed to take on its own agenda, its own evolution. Moving into the digital world, the simple radio-era analog “synths” became systems with vast amount of memory, perfectly reproducing every nuance of timbre and performance. With MIDI, music’s own computer language, sonic expression became more of an abstract science fraught with methodologies. The massive leaps in memory and processing put the digital recording into the hands of mere mortals, and soon there were jobs for everybody in this quirky field.

For me it was always about being playful. I love to jam. I love to noodle. I love to play. So what better application for digital sound chops than the game industry? Easily the most engaging use of the media, it is probably most responsible for opening up new ears to electronic sounds, quirky beats, and mystical anthems. What a perfect place to work and have a front row seat to the continuing evolution of audio technology! Fascinating intersections like MP3 compression and high-speed internet created a paradigm shift in not only games, but how music was consumed everywhere. So called “interactive music” became a herald of the game music scene, and tantalized the experimental composer in many of us. Solutions for bandwidth, storage, and performance became creative challenges. Again, we have more work than we know what to do with.

As I wake up in present day, what do I find? Full media production capabilities in portable laptop systems, global connectivity for distribution and retrieval, interactive games rivaling any other kind of media penetration, and all of this amazing stuff taken for granted as just part of our lives. In my life as an academic, it seems to be the birthright of my students to have this laid out for them, so they can just get on with the job of getting rich. But does the history of the craft provide anything else besides nostalgia and background for getting a good gig? Could it possibly point to the next step in audio technology? Or the next paradigm shift in cultural development? This is what I’d like to stick around for. This is what I’d like to write about.

The second leg of our on AIR Bus tour is a week in and we’ve had some great events. We took a weekend detour on Saturday to visit a user group in Raleigh, NC which turned out really well. It was more intimate than our other events but it had a great vibe. On the east coast our legs have been shorter which means we have less time on the bus and more time in the city. We have christened a few “unofficials” for the bus though:

• Unofficial TV Show: Reno 911 - we’ve watched a LOT of Reno on this trip
• Unofficial Jet Fighter - SR-71 - we saw this when we visited the Smithsonian Air and Space Annex in DC.
• Unofficial Mascot - The Cheat - we got a “kick the cheat” doll from the Chapman brothers,

The east coast has also been an interesting leg so far because we’ve fluctuated group size. People have left, come back and left again. We’ve had a crowded bus with 8 people and a very roomy bus with 5. We’ve also cut down on the truck stop food a bit. It can’t be taken away entirely, but we’re trying.

We’ve got some great write ups from the community as well as some great pictures and video:

Recently I needed to develop a storyboard in a hurry for a TV commercial. Problem: I can’t draw. Solution: FrameForge 3D Studio 2, a pre-visualization tool popular with film & TV directors. Unexpected extra: Flow! I loved working with this tool.

I found that it was so intuitively designed that I was able to learn the basics in an hour or so. And shortly after that I was using it to generate and explore new ideas faster and more easily than I could have otherwise.

But helping non-illustrators to produce usable 3D sketches is just part of what FrameForge Studio does.

Last Friday an interview with Tom Hogarty went live on Inside Lightroom. To check that interview out click on the link below:

http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/oreilly/digitalmedia/2007/08/17/interview-with-tom-hogarty.html

In the interview, Tom was gracious enough to speak with me about future improvements to Lightroom, Lightroom’s digital asset management (DAM) capabilities, a little explanation on the new sharpening improvements, and about many other topics as well as a lot of other very interesting comments. I was very impressed with how consumer feedback influences Adobe’s direction concerning Lightroom. If you ask for it they will at the least consider it.

One of the things I found very interesting were Tom’s comments on using Lightroom as a digital asset management tool. 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.

Of course Lightroom can be used as a DAM tool right now no matter how many images you have. With the catalog structure one can have multiple catalogs of 10, 20, 30 or even 50,000 images. That is kind of a workaround but I’ll soon find out just how well it performs. If you have any suggestions please feel free to offer them up and I’ll try to incorporate those into my testing.

I’ll report back on my findings next week. Until then enjoy the Tom Hogarty interview. That’s it for this session. See you next week….

Adios, Michael Clark

In Aperture, I want to make my time at the laptop as efficient as possible. To do this, I want to be able to import quickly, with as much information as possible, as well as add as many relevant keywords as possible, in the shortest amount of time. I will be traveling in Africa, and time and electricity will be in short supply where I am going, so anything to speed up my post-processing is welcome.

To do this, I created a standardized metadata view that works for me, along with various metadata pre-sets that I know I will use when importing from the various locations I will be shooting.

The standard metadata view that comes up, which can be easily changed. The cog on the far right in the metadata area lets you manage your views and presets as well as create new ones. When you go to manage views, you will see a list of Aperture Pre-set views, and at the bottom of the box there is a plus and minus button.

You can create a new view by clicking on the + button. I won’t have too many views at this point, so in creating my standard view, I put the number “1″ in front of it so it will be at the top of the list, since it is the view I will use most often.

I have determined the things that I feel are important to include for now, which you will see in the image below.

This will be the standard view that comes up on import while I’m away. I then created a caption preset with some basic information that I know will be needed. As I get more specific caption information and place details I can modify the pre-set to make it more detailed and quick to include all the information I want in the field.

Lastly, names and other unique metadata words and fields can be added to individual images. If you make the time to explore the metadata pre-set options in Aperture, you will save a lot more time in the field.

Near Vilankulos, Mozambique this baby is weighed to monitor his health progress. Photo Copyright Steve Simon.

I’m back in the US and taking a short break from teaching at the 16th Annual Book Passage Travel Writers and Photographers conference in Corte Madera, California. The attendees are great, and several of them are quite accomplished photographers. It’s going to be easy to pick two winners of the photography contest to receive copies of Lightroom donated by Adobe.

The Variax is an elegant, functional guitar, whose look is lent a great dignity by its lack of pickups.

To play in my wife’s Nerd Band, the Captains of the Chess Team, I took a perfectly good, new Variax and taped a pickup to it. I also run three wires (Well, four if you count the one I added last night) between it and the pedalboard. Why, you ask? Read on.

Once you’ve done all your processing in Lightroom and Photoshop…or at least, all the processing you need to do on your main candidates for presentation to your client…it then becomes time to make that presentation. You could use any or all three of the remaining Lightroom modules for that purpose. However, whenever possible, I like to make that presentation in person and in close enough proximity to the buyer to be able to “feel the vibe.” So, for me at least, the next step is usually making a contact sheet.

Now, time was when I really didn’t like contact sheets much because they had too many drawbacks. The images were all tiny (1 X 1.5 inches if I shot 35mm), you had to spin the sheet around to see the verticals properly. Furthermore, there was no practical way to leave out anything or to re-arrange images so that all the verticals, or even all the pictures of one subject, were on one sheet. It was really hard to see the frame numbers and there was no way to label the images any other way than the way the film maker automatically labeled them. Furthermore, the frame numbers were the same for every roll of film and gave you no clue as to which camera shot them.

Now, along comes the Lightroom Print module. It overcomes every one of the problems I just mentioned. It also has some BIG advantages: You can put virtual copies onto your contact sheets. That means that you can show “proofs” of what several variations might look like…or print them for a model’s or entertainer’s “book.” Besides, you can make “custom” contact sheets so that you can choose to show the images at the size and orientation that’s best suited to the “look and feel” of the shoot. In other words, you might want lots of the photos crowded onto a single page if you’re just looking for changes in expression, lighting, or position over a series of shots. On the other hand, if you’re evaluating landscapes or small differences in image texture and content, you may want to have the individual thumbs relatively large.

When I saw this scene in front of me, I realized that it was going to be very difficult to get what I was seeing. For one it was very dark and I was standing on a very narrow and slippery ledge between the lichen encrusted ruins of Banteay Kdei (Angkor, Cambodia) and the jungle. I didn’t have a tripod with me but it was doubtful that I could have gotten the angle I was after even if I had one anyway (where is that Gitzo ladder tripod when you really need one).

