O'Reilly Digital Media

The one thing that the Print Module doesn’t do that I wish it did is make it easy to send proofs to clients…especially those who don’t know much about computers. You see, being out of the country has a cruel way of teaching you the need for such things. Just before I left, I had a portrait shoot with a terrific jazz singer, Dianne Zellers, who’s musical career is rapidly rising. But in the hassle of getting everything ready to go, there just wasn’t time to process the photos;and by the way, Dianne knew that before we did the shoot. However, I thought it would be no problem to process the photos in Costa Rica in Lightroom, then just send her a slide show. I did that, but she didn’t know how to open a PDF file. She has a boyfriend who knows all about such things, but it just happened that he was pretty ill at the time. There was no easy place to put a private web gallery, either. So I thought: How about making a proof sheet in the Print module, then emailing her the proofs?

Ah. Now that looked really nice. You can see the result below.

Here’s the best argument I’ve seen for (and against) legalizing digital mashups. YouTube contributor StSanders took concert video clips of guitar heroes like Clapton, Santana, and Van Halen and replaced the guitar solos with hilariously bad plunking. (Plus other noises, as you can hear here):

The sync is amazing. But what’s especially funny is that StSanders’s soundtrack manipulation is so skillful that half the viewers simply think their musical heroes were stoned.

This is exactly the type of derivative artwork that should be covered under Fair Use, but at the same time, one can see how it could damage the original artist’s reputation.

(Thanks to Julian Kwasneski for the tip.)

It’s remarkable what you can do in post-processing. Compare my original conversion from the RAW of my Yosemite Dreams (far below) with a more recent version (immediately below) I created in Photoshop for a special project. (There’s actually no comparison to either version with the far duller look of the original RAW file that appeared when I first looked at it with default settings in Adobe Bridge.)

These file versions go a long way to confirm my contention that digital photography is an entirely new medium, one part photography and one part digital manipulation. Photographers who ignore the “digital painting” aspect of this new medium do so at their own peril, as do digital technicians who ignore the need to take great photos in the first place. Those who critique the new medium based on the aesthetic of the inviolate unmanipulated negative are truly lost in this brave new world.

For a long time I resisted the metaphor from silver halide photography that “the RAW file is the negative” and the final version is the print. A reason for my resistance is that the metaphor doesn’t completely work: a post-processed photo is not a print, it is a file that (theoretically) many literal, physical prints can be made from.

But there’s a significant kernel of truth in the metaphor: using the power of the “digital painting” it’s possible to make many different end-result images starting from a single RAW capture.

Today I am very pleased and excited to announce the release of the Aperture To Pictage Plug-in. Why am I so excited about this plugin? Well, mostly because I wrote it myself! Yes, it is true, this photographer/writer is also a /programmer.

The Aperture To Pictage Plug-in allows Pictage photographers to easily and seamlessly upload their images to Pictage’s web service. The plugin has a number of cool features including background uploading of your images (man was that interesting to write) as well as a system of key-wording that will allow photographers the ability to organize their images into Pictage categories for easier sorting and viewing on their site. And, the plugin also offers users the ability to select an existing event from their studio, or create a new one right from within the plugin itself.

At the moment the plugin is in Beta testing form. If you would like to try it, you will first need to set yourself up with a Pictage account and then follow this link to download the plugin.

If you are already a Pictage photographer, you can give it a try right away, and please be sure to click the “Send Us Your Feedback” link so we can fix any bugs you may run into.

In addition to announcing the plugin today, I am also happy to say that I will be attending this years PhotoPLUS Expo in New York City. If you are in the area and attending the show, be sure to stop by and say hello at the AUPN booth where I will be stationed most of the time. On the Saturday of PPE (October 20th) I will be giving a brief presentation having to do with Aperture and the new Pictage plug-in over at the Pictage booth, so feel free to stop by there and check me out. I will be blogging from the show here and at my personal website at Micah Walter.com, so be sure to add my RSS feed and check back often.

Man, writing the plugin was really exhausting. I have to hand it to the software engineers at Apple and to all the plugin-writers out there in the world. They really do some amazing stuff for us photographers. The Pictage plugin was a big step for me, and I am looking forward to helping it grow into a more refined and useful tool. In a little while I will be adding the plugin to the list over at Aperture Plugged In and at AUPN, so if you want to keep up on the latest updates, you will know where to look.

This is a rather extreme example of digital camera noise reduction, but the camera used for this image is the fairly popular and affordable Nikon D40, so it is a valid example of a situation that many photographers find themselves in these days.

Before anyone writes me a comment, saying that I should not use ISO 3200, this is an example of what can be done, I took this picture specifically to illustrate what happens when you shoot at ISO 3200 with a Nikon D40 and what you can do in Lightroom to improve (or enhance) that image.

Personally I find noise (or grain in film terms) very attractive in some images and I want to know what I can do with my digital cameras. Not only at the 100 ISO perfect exposure end of the image but also at the extreme and most ragged end of digital noise.

Noise Reduction - Luminance 0 - Color 0

If you look in the picture, especially the road surface, you will see quite a lot of multi-colored “grain” which is the noise coming from the processor at ISO 3200.

Noise Reduction - Luminance 100 - Color 0

With the Luminance Noise Reduction at a value of 100 the “grain” has disappeared but the multi-colored noise is still very visible in the picture and kind of smudged looking.

Noise Reduction - Luminance 0 - Color 100

With the Color Noise Reduction set at 100 the color noise is gone but there is a fairly strong “grain”, I really don’t mind this result and in some instances could see using it on purpose.

Noise Reduction - Luminance 100 - Color 100

This is the maximum noise reduction setting for Color and Luminance and looks a bit too smudged to me.

Full Frame Image - Luminance 40 - Color 100

I find this setting fairly acceptable. it might not hold up to enlargement, but for me (and I assume a lot of other people) most of my images (not all of them for sure) are actually used at fairly small size.

I am of course not recommending that you can start shooting everything at ISO 3200, but whenever it is absolutely necessary, it is good to know that a usable image can be extracted from the results.

The problems I blogged about last week with my Lightroom library were mostly—but not completely—fixed by rebuilding my preview database. My library of around 2800 images was useable, but there were still some irritating things happening that hadn’t been cleared up. Finding myself tired of mystery issues while editing photos on the transatlantic flight home, I decided to pull the trigger and do a complete database rebuild.

More on my post shoot workflow from my recent assignment in Mozambique for Oxfam UK.

I went through every image in each album, harnessing the editing power of Aperture, occasionally toggling from full screen to standard view to see where I was in the process (to see Projects and how many more albums there were to go), comparing, zooming, stacking and upgrading my keepers to three star from two. I had culled 4711 images to 336.

3-Star Selection

I think that seeing a group of images in a slideshow with music can make the experience of seeing the work more compelling. I was then ready to bring my traveling partner Kate into the process. To give a taste of what was to come, I clicked on Slideshow and chose the music of artist Oliver Mutukudzi. Seeing the images dissolve into each other with the added emotion the right music track evokes can really put a positive spin on the editing to come.

Together we went through the 336 to choose a final selection of 88 4-star images that we would send to Oxfam at lo-resolution so they could get started putting together the brochures and campaign these photos are to be part of.

4-Star Selects

Kate is not a photographer and knows nothing about Aperture, but she (and I) were both impressed with how well Aperture worked for us to edit together.

Editing in full screen mode was wonderful. The images looked great and occasionally we would view a series in compare mode, which made the best picture obvious when you see them side-by-side. On the fly, I would summon the loupe to check sharpness or details in expressions—occasionally zooming several similar images from the take to insure we chose the best possible expression in a portrait for example. Also, if something was a bit dark or needed a color temp warming, I could do so without skipping a beat by simply pressing the H key, calling up the adjustments HUD and quickly fixing the problem without slowing down the editing flow.

Maria de Christina Joaquim, 29, and her children walk through a forest in rural Manica Province, Mozambique. Photo Copyright Steve Simon

Finally, we found a wireless connection at the luxurious Holiday Inn in Maputo and FTP’d lo-resolution versions of our final 88 that I exported as small JPEGS from Aperture. Exporting from Aperture is one of it’s most powerful features allowing you to export in many pre-set sizes and file formats, but allowing you to create your own custom pre-sets.

I used a different program to create a QuickTime Movie of the slideshow with music that I also sent. (I hope the next version of Aperture allows creating these QuickTime’s of your slideshows directly from the program).

Regina Cumbuis, 22, photographed near her home in Chibote, Moazambique. Photo Copyright Steve Simon

I burned a DVD of Hi-Resolution Images and she was off to London and I headed back home. So the moral of this story is: the longer you use Aperture, the more you learn to love it—and it’s only going to get better with future versions.

Walking along the Marin Headlands cliffs between Rodeo Beach and Tennessee Beach, I was struck by the brightness of the breaking waves in the sunset light against the darkness of the shore in shadow:

Breaking Wave, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

Depth of field was not an issue. I spot metered for the brightness of the waves, made sure that a shutter speed fast enough to stop the motion of the wave was selected, and allowed the camera to choose the aperture.