I took a few close-up shots first but what I really wanted was to capture the feeling I got when I crawled around the most remote corner of this temple and saw these stone carvings facing in three different directions, with very dramatically different levels of light on the various surfaces.

I tried a number of different angles but I also had to jack the ISO of my camera up to 1600 to get both the depth of field and the shutter speed I needed to work while leaning out precariously on the very narrow and slippery ledge. When I finally saw this image in the camera, I knew that I had what I was looking for, that sense of being able to fall into the picture and see around a corner.

The camera I used for this shot was the Nikon D40, which has a relatively noise free image at ISO 1600. The lens I used was the Nikkor 12-24mm f/4.0 DX. The setting for this particular shot was 12mm, 1/125 sec at f/6.3. It seemed appropriate that my settings where as far out on the ledge as I was.

Just looking at the scene in front of me and reviewing the image on the LCD, I could see that I was in real trouble exposure wise, but in the back of my mind was the thought that Lightroom would allow me to save this image by pushing and pulling the deep shadows and glaring highlights enough to produce an image that would give me a sense of the time and space I was in when I took the image.

“Pushing” is to me is the effect you get when you increase the Fill Light value in the Basic panel (of the Develop Module) to open up the shadow areas in an image. Overdoing it can leave an image very flat (and noisy) and without any blacks. Sometimes it is necessary to overdo it though and bring back the blacks with the Blacks tool (use a very light touch on this tool).

“Pulling” is to me the effect you get when you increase the Recovery value in the Basic panel to lessen the effect of glaring highlights. You have to be very careful to not overdo it with this tool though because you can easily leave an image drab and lifeless looking when it loses all its highlights.

A lot of the life in an image that has been pushed and pulled a bit too much, can be brought back by using the Clarity tool.

The end result is of course a very personal image and not one I can claim to be technically perfect, but by using my camera, my lens and envisioning the result I would get using Lightroom to control the image, I was able to produce an image that will always put me back in that exact time and space, that existed only for a fleeting moment in a remote corner of Banteay Kdei.

Related images can be found at: http://dpmac.com/angkor/

If you’ve been following Brad Fuller’s blogs on the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) movement, you’re probably as intrigued as I am by the creative potential of these tools.

Today, though, I received a press release touting a more sinister use of laptops. The Spy Laptop, from an Indian company called SpyInvent, is built around a remote-controlled pinhole camera that lets you “know if your manager is floating a parallel business in your office right under your nose.”

The Spy Laptop. Click to enlarge.

I initially laughed at the paranoid pitch, but then recalled another e-mail from an Indian businessman who was worried someone would swipe his pocket voice recorder and steal his ideas. (I pointed him to a Panasonic model that encypts the recordings, but also suggested he could simply leave a message for himself on his voicemail.)

Do you think this paranoia is a sign of an emerging market? I know I’ll look twice at desktop waterfalls now.

I just returned to New York after a great trip traveling in and around Santiago, Chile. Whenever I’ve traveled abroad before, I’ve always taken photos and processed them in Aperture upon my return home. For this trip however, I wanted to attempt to share my experiences by keeping a travel photoblog, posting photos to Flickr daily.

This raised a few interesting challenges: I would be traveling without my MacBook Pro and shooting in RAW, so I wasn’t sure how I was going to process my images without Aperture. I had access to a broadband internet connection and a MacBook with 1GB of RAM, and around 10GB of free disk space.

My initial thought was to download the trial version of Aperture and simply use it while I was visiting, then remove it when I was through. But because of the low amount of disk space, I wanted a solution that would allow me to convert my large 10MB RAW images to JPEGs and then simply delete the RAW files. Plus I didn’t really want to be tempted by Aperture’s adjustment tools: my goal was to download my images each day, pick the 10 or 20 best, and upload them to Flickr as JPEGs. I’d leave the RAW files on my camera for processing in Aperture once I returned home.

What about creating a new iPhoto library and processing my photos in iPhoto? This wasn’t appealing because of disk space limitations. I tried importing my RAW images into iPhoto and then had to export each as a JPEG. It quickly became an organizational mess, plus iPhoto’s library folder was quickly filling up my available disk space.

Despite the raised eyebrows, I insisted on taking my portable 4 x 6 dye-sub printer on my trip to Ireland. You know, I never missed that fourth pair of shoes, especially when I was having fun making personalized postcards with a little help from Lightroom. The paper that I ordered for the printer came with postcard markings pre-printed on the back, and it was easy to create a customized image for the front using Lightroom’s Print module features.

Yes, you can print to these fun little printers (only slightly larger than a thick paperback novel or the roughly the same room in the suitcase as the aforementioned shoes) directly with any pict-bridge enabled camera, but using Lightroom allows for arranging multiple images and including a customized caption. Lightroom had no difficulty communicating with my 2-year-old Canon Selphy 400 printer. I picked four images from my Ireland catalog, arranged them appropriately, used the Page Setup command to choose a 4×6 paper size, and tweaked the settings in the Overlays pane to make the caption.

In the Identity Plate section of the Overlays panel, you can set the angle, text color, opacity, scale and message of the text that appears in the window. If you click the down arrow at the bottom of the text window, you can choose Edit and type your greeting of choice. Although this element shares its name with the Identity Plate proper that sits in the upper left of the interface, don’t worry, changing the Identity Plate text here does not (even quasi-permanently) stick “Greetings from Ireland” at the top of your workspace.

The result was a personal, “How did you do that?” montage-type postcard with both family shots and notable Irish landmarks, suitable for impressing the folks back home with my far less interesting fourth pair of shoes.

There’s been a bit of talk on here lately about hard drives, and once in a while someone will mention the word “backup.” I think that backups are incredibly important, yet very few people have a good backup solution. As I’m sure everyone knows, the idea of a backup is simple: have a current copy of all of your work that you can retrieve should something bad happen to the main version. However, the devil, as they say, is in the details. How do you keep your backup current? How do you keep it safe?

Today, I’m mainly going to address keeping your backup safe. When first backing up files, most people start with a simple solution. Put a copy on a second hard drive (there’s even an Automator action to help backup images when importing to a second drive). But what if you’re in a hotel with your laptop and 2nd hard drive, and someone breaks into your room and steals your bag. There goes your backup! It also leads us to tip number one, keep your backup in a separate location. Ideally, it should be in a different spot all together, e.g. one copy at home and one at your office.

Now let’s say that we’re doing that, and suddenly our main drive dies. When we go to get our backup drive, uh-oh, it’s gone bad, too! What could cause this? Well, it’s sometimes possible that a manufacturer has a bad run of drives (or CD-Rs/DVD-Rs). It’s good to buy different brands at slightly different times. It’s also good to have an alternate, second backup.

The simplest type of a second backup you can have is via a RAID array. We’ve mentioned RAID here before, but put simply, RAID provides a way to automatically make multiple disks appear as one hard drive. It can be used for performance (you have two hard drives and alternate which one you write to) or redundancy. In this case, we care more about the best backup possible, and there are two primary backup schemes. RAID 1 is when a second hard drive is just used to duplicate the contents of the first, and RAID 5 is when three drives are put together so that in addition to copying the data, the drive can actually correct errors when reading the data back. RAID is becoming more popular, and you can set it up in many configurations ranging from drives inside your Mac Pro to multi-thousand dollar XServe RAID units. You could also have multiple RAID arrays, one for primary storage and one for backup. I personally use a Kano Technologies desktop RAID unit for my primary storage. The new Drobo device looks promising, too! RAIDs are also convenient because they appear on your computer like a normal hard drive–you can put a vault onto one or just duplicate your whole library.

Yet let’s say some freak accident happens, perhaps someone gets mad at you and places a big magnet on top of your RAID array. Even RAID 5 can’t protect against that! Burning your data to a more permanent form, like a CD or DVD provides a nice way to have an alternate form of storage. Unfortunately, burned discs are not nearly as stable as pressed discs (such as what Aperture comes on). Although there are some more stable discs, namely those made from gold, you probably want to burn a couple copies of each and replace the discs every few years. Plus, the sheer size of image files makes it hard to coordinate burning discs, and it’s tough to figure out what discs have what images. Side note: if someone has time to write a plug-in for Aperture that’ll automatically burn master files + a JPEG version to disc, spanning discs as needed, I guarantee you I’ll buy a copy :) Despite the pitfalls of discs, I like the safety net of having a non-magnetic form of storage for my images.

Online backup solutions are becoming more common now, and two in particular stand out. The first, Mozy, now has a Mac client available and provides 2GB of storage for free. Unlimited storage is only $4.95/month. Their data is stored offsite, it’s encrypted, and you can access your files from the web. Using Mozy is fairly simple. Register, download and install their tool, pick what files you want to backup, and click go. Unfortunately, it can be VERY slow to upload data to their server. They even warn you that your initial backup may take days. That also means that restoring data can take a while. Plus, if your machine is firewalled, you need to make sure to open up port 443. From working with Mozy, I think that it’ll be fine for personal data, but I want something better for my images.

A pricer option, but one that I am quite impressed with, is Photo Shelter. Photo Shelter provides online image management, ranging from just a simple online backup of your file to being able to send a gallery to a user who can order a print without your doing anything. In fact, they have an Aperture plugin to help upload images. I will admit that I have just begun to play with Photo Shelter’s free membership, limited to 50MB of storage (I’ve been meaning to try it for the past year or so), but I’m impressed enough that I think I will be purchasing a full membership soon and integrate it into my website. I’ll let everyone know how that goes once I start setting it up more!

I’ve probably given you more questions than I’ve answered about backing up your work, but hopefully you all have a better understanding of your backup options. Personally, between using a RAID 5 disk for my primary storage, keeping a backup copy of my images offsite on another hard drive, and now using Photo Shelter, I am mostly able to sleep at night.

The other night, my father and I took a day trip out over the mountains and into central Oregon. Our aim was to find a nice dark spot far away from any bright lights so that we could enjoy the Perseid meteor shower. We ended up finding a good spot not far from where US197 and OR216 meet up. It turned out to be such a good spot that the Milky Way was in full view along with the Perseids.

As fate would have it, I had my camera with me, but I didn’t have a tripod or my best glass. Nonetheless, I decided to try to capture the scene by setting my camera exposure manually and using a few rocks to lean the camera against. Because I was using a makeshift array of rocks on the ground, I couldn’t really compose the shot before taking it, so I was continually chimping and making adjustments as I went. As I chimped, I could see that I was successfully capturing the Milky Way with an exposure of 30 seconds and an aperture of f/4 at ISO 1600. I knew that at 30 seconds, I’d see some smearing of the stars at 100%, but I given the makeshift arrangements, I was OK with that.

In a significant way, photography is about time. A photograph freezes action and captures a moment. Looking at photographs we see the past, perhaps our past. Photographs become memories. Unlike the wizard photos in Harry Potter’s world, the people in our photos don’t move around to get our attention. The time slice is static, and the time capture is usually created with shutter speeds that are a small fraction of a second.

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

When shutter speeds get longer, and are measured in seconds or even minutes, then the capture of time changes. Moving cars become streaks of light and people are featureless blurs (unless they hold really, really still like they did at the beginnings of photography). Water in motion becomes ethereal, like the action of the surf in the photo above and below. The waves crashing on the rocks have been tamed and gentled. The rock and arch almost look like mountain peaks peering through clouds.

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

In both these pictures, I combined two exposures. Each exposure used the same aperture (f-stop). I used twice as long a shutter speed for the rocks as I did for the surf. I combined the exposures manually in Photoshop using layers, masking, and blending modes. This is not exactly High-Dynamic Range processing, as I explain in Multi-Raw Processing Versus Automated HDR.

The photographic trick is to absolutely and completely not move the camera between the two exposures. A tripod is, of course, required. But absolute camera stillness can be harder than one thinks it will be, particularly when the fierce wind that drives the surf is raging. Even the slightest motion of the camera will show up as a registration problem when you try to combine the layers. A solution can be to anchor your tripod with something heavy (like your camera bag).

While Aperture includes a fairly robust printing architecture, there will still be times when you want to print images in your Aperture library from Photoshop. Whether this is because you want to print using driver-generated color, (something Aperture doesn’t allow) or because you prefer the color that Photoshop generates, or because you need access to a special printing feature, sometimes Photoshop-based printing is the only way to get the results you want. To ease your Aperture to Photoshop print workflow, I’ve created a simple AppleScript that you can use for speedy Photoshop-based printing of your Aperture images.

Download this AppleScript, unzip it, and place it in Library > Scripts > Folder Action Scripts. Note that I’m referring to the root-level, global Library folder, not the one that’s in your Home folder.

Now create a folder on your Desktop and call it Print from Photoshop. Right-click on the folder (Control-click if you don’t have a two-button mouse) and choose Enable Folder Actions. Then right-click again and choose Attach a Folder Action. A dialog box should appear that’s already pointing to the Folder Action Scripts folder where you placed the Print from Photoshop script. Select Print from Photoshop and hit Choose.

Folder Actions are nothing more than AppleScripts that execute as soon as something is placed in the folder to which the action is attached. So, when you place any document in your Print from Photoshop folder, the Print from Photoshop script automatically runs. It, in turn, opens that placed document in Photoshop, and executes the Print command.

For this to be useful, there are a few more things you need to configure. First, because the script doesn’t offer any resizing options, you need to make certain that your images are properly sized when you export them from Aperture. In Aperture, go to Aperture > Presets > Image Export. Let’s assume you want to print an 8 x 10. Create a new Export Preset by clicking the + button beneath the list of Export Presets. Call it TIFF - Fit within 8 x 10″.

With the new Preset selected, change the Image Format pop-up menu to TIFF, change Size to: to Fit Within (Inches), change the Width field to 8 and the Height field to 10. Set DPI to 300 and then change the ColorSync Profile to Adobe RGB (1998).

Click OK to save the Preset.

Now pick an image that you want to print. This whole scheme assumes that your images are in portrait orientation, so if the image isn’t, rotate it 90° by pressing either [ or ].

Now choose Export > File > Export Version. Change the Export Preset to TIFF - Fit Within 8 x 10 and then save the document into your Print from Photoshop folder.

After the export, Photoshop should activate, (or launch, if it wasn’t already running) your document should open, and the Print dialog should automatically appear. Configure the Print dialog as needed, and click Print.

To further speed printing, consider creating a preset in the Print dialog box. For example, when printing black and white prints to my Epson R2400, I want to activate the printer’s built-in black and white printing features, since these do a far better job than either Aperture- or Photoshop-managed color. So, I configure the Print dialog accordingly - black and white settings and paper type - and then save a Preset, so that I can easily choose these options with a single menu choice.

Different printer drivers communicate with Photoshop in different ways. Unfortunately, the Print command in Photoshop CS3’s AppleScript library doesn’t bring up the standard Photoshop Print dialog box, but rather the OS-level box. With some printers, such as the HP DesignJet B9180, the Print dialog will be locked into Application-controlled color, and the menu option to change to driver-controlled color will be greyed out, meaning you’ll have no way to regain control.

If you find this is the case with your printer, then try using this script instead. Install it like the previous script, and attach it to a folder. This script works by exploiting an AppleScript feature called GUI Scripting, which is a bit of a hack. It lets you script actual interface events, so this script simulates the selection of the Print command from Photoshop CS3’s File menu. For it to work, you must go to System Preferences, and then choose Universal Access. Check the box that says “Enable access for assisted devices.” Your Mac is now gui scriptable.

This script works just like the other script, but will show you the Photoshop Print dialog box. Bear in mind that both of these work only with CS3. Also note that they only support printing one document at a time. If you’re interested in one that can print multiples, just let me know. It’s an easy enough change to make.