[300mm in 35mm equivalent terms, 1/250 of a second at f/6.3 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

There have been a few posts recently that cover the benefits of traveling with Lightroom while on assignment, and I recently discussed the benefits of using presets to do some of your editing and cataloging dirty work. This post crosses the gap between the two subjects.

Two weeks ago, someone posed a seemingly straightforward question to Josh’s blog; he asked how to remove unwanted JPEG files if you have managed projects that contain both RAW and JPEG versions but no longer need the JPEG files. Obviously the JPEGs are taking up considerable storage space, and if they’re unneeded, it would be nice to get rid of them.

Neither of us thought this would be too challenging at first. But it turns out that it’s a bit more difficult than you would guess. Of course two brains working together did come up with some solutions. So this week you’re getting the best of Ellen and Josh together!

To begin, in Aperture, go to File > Relocate Masters and move the files to a folder on your desktop. We want to move the JPEG files somewhere that we can easily access them. If you are content to leave your files as Referenced files, all you need to do is go into Finder and navigate to the folder. Then go to View > as Icons >Arrange By >Kind. All the JPEGs will be together and you can drag them to the trash. The problem is that doing this will prevent you from ever making them managed files again because Aperture will complain about the missing JPEGs. You could import the remaining raw files into a new project, but you would lose all your keywords, ratings, edits, etc.

The smaller the aperture (opening in the lens), the greater the depth of field (the distance in front and behind a subject that is apparently in focus). The aperture designated by the very small f-stop f/64 provides much greater depth of field than the far larger aperture of f/1.4. Small apertures with great depth of field are used to create photos that are entirely in focus; large apertures with low depth of field are used to isolate in-focus elements in a photo from the photo’s background.

Depth of Field and Aperture shows a high depth of field (using a small aperture opening at f/32) version and a low depth of field (a big aperture opening at f/4) photo of the same flower. If you look at the two photos in that story, it’s easy to see the impact of aperture on depth of field (and the visual implications of high or low depth of field).

Both Dahlia photos in the depth of field demonstration were taken with my Nikon D200. It may seem odd, but the macro photo below, taken with an old Canon Powershot G3 at f/8, shows about as high depth of field as the D200 photo of the Dahlia taken with a macro lens at f/32. What gives?

It’s well known that telephoto lenses have less depth of field than wide angle lenses. In other words, the wider the angle of view, the greater the depth of field. It’s perhaps less understood that the size of the sensor has a direct impact on depth of field. The smaller the sensor size, the greater the depth of field at a given effective focal length and f-stop.

Sensors are classified by their crop factor, which compares the sensor with a frame of 35mm film. My D200 (and all the Nikon dSLRs) have a sensor crop factor of 1.5, meaning that comparing width-to-width, the D200 sensor is smaller in a ratio of 1/1.5 compared to a 35mm frame. The Canon G3 used to take the photo above, like all fixed lens digital cameras, has a much smaller sensor, about 4.5 crop factor, meaning that the ratio to the 35mm film is 1/4.5, and the G3 sensor is about 1/3 the size of the Nikon sensor. (Worth noting: Canon dSLRs, as opposed to the fixed-lens Canon used here, have comparatively large sensors, many of them actually 1:1 with 35mm.)

The effective focal length of 140mm on the Canon isn’t that different in terms of depth of field from the 157.5mm used on the Nikon photo of the Dahlia (both are moderate telephotos). So the only real variables regarding depth of field between the photos is sensor size and aperture. Depth of field is directly proportionate to sensor size. So the Canon has 4.5:1.5 the depth of field (or three times the depth of field) as the Nikon at any given aperture. The f/8 aperture on the Canon gives as much depth of field as somewhere between f/11 and f/16 would on the Nikon.

Advantages and disadvantages? More depth of field at moderate apertures on the small sensor fixed-lens digital cameras means that you can take images with everything in focus (particularly in macro mode) without having to go to excruciatingly long exposures. (However, note that many of these cameras will only allow you to use macro mode at the maximum telephoto end of their zoom ranges.) Photos of general subjects taken with a camera that has a small sensor will exhibit high depth of field, often a good thing. However, even at the biggest aperture settings you still have plenty of depth of field with small sensor cameras. This means that it’s hard to take photos that isolate subjects, like flowers against a blurred background, or portraits where the background is out of focus.

It’s also a fact of life that the smaller the sensor, the smaller the pixel. Smaller pixels mean more noise.Therefore, for a given size capture, small sensor images will always have inherently more noise than larger sensor images.