Nothing like a midday August wedding to strike fear into the heart of this digital photographer. Harsh sun, sparse shade, black suits, white gowns, black skin, white skin — often all in the same shot. This is a situation where you have to shoot Raw and thank goodness for the Highlight and Shadow recovery sliders in Aperture.

I have lots of tricks for dealing with bad lighting (find shade whenever possible, fill flash, reflectors, etc.), but as you know, sometimes clients say, “We don’t have time to walk over there; let’s just take the shot here.” Horror. “Not here!” I think. “This is the last place on the planet I want to take this shot.”

After using my best persuasive skills — which apparently aren’t that good — I end up politely acquiescing and line up what is sure to be a disastrous shot. All I had for my survival was a Canon 5D and fill flash.

Back in the studio with the images uploaded to Aperture, I noticed that I had managed to work around the bad light on most of my shots… this one of the groomsmen being a notable exception. Thank goodness I had the Highlight and Shadow recovery sliders in my bag of tricks. With less than a minute’s work, I was able to bring back the blown-out skin tones in the white men, and salvage some detail in the tuxedos.

Moral of the story: don’t shoot midday weddings. If you must, shoot Raw and know that you have an Aperture safety net waiting for you once you escape.

In Lightroom, as most of us know there are no color spaces to choose until you export an image. I’d like to demystify exactly what is going on in Lightroom and how it deals with color spaces.

First, lets talk about color spaces in general. A color space by definition is a description of a range of colors that can be represented. The smallest color space is CMYK used for off set presses used by most of the printing industry. The sRGB color space is a little larger and used for the internet and this is also what most monitors display. Adobe RGB is quite a bit larger and is the color space that should be used in most digital cameras to get the best image quality. Lastly, ProPhoto RGB is one of the largest color spaces around and can incorporate all of the colors captured by a digital camera.

Anyone who has used Photoshop quickly realizes that color management is a big deal. You need to set up your color settings dialog box in Photoshop so that you know what color mode you are in. With Lightroom Adobe wanted to simplify the color management process. Lightroom was created to have a ProPhoto RGB color space with an sRGB tone curve. We’ll get into what exactly that means in a moment. The reality is with Lightroom you are working up your images in a very large ProPhoto RGB color space. Exporting those images into an sRGB color space for example will lead to a certain amount of clipping in your histogram. Whether or not that clipping is important depends on the image.

Below is an image from a recent surfing shoot that I exported three different times into ProPhoto RGB, Adobe RGB and sRGB color spaces.

I went into Photoshop and took a screenshot of each histogram. Below are the histograms for the same image in ProPhoto RGB, Adobe RGB and sRGB color spaces and also the Lightroom histogram before exporting the image.

Original Lightroom Histogram (ProPhoto RGB)

Photoshop ProPhoto RGB

Photoshop Adobe RGB

Photoshop sRGB

Now as you can see the Lightroom histogram and the Photoshop ProPhoto RGB histogram are the same (as they should be - the Lightroom version is just stretched out a bit more than the Photoshop version). The Adobe RGB histogram has some clipping on the shadows side and since the ProPhoto RGB highlights had some headroom there is no clipping in the Adobe RGB highlights. Now the sRGB histogram has a big line on the left hand side showing significant clipping in the shadows and while there is no clipping in the highlights it is right up against the right side of the histogram. So, all this is to say that if you are not exporting into a ProPhoto RGB color space then you will most likely have some clipping in your exported images histogram.

Now, why would Adobe set up Lightroom to work with a ProPhoto RGB color space is the big question. The answer is ProPhoto RGB is the only color space that can contain all of the colors a digital SLR can produce. Most DSLR’s produce colors that are outside of the standard Adobe RGB color space even though you have your camera set to Adobe RGB. Hence for the highest image quality in a raw processor one would use the ProPhoto RGB color space. I highly recommend that folks use the ProPhoto RGB color space when exporting images out of Lightroom and as their archival color mode - then in Photoshop one can convert the color space to whatever is needed for output and have a lot more control.

Now, I understand that my methods may not be yours. Hopefully this isn’t super confusing. If you are shooting for the web and don’t want to have your shadows and highlights clipped then you have a few options - leave a little headroom on either side of your histogram and tweak the levels in Photoshop or use Adobe Camera Raw in Photoshop where you can set the color space and adjust the histogram while looking at the color space you intend to output the image into.

So, here I have just explained a little about how the color space set up in Lightroom affects the image when it is exported. While this topic might seem like a small detail it is very important to note when you are working up your images - because how you adjust the exposure, recovery, fill light and blacks sliders in Lightroom affects the histogram - and in turn affects the clipping that will occur when you export your images if you are not exporting into the ProPhoto RGB color space.

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

Adios, Michael Clark

We just closed up the summer house in Norway, and we are enroute back to San Francisco. It’s been a memorable week, filled with many positive events. First, on Monday, there was Michael Reichmann’s Luminous Landscape piece on the Lightroom Adventure book, which gave the book a strong “thumbs up” and drove the book’s ranking on amazon.com to the mid 100s and made it, for this week at least, a best seller. I’m so impressed with Michael’s dedicated following. When we were in Iceland last summer for the adventure, one of his “fans’ tracked him down there and I witnessed first hand an amazing show of respect and high regard.

Do you ever feel like technology is just running away from you? With the release of iLife and iWork ‘08 I have to say, I am a little overwhelmed! Before Aperture I had never been a big fan of iPhoto. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I thought it was a fine program, and I used to recommend it to many of my students and friends who I thought would benefit from something simple while they were getting into photography for the first time. It is also really a perfect application for the casual point and shooter, but for a pro, it was really lacking in certain areas. So, admittedly I never gave it much chance.

I have used iPhoto on a number of occasions to create slideshows due to it’s nice automatic Ken Burns effects, and ease of use, but that has been about the extent of my iPhoto use, and since Aperture 1.5 came out and allowed me to see my Aperture library right within iPhoto, slideshows have been really the only function I have utilized.

However, now that iLife ‘08 is available, I am pretty excited about revisiting iPhoto. It looks like they have done some really great things in terms of organization and the user interface. In fact, it looks like a really fun program to use.

As I am writing this post, I have yet to receive my copy of iLife ‘08. So far all I have been able to do is watch a few of the demo videos on Apple’s website and speculate as to how iPhoto will behave. I have heard a few good things from a few reliable sources, and based on the fact that there was an Aperture update (version 1.5.4 is now available via Software Update) that is necessary for integration with iLife and iWork ‘08 I can sort of speculate that Aperture users may see some added benefits.

One of my favorite things about the Mac has always been the ease of which applications have been able to interact. So, I am always happy to see these types of things grow. Maybe I can use iPhoto to create a beautiful large sized calendar by drawing from my Aperture preview images, or a really slick keepsake book (I really dig the new dust covers). I simply can’t wait any longer!

On August 7th Apple announced so many new products and upgrades that I found myself wondering what to do next. I love trying out their new stuff. I will be the first to admit it. I am a gear junkie, and that is not limited to cameras! iMovie looks simply amazing and makes me want to cease my continued efforts to learn more about Final Cut Pro. It just looks like so much more fun! And, they finally, finally added a way to catalog your movie clips! I think that users who shoot with point and shoot cameras will find this really appealing. We have a Canon SD800 IS which shoots really nice video, and every time we import our images into Aperture we get asked where we would like to dump off the Movies. Of course they go into a folder somewhere in the Movies folder, but that is usually the end of our organization efforts. So, with iMovie, we will finally be able to keep tabs on all those precious little movie clips.

I am pretty iHappy with all of Apple applications right now. They seem to be growing by leaps and bounds. If Aperture continues to grow at this same relative pace, I think we will really be doing well.

One of the things that scares me sometimes though is how quickly I can learn all these new applications. Especially on the pro level. It seems sometimes that just as I figure out how to do one thing, a new application or an upgrade comes out and I either have to learn how to do it all over again, or simply, learn more and more. When will it stop?!

Are these constant improvements making our lives easier? I think so. I know it is a pain to have to learn new software. Sometimes you even have to rethink the way you do things all together in order to adopt the latest and greatest tools. I mean, when Aperture first came out this was certainly the case.

But to me, this is what I find so exciting about technology and especially about digital imaging. Our lives are changing dramatically based on our inventions. We have to keep up with everything or fear the possibility of becoming obsolete in the job market. This can be really scary to some, but for me it is just part of life, and actually, quite exciting.

From what I can tell, Apple has done a superb job with the new iLife and iWork suites. iMove and iPhoto looks like solid upgrades and for the amount of money they are asking, I think you really can’t go wrong. Will I use them all the time? Will I stop using Aperture? I seriously doubt it. But, maybe now I will have just that extra little piece of help that I need to get my vision realized. Maybe, just maybe, these new apps will come in handy when I need a quick solution to a problem. And, more importantly, maybe, just maybe, I will find some free time, open up a new iLife app, and just have some fun!

I’ve had fun exploring some of the new features in iPhoto ‘08, but I’ve also noticed what’s missing. And the big thing that jumps out at me is that iPhoto still makes a copy of your file when you edit compared to Aperture’s intelligent metadata approach.

No matter what you’re shooting with, you’re going to eat up disk space faster in iPhoto than Aperture. It’s funny. Part of me was hoping that the iPhoto team would modernize this approach, and part of me not.

On one hand, I think a more efficient iPhoto is a good thing for every one who uses it. Even if most of its customers are shooting Jpegs, the metadata approach to editing instructions is just so strong and hard to argue with. On the other hand, I do like having distinguishing factors between Aperture and iPhoto… and this one in particular is a biggie.

So, I’ll stay current on iPhoto for my teaching and to help others learn it, but I tell you… when it comes to my work, Aperture is definitely king.

When you can’t decide how you want to process a particular image, the easiest thing to do is to make a number of Virtual Copies and apply various settings or presets to the individual images. At any point you can then go back to the Library Module and select all your various versions, click on the Survey View icon in the tool bar and compare all the selected images side by side.

Since all the Virtual Copies and their settings are created with non-destructive editing tools, you can experiment to your hearts content on all the Virtual Copies (without affecting the original image) and keep comparing them until you get an image (or images) that you really like.

The Survey View of the original image and three variables.

Ta Prohm temple ruins, built in mid 12th century by King Jayavarman VII to honor his mother, the temple is located in the Angkor Archaeological Park, a few kilometers from the Angkor Wat temple complex.

The Ta Prohm temple ruins are immensely popular with tourists and photographers visiting the Angkor temples, because they were used in the 2001 Lara Croft Tomb Raiders movie starring Angelina Jolie.

This series of my blogs is all about how I make use of Lightroom’s workflow. I have to confess that I’ve left out one logical step in the overall workflow, camera calibration, because I simply haven’t found a strong enough need for it (in the context of my own work) to take the time to apply it. So I’ll leave camera calibration to someone else who knows what they’re talking about and jump straight to the Slideshow module.

Lightroom makes organizing your images for a slideshow really easy. I work with Collections a lot (the topic of a whole ‘nother blog), so I like to put the images for a slide show into a Collection. All you have to do is name the Collection by clicking the + sign in the Collections panel in the Library module, then either going through your Folders and dragging anything you want into the collection or searching for the Keywords or other Metadata most likely to call up the images you want for that slide show and then flagging and dragging those for the slideshow into the collection. The first method works best if you’ve been too lazy or rushed to be thorough about adding keywords when you first Import to your Catalog. In either case, I Flag (press P after highlighting the image in the Library) the shots I really want in the Slideshow. If there are hordes of pictures to choose from, I recommend doing the choosing in the Library Panels. If you’re looking mostly for specific subjects, you can drag the Size slider to make the Thumbnails quite small, so you can see a large number of images at once. If you’re looking for subtle variations in similar images, make the thumbs large enough to judge each frame more critically. Also, if you’re just picking a few from a small collection, you can pick them in the Filmstrip by just selecting them.

Once you’ve Flagged all the images you want to keep in the slideshow, just click the Slideshow module header. Go down to the Filter bar and click the Flag icon. Blink! There’s your slideshow collection.

Past the Golden Gate Bridge, Black Sands Beach lies along the straits between Point Diablo and Point Bonita. The beach faces the open Pacific towards the southwest. On a sullen, cloudy, windswept day I hiked down to the beach. My camera and tripod were on my back. It was bright, but drizzling slightly.

The dark beach was empty of people, and it was hard to believe that a great metropolitan area was near by. A great flock of seagulls huddled togather at the western end of the beach.

Hard by where the trail ended on the beach there were great piles of bird feathers, caught and held by the wind. These were no fancy feathers. I placed my tripod legs in the mud, and began to photograph with my macro lens stopped all the way down.

View this image larger.

Initially, I was most attracted to the contrast in textures between the feathers and the green grass (above). As I spent more time looking at the feathers, I became interested in the filagree and transparency of the feathers up close (below).

As I took these photos, the waves crashed on the dark beach and the spray mingled with the moisture in the wind. I hovered, protecting my camera as best I could, and wiping it dry from time-to-time with my shirt.

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

[105mm f/2.8 macro, 157.5mm equivalent focal length if 35mm, 1/6 of a second (top exposure), 1/5 of a second (bottom), both at f/36 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

Related story: Feathers.

iPhoto and Aperture users have nice plug-ins to go from their photo management apps directly to Flickr. While we wait for Lightroom’s plug-in architecture, here’s a nifty way to streamline your Flickr workflow.

First make sure you have a current copy of Flickr Uploadr. Then designate Uploadr as Lightroom’s additional external editor. Choose Flickr Uploadr as the post-processing option during Export, and the tool will open with your selected Lightroom images. Adjust your metadata as normal, and send them off.

I first stumbled across this tip from zohar.ma on MacOSXhints. I’ve used it successfully when uploading images to The Digital Story Flickr Public Group.

It was a surprise to read Derek’s post about his new OWC bus-powered drive. Only because just a day earlier, inspired by some of your comments on my last post of “How Fast Is Fast Enough“–your Aperture/Hard Drive performance experiences made me seek out the fastest, biggest bus-powered drive I could get (and afford).

I ended up looking at the same drives as Derek, and spending the extra 50–picking up the OWC 7200-200GB FW 800 drive, that works on my older MacBook Pro with FW400 connection via the FW800 to 400 cable that comes with it. (I will be upgrading soon to a new MacBook Pro).

I too have a need for space, but I figured, as some have pointed out, that speed in the field can be very valuable and that there is a noticeable boost of performance with 7200 vs. 5400 bus-powered drives. So I spent fifty extra bucks for 50 less GBs. Crazy man or smart photographer? I will report back.

Michael B on Derrick’s Post brought up an excellent point. What do you do with older drives you replace with bigger, shinier, faster new ones? This is both an economic and environmental concern, and maybe you have some ideas how best to deal with this.

I wouldn’t buy a used drive and I never think to sell them. But there are always less geeky friends and family who would appreciate a 160GB external drive that for them, would be huge.

I’m looking forward to seeing Derek again sometime soon for the main event: our two drives, facing off in the ring with Inside Aperture photographers placing bets as to who got the better deal. I suspect we both did.

Inside Aperture Presents: The no-holds-barred battle of speed vs. size and everybody wins. Photo Copyright Steve Simon.

Despite all the new goodies in iPhoto ‘08, such as event-based organization, I’m most pleased with the overhauled Adjust palette. There are real Levels controls similar to those in Photoshop, Highlights and Shadows sliders, and Noise adjustment (particularly handy for compact camera shooters at high ISOs).

This brings iPhoto’s Adjust palette up to snuff with other modern photo management tools. If you want more details about the specific image editing tools in iPhoto, I’ll walk you through them here. iPhoto ‘08 is part of the new iLife suite of applications. The entire bundle is available now for $79 at Apple.com.

Every photographer knows how important it is to have backups of your digital files. I have an external RAID system that I’ve used for a couple of years to store my image files and important documents. When I saw that the new MacPros could be configured with multiple internal drives that could act as a RAID, that seemed like a great idea. I know from painful experience that any hard drive can fail at any time, (but usually only at the most inconvenient time.)

My new MacPro arrived just as my G5 was gasping its last breaths, and as I was leaving to teach a workshop in Pennsylvania followed by a trip to France. I ordered the MacPro with two hard drives, planning to create an internal mirrored RAID set-up. However given the time pressure I was facing, I wanted to set up the computer just enough to enable me to finish preparations for the upcoming course. I decided to just install my applications, drag in some files I had temporarily stored on an external hard drive, and get back to work. Since I didn’t see any obvious instructions for setting up the internal RAID, I planned to figure that part out after I returned, when I would have more time. I assumed there must be a straight forward way to do this, although I wasn’t quite sure what it was.

So when I got home from France I sat down with the instruction manual, and to my chagrin found very little about how to set up the additional hard drive as a mirrored drive. I went to the Disk Utility, assuming there would be a way to select the additional drive and a button to click to set it to mirror the initial hard drive. That would seem logical to me … but that’s not quite how it works.

Aperture’s Web Gallery feature is very nice, and extremely functional. That said, it’s hard not to look a little enviously at the cool Flash-based galleries that can be exported from Lightroom. However, while Aperture may lack built-in Flash support, it does have an export plug-in architecture, which means third parties can easily build new ways to export data from Aperture. Programmer Ken Welch did just that and came up with a very cool plug-in for outputting a series of images as a Flash-based web gallery.

The Flash Album Exporter is available for free download from this site. Full installation instructions are included, and a number of examples are provided on Ken’s site.

The Flash Album Exporter includes a large array of customizable parameters and a number of different output options, making it simple to go from an Aperture selection to a finished Flash gallery, ready for upload, in just one or two clicks.

If you’ve been looking for a…um…”flashier” way to display your images on-line, it’s worth spending a little time with the Flash Album Exporter.

Several months back, I’d picked up the 8 QuickTime movies that composed the Adobe Lightroom Tutorial by Michael Reichmann and Jeff Schewe. At $14.95, it seemed like a great deal and a good way to potentially learn a few things. But, after intending to sit down and watch them with my girlfriend so that we could both learn a few things, it somehow never happened. Gathering both of us around a laptop wasn’t appealing. And, every time I started to watch the videos, I always wanted to jump right back out into Lightroom to try something out. So, they sat there, gathering virtual dust in a folder on my hard drive. Waiting for a day to be watched. A day that was apparently not coming anytime soon.

In the garden in the early morning I found rain drops suspended on a spider’s web. Nearby, pink Gerbera Daisies grew. These flowers were reflected and contained in the water drops. The technical challenge was to obtain high depth-of-field with subjects in constant motion from the wind, subjects so tiny that any motion was magnified.

I locked the camera’s mirror up to eliminate one possible source of vibration. As I waited for the moment of perfect calm to squeeze the remote release, I thought about the worlds inside each water drop, suspended animation waiting for a photographer to come along.

[200mm f/4 macro, 300mm 35mm equivalent focal length, 36mm extension tube, +4 diopters close-up filter, 1/8 of a second at f/40 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

I’m an laptop-on-the-go photographer who likes to have a big library of images with me at all times. When I land at my studio or my office at O’Reilly, I immediately hook up to big FireWire drives and back up my Aperture library. The challenge is finding portable storage with enough capacity to haul around my library of Raw files.

I have been using the FireLite 160 GB FireWire Drives lately, but have outgrown their capacity. So the quest for bus-powered storage began again. This time I found the OWC Mercury 250 GB FireWire 800/400 + USB 2.0 2.5″ Portable SATA Drive and ordered it. I’ve used OWC products before and had good luck with them. This model provides me with two FireWire 800 ports and one USB 2.0 connector. It spins at 5400 RPM which is decent enough to run an Aperture library.

I was really tempted by the 200 GB model that spins at 7200 RPM and has a 16 MB cache instead of the 8 MBs I get with the 250 GB drive, but quite frankly, I need the raw storage capacity, plus the 7200 RPM model cost $50 more. Either drive has two FireWire 800 ports, so I can use one to connect to the MacBook Pro and the other for my SanDisk FW 800 card reader. That should make for fairly speedy uploading of Raw files.

I should be up and running with the new set up this week. I’ll let you know how things go.

Oh, and if you want to see the complete line up of OWC portable drives, this page provides a good overview.

A few weeks ago, I was asked to produce a slideshow for our New Mexico chapter of ASMP (American Society of Media Photographers). The slideshow would run continuously at the Photo Arts Santa Fe tradeshow in the ASMP-NM booth on a 30-inch Apple Cinema Display loaned to us by Apple (thank you Apple). It was decided that images would be displayed in a random fashion with each photographer’s name displayed below the image.

As we are all volunteers on the ASMP board I didn’t want to spend days working up the slideshow. I chose the easiest method I knew of to produce the slideshow and that method was using Lightroom. We ended up showing 200+ images from our members for three days continuously.

Image by Sara Stathas (www.sarastathas.com)

To solve the problem of putting each photographers name below their image I turned to the metadata and had each photographer place their name in the “creator” line in the metadata. Each photographer submitted up to 7 images. After importing the images into Lightroom on my Apple G5 tower it took me literally five minutes to select the creator metadata tag in the right panel of the Slideshow module (as in the image above) and then position the photographers name plate as I wanted. Bing. Bang. Boom. Finished.

I was kind of amazed how easy it was to pump out a complex random slideshow in Lightroom. The last step in the process was to get all of the images off my G5 tower and move them over to Lightroom on my laptop - which would be used to run the slideshow. A quick export of the slideshow as a catalog with the pertinent images, copy that to my laptop and import the new catalog and presto - now I was truly finished.

The slideshow turned out to be a huge hit. We had large crowds standing around the monitor pretty much the entire three days of the trade show. My MacBook pro got quite hot running the slideshow continuously for 8 hours each day but Lightroom never crashed and the slideshow never faltered. Once again Lightroom shows itself to be a great problem solver.

My thanks to Sara Stathas for letting my use her image in the screen shot above. Also, just a note, my latest newsletter is available for download from my website if you want more geek speak and the latest news of what I am up to. Here is the download link:

http://www.michaelclarkphoto.com/summer_2007.pdf

If you’d like to subscribe to the newsletter so it is delivered to you directly via email please drop me an email and I’ll add you to the list of subscribers.

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

Adios, Michael Clark

O’Reilly’s Linux Dev Center just published a fairly technical discussion of how the various Linux audio subsystems work.

For those who just want to boot up and play, we’ve run several Linux audio articles, including:

• Resurrect Your Old PC for Music—with Linux
• Review: Fervent Software Studio-to-Go
• Inside a Luxury Synth: Creating the Linux-Powered Korg OASYS
• Inside Pandora: Web Radio That Listens to You

Are you using Linux for audio? Let us know what you’d like to read about.

As you may have noticed I have been a little behind on my weekly blog submission. Well, I have a pretty good excuse. In the past couple of weeks I have had some serious computer problems. The fans on my MacBook Pro quit working, and the tropical temperatures here in Dominica were just too much for it to handle. So, laptop number one is out for repair. Then, just as I was getting ready to usurp my girlfriends MacBook (and in the time between her downloading her pictures and the scheduled backup) her hard drive crashed.

So, all of the sudden we found ourselves fresh out of Apples. After playing around with the MacBook I realized that I was able to get it running off a USB drive that I had previously set up as a boot drive. So, once I had her laptop up and running, tethered to the USB drive I began the immediate task of recovering her precious photos. She had erased the card in her camera before making sure to backup her computer, so I downloaded PhotoRescue just before realizing that I didn’t have a card reader for her SD card. Attaching her camera via its USB cable didn’t work either as for some reason the Canon point and shoots don’t show up as a card and so PhotoRescue wouldn’t recognize it. After asking a few friends for help I acquired an all-in-one card reader and PhotoRescue went to work.

PhotoRescue is pretty amazing. It was not only able to retrieve all of her photos and movies, but just about everything she has shot on that camera since we bought it nearly two months ago. If there is one application you should just go ahead and buy, it’s PhotoRescue. You can download and install a free copy, and then when you run into trouble like I did, you can recover the card to your hard drive and then worry about paying for the license to unlock your photos later.

Well, yesterday our new 250 gig hard drive showed up at fedEx. Living on this island means that if you want to order something like a hard drive, you usually have to order it to a friend or relatives house in the states and have them ship it to you via fedEx. It’s very expensive to ship things here, and you never know exactly how much you will get hit with in import taxes.

I had my father ship us the drive and my old Titanium PowerBook as well. So, yesterday I took a transport to the capital city airport where my package was waiting for me at customs. After the hour long ride, I walked into the customs office and was surprised that my efforts of convincing the customs agent that the laptop was old and used had payed off. I walked away without paying a dime in taxes. Happy with my success I hitched a ride on the next transport home, walked into our apartment with a smile on my face and began installing the new drive in the MacBook.

It was kinda fun actually. My father had packed my old laptop in its original box, so it was like getting a brand new seven year old laptop. This old PowerBook and I have a great history together. It was my first Apple computer, and not only that, but the first computer I ever bought on my own.

The PowerBook, when I bought it brand new I believe was about $2000 bucks. It’s a 667MHz model, and it came with a 30-Gig hard drive, 256-Meg of RAM, and a DVD burner. I had to buy a Wifi card that fits into the PCMCIA slot, and I eventually added another 512-Meg of RAM. It has USB 1.0, and a FireWire port. It really is a nice machine, and has served me well. I mean, it has never had a single issue, I have never had to repair it, and in the seven years or so since I bought it, I have only re-installed the OS twice, and one of those times was yesterday.

The PowerBook isn’t pretty anymore. The paint has chipped, and certain areas have yellowed. The screen resolution is pretty low, but hey, that means it’s also very easy on the eyes! I keep trying to use the two-finger scroll feature on the trackpad, and if I sit at my desk with no shoes on, and my feet on our apartment’s tile floor, the PowerBook’s case still gives my wrists a low level shock!

After spending the day reinstalling the two laptops, waiting for software updates to complete, and reassuring my girlfriend that her pictures and all of her files were safe and sound, I have to say I was enjoying my trip down memory lane. The PowerBook and I have been through quite a bit together. It was my only computer the entire time I lived in Israel, I carried it across Europe by train, and I have used it on more news assignments in D.C. than I can count. I can remember always having to burn my images to CD just to make a little more room on the little 30-Gig hard drive. Of course my workflow wasn’t quite as precise as it is now. But, I used to get by pretty nicely with PhotoMechanic, PhotoShop CS, and iView MediaPro. Shoot, edit, burn, delete–that was my workflow.

When Aperture came out I had to have it, so I got a MacBook Pro and jumped in with both feet. I have been pretty happy ever since, but I do miss this old PowerBook. If anyone out there is able to gut my PowerBook and fill it with MacBook Pro parts, I would be really happy to hear about it. I mean, don’t me wrong, I really like the Intel machines, and my MacBook Pro is finding its way into my heart at a rapid pace, but the Titanium PowerBook’s were really wonderful machines. They were a great leap forward in design. They were durable and well made, small and sleek, and very very reliable. Kinda like an old Chevy.

While I await the return of my MacBook Pro, I am really going to enjoy typing on this old keyboard. The keys on the old PowerBooks had a great springy feel to them and Pages (my word processor of choice these days) seems to run just fine.

I am sure that once my MacBook Pro is back this old PowerBook will find its way back into its box. There it will sit idle, powered down for cold storage, and waiting patiently to be resurrected to save the day once again.

I have to confess that I’m not the most diligent user of keyword, so when I am looking for specific related images, I have to hunt through a number of folders that I know contain the images I am looking for and make a quick selection of the images I am interested in.

A few days ago I was looking for all the breakfast food images I have taken while visiting Siem Reap in the past couple of weeks, for my Bangkok to Angkor online trip report. Not having found a good use for the Painter tool yet, I decided to take a closer look at it and see if it could help me. The stars, flags, colors and other settings didn’t seem to fit what I was looking for, but keywords seemed promising, I figured that as long as I select a unique new keyword for my image selections, this should work.

To my surprise it was exactly what I was looking for. After spray painting the keyword “breakfast” on each image I was interested in, I was then able to select the “keyword” breakfast and all my breakfast images came up.

Pretty simple really and basically eliminates the need for the Selections and Quick Selections tools for me.

The images in the trip report can be found here - Siem Reap Breakfasts

On Tuesday, while shooting images at a small iron foundry here in Ulefoss, Norway for my Under the Hood, Working Raw project, I messed up. What followed is both a testimonial for Lightroom and shooting in the RAW mode.

In my last blog, I talked about the workflow for using the Develop module. For most of us, that’s all you need to know for processing about eighty-percent of your images. Furthermore, the speed and beautiful and intuitive interface of Lightroom will likely improve the overall-quality of your images while making your workflow more profitably efficient. BUT, you just can’t do everything in Lightroom. For starters, you can’t do anything that requires doing only on an isolated part (selected, masked, or cut-out) part of the image.

Here’s a partial list of things that Lightroom has to turn over to Photoshop (or another “standard” image editor):

1.Working with Layers. Since you’re able to work non-destructively with Lightroom adjustments, you don’t have as much need for layers…but some effects just can’t be had without layer blend modes, retouching can’t be done non-destructively without them, and you can always turn them on or off.

2.Burning and Dodging. There just aren’t any burn and dodge tools in Lightroom. Even given the Fill Light and Recovery sliders, there are times when you can make or break a photograph by darkening the foreground or lightening the shadow under a nose.

3. Combine two RAW interpretations into a single photograph. There’s real power in the ability to do this and I’ve already written a couple of blogs about doing it for special effects and doing it to create HDR (high dynamic range) photos. By the way, the new Align Layer command in Photoshop CS3 makes it much more practical to combine a pair of shots that were hand-held

4. Regional adjustments with masked layers.

5.Cosmetic retouching and skin smoothing. Although Lightroom has the spot removal capability, it’s too clumsy to use for extensive zit removal. Photoshop’s Spot Healing and Patch Tools are tough to be beat in that regard…not to mention all that can be done with the Clone Stamp, brush tools, and a huge variety of texture filters. It’s also filters that allow you to lift the skin to its own layer so that it can filtered (usually with Diffuse Glow) and blended with a variety of Fill and Opacity settings.

6.Compositing and sky substitution. There is no way, in Lightroom, to layer images from a variety of sources, cut them out with variable transparency transitional edges, and then carefully position and re-light them so that they fit right in to an entirely new and fictitious scene. The new Refine Edges command in CS3 is especially helpful.

7.Panorama Stitching. You can synch the adjustment of all the Lightroom commands for all the frames, so you’ll know the adjustments will match. It all makes it that much easier to stitch together an even better-looking panorama in Photoshop CS3’s Photomerge.

8.Perspective correction. There’s still no Transform or Lens Correction command in Lightroom.

9.Have more control over sharpening. Even though the sharpening commands in Lightroom 1.1 are much more flexible, it makes for better workflow control to do sharpening with the new Smart Sharpening filter on a separate layer that can be re-created and re-sharpened any time the target output device changes. Also, you may want to sharpen only part of the image as an effect…which can’t be done in Lightroom.

And then, there’s Light Zone…

Did you ever sit down to diligently apply keywords to your images in Lightroom’s Library module, only to be distracted by a particular shot that you just know could really be made fabulous with just a few tweaks in the Develop module. It’s just a click away, it will only take a second, and then…well, there go all your good asset-managing intentions, because the Develop module, in all its creativity-satisfying splendor, as lured you in. I’m thinking about creating a keyword called “later” which would basically mean “finish what you’re doing now and play in the Develop module later. You’re not going to remember where in Ireland you shot this pub sign forever. “

In the latest excerpt from Photoshop Lightroom Adventure in the Inside Lightroom Getting Started section, Mikkel Aaland introduces you to the siren-song-singing Develop module and all its wiles. And speaking of instant gratification, you no longer have to wait until later if you like what you read. The book is in stock and inspiring desire of its own.

Next week I will be on my way back to Africa, specifically, South Africa, Angola and Mozambique–so I thought I would talk about my preparation for this six-week trip.

The last time I was on assignment in Africa for that long, I shot more than 250 GBs of raw images. That is a lot of pictures and figuring out how to store them while traveling as light as possible is a challenge.

I know that when you travel there are no guarantees.

In February, I was in Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda. I had a brand new Firewire 160GB bus-powered drive, along with a 120GB USB-2 bus powered drive.

Of course, I promptly lost the 160GB Firewire before even landing in Kigali, so I had to go with the flow, and figure out how best to maintain my archives with a combination of deleting images I would never use; burning DVDs and having to wait until I returned home to back up the images–not my favorite way to work.

But fortunately for me, everything turned out fine. I discovered that Aperture worked pretty well on my Western Digital 120GB Passport bus-powered drive, which I basically was going to use to back up my main Firewire drive. I was actually surprised how well Aperture ran with the USB-2 drive on my older MacBook Pro.

For this trip, as I prepare to leave, I noticed that bus-powered 250 GB drives have become available at a good price; yes, these little drives are the same small size, but are now up to 250 GB’s in storage capacity.

I have been very happy with my Western Digital Passport Drives. I have 160GB and 120GB USB-2 versions. They are inexpensive, small, sleek and cool looking and have done a great job for me on the road.

Western Digital USB-2

But since I also have a Firewire-400 160GB drive, I decided to do a little test to see if the speed difference justifies the added expense of firewire. The LaCie 250GB Firewire 400/USB2 portable sells for $240, the Western Digital Passport 250GB USB2 can be had for $180.

LaCie Firewire 400/USB-2

I have to admit that I was secretly hoping that the speed differences were not that great so I could save some cash. I used the same 40GB Aperture Library on my Western Digital 160GB Passport vs my 160GB Firewire LaCie Portable, both small and Bus-Powered and perfect for traveling.

Of course there are many variables that will effect the speed at which Aperture will work (processor speed and graphics card being two important ones). My testing was unscientific, but real world using the equipment I take with me on the road.

I opened each library and did similar things: moved from project to project, went to full screen, made the same adjustments, exported and imported images and realized that though the difference in speed was not too great, the Firewire connection seemed to make a positive difference in my Aperture experience.

The Firewire was clearly faster on import, almost twice as fast importing from my local laptop drive and from my USB-2 card reader. (My Firewire reader stopped working and I haven’t replaced it yet).

There are few people that would disagree with the “faster is always better idea” when it comes to computing speed. But increases in speed don’t always justify the cost, and it’s a personal decision. For my purposes it makes sense to spend the extra money and get the Firewire version, though I know form experience that USB2 works well when pressed into action.

I think it would be useful to hear others experiences with Aperture Libraries on different drives.

Has anyone compared 7200rpm vs 5400rpm drives with Aperture? We’re starting to see portable and notebook-sized 7200rpm drives pop onto the market, but for considerably more cash than 5400rpm versions.

The question is not always how fast?; but how fast is fast enough? I expect having a MacBook Pro with a Firewire 800 connection should speed things up and I’m looking forward to upgrading my laptop when I return.

The photo you see below is from the end of the Berkeley Pier looking towards the Golden Gate Bridge. The Berkeley pier seems like it goes half way across San Francisco Bay to Alcatraz, but at one time it must have stretched futher than it does now. The boards block the end of the pier, prevent people from falling into the water, and make a good canvas for graffitists.

When taking the photo, I positioned myself well back from the boards at the end of the pier, used a moderately telephoto lens, a decently long exposure, and stopped the lens down as far as possible. The point of these choices was to maximize depth-of-field and get boards and the Golden Gate Bridge in focus (with the partially blurred water a bonus). [62mm focal length for 93mm equivalence in 35mm terms, 3/5 of a second at f/32, tripod mounted.]

I exposed the original RAW capture for the Golden Gate Bridge, which meant that the boards in the foreground of the photo appeared very dark and underexposed. To correct this problem, and bring out the wonderful glowing colors on these boards, I needed to do a second pass at the RAW original, correcting the exposure values with the boards in mind.

The two versions, one corrected for the Golden Gate Bridge, sky, and water and the other using exposure settings for the boards needed to be combined as layers using a mask. If I’d applied the light exposure values I used on the boards to the bridge, the bridge would have been overexposed, so the point of the mask was to selectively apply the exposure values.

I was able to create an appropriate mask by converting a duplicate of the darker version of the image to LAB color. Next, I dropped the A and B channels of the image, leaving just the luminosity information. I used an adjustment curve to heighten the contrast, and converted the image to grayscale. I used Photoshop’s Image > Apply Image command to use this black-and-white version, which showed the boards as black shapes and everything else as white, in my original, layered image. A little hand painting on the mask finished the job.

Here’s why the process I used to create this image from a single RAW photo is not exactly High Dynamic Range (HDR) photography.

This past weekend, I was shooting the Big Air Windjam kiteboarding competition in San Francisco. To help try and drum up some support, I stayed up late Saturday eve putting together a small promotional gallery that I posted to some local kiteboarding forums. On Sunday, a number of people who know me and saw the images came up to me and said, “Wow, great shots! You really must know how to use Photoshop!”

Wow, what to say, where to start…. My reply was simply, “Yep, sure do!” (EDIT: I should also add that this is while I was shooting and most of the people who came up to me were not photographers/people who understand basics of digital imaging at all) It’s funny seeing people’s reactions to that simple statement. Some look kind of shocked, like they just expected me to argue. They usually end up just kind of walking away. I’ve learned that the bulk of the time, it’s better just to say “yes” and to not try to deal with subtle explanations about image processing.

Then, a few people will start pressing me further, saying things like, “How long did it take you to put the kiteboarder in front of the golden gate bridge?” It’s rather amusing to see their reactions when I tell them that the only thing I did to that image–and I used Aperture, not Photoshop–was to boost the shadows slightly. If they don’t suddenly stare glassy-eyed at me, I continue on to say how I feel that nearly every image can use some manipulation, whether it’s boosting the shadows, cropping it slightly, modifying the white balance, or straightening the horizon (it’s a personal pet peeve of mine when I see a published image with a crooked horizon–there’s no excuse for that anymore). The fact that Aperture lets me make these adjustments so quickly is a dream come true. I was able to go from CF card with over 3,000 shots (the 1D Mark III’s motordrive is jaw-dropping) to edited DVD in about 12 hours (including import, edit, export, and burn time).

Take these before/after images of the two kiteboarders rounding the buoy in a race. The before shot isn’t bad, and I saw a number of shots like it, with dark faces and lots of water or land, in people’s personal galleries of the event. However, by tweaking the levels, boosting the shadows, and cropping slightly (15 seconds worth of work?), I think the final image is significantly better. In fact, I feel like Aperture is this secret weapon that we have, which lets us make these subtle improvements very quickly, helping to bring our images to the next level (sidenote: I am not saying you can make a bad image great but rather that you can make a good or great image even better). I almost even feel like we all should stop telling people we use it so that they don’t learn this secret! But alas, Apple’s advertising is very well-done, and I suppose competition is good and makes us work harder :)

However, the next time someone asks you if you photoshop your images, try saying yes and see how they react. At the very least, I’ll bet that you save some time trying to explain shooting digitally!