I just read Scott Kelby’s blog post about having to remove his DSLR from his camera bag when going through airport security in Minneapolis. Got me thinking about the security line dance performance I already do and have worked hard to perfect. I thought I was fairly clever putting my quart-size bag of 3-oz bottles of liquids in my laptop bag, so I only have to open section of one bag to remove all the items that have to go solo through the xray. (However, I have been directed not to put the liquid and the electronic items in the same gray bin.) Now I’m trying to figure out how to add removing my DSLR will fit into this delicate ballet.

Of course the main issue, somewhat ironically, is security. While all reasonable people want to do what they can to increase airline security, this is the moment where you expose your most expensive possessions to both a) immediate theft and b) reconnaissance by potential thieves. The former can be mitigated by sending the electronics through last. My routine: bin 1 is coat and shoes, then suitcase, then laptop bag, then bin 2 with liquids (which go penultimately because of their proximity to the laptop in the bag not their value. I mean I like my shampoo, but…), and bin 3 with laptop. I don’t even want to talk about the time I felt I needed to take two laptops. As for the latter issue of showing it all off to those bent on thievery? Well, who am I kidding, the whole package travels around in my awesome LowePro CompuDayPak.

Anyway, depending no doubt on which airports I travel through, looks like I may just have to write my camera in to the show. Thanks for the heads up, Scott.

I just got a call from a blind man who liked the sound of my podcast. He asked how he could get started podcasting. Would it require expensive equipment? I told him that all I used was a USB mic and some software. (In my case, Ableton Live, BIAS Peak, and Izotope Ozone, but there are plenty of free options as well.) The secret to my sound, I told him, was upgrading the mic, learning the software, and speaking with enthusiasm.

To demonstrate, I referred him to this before-and-after example (516KB MP3), contrasting my voice in the first episode and the tenth. The difference is enormous.

Then I offered to send him links to podcasting tutorials I’d found especially helpful. But when he told me that he uses a screen reader to browse websites, I started to wonder how helpful this background would be. Even if he could make sense of the pages (try clicking the “Listen” link above and closing your eyes), how would he be able to run a graphic waveform editor? I spend many hours cleaning up my recordings, often on a syllable-by-syllable level.

If you know of audio-editing software or techniques that are friendly to disabled people, please leave a link below. In the meantime, here are some of the podcasting tips I assembled for my listener.

I’ve been testing the new Canon PowerShot G9 that records in Raw. Great camera, but Aperture doesn’t read its version of .CR2 files. This brings up a common question. What do you do if Aperture doesn’t support the Raw files you camera creates?

There are a few things to consider here. First, what’s Apple’s track record with your camera brand? In my case, Apple has done an excellent job of supporting Raw formats from Canon cameras. So for me, it’s probably just a matter of time before I can work with my G9 Raw files in Aperture. If you shoot Panasonic, on the other hand, it’s hit or miss. I was working with an FZ8 for months and never got Aperture support. So as a Aperture user, I would review the Raw support list, look for trends, and consider them before buying my next camera.

OK, back to my Canon G9. Since I’m confident that it will be supported up the road, what do I do in the meantime? Here’s my plan:

I shoot Raw+Jpeg until I get full Aperture support. I’ve been talking a lot about Raw+Jpeg lately; I guess because situations keeping coming up where I need it. This seems to be one of those times. After the shoot, I upload the files to Aperture as I normally would. The thumbnails show up in the import window, but once the files are in the Aperture Library, all you see are gray boxes.

But as we know from an earlier post, Aperture grabs both the Raw files and the Jpegs. It’s been a curse for me in the past, but now it’s saving the day.

All I have to do is right-click on a gray thumbnail, choose “New Version from Master Jpeg,” and Aperture presents me with the Jpeg right next to the grayed out master Raw file. I have the Jpeg in there anyway, why not use it? You can select an entire group of images and apply this command to all of them at once.

Now what’s really going to be interesting is to see what happens when Apple supplies the Raw file update, and the Canon G9 is supported. Will all of the gray boxes in my library suddenly spring to life and display thumbnails? I’ll keep you posted.

Yet another great feature of Lightroom is that you can use a more advanced external image editor to work on your images if Lightroom can’t do what you need it to do. Now don’t get me wrong, Lightroom is incredibly powerful and there isn’t much on the market that can surpass the Develop module that I have found. But there are those rare instances where I need to go in and do some work on an image - and Lightroom isn’t up to the task. If an image needs extensive spotting I just find it easier to do this in Photoshop. If I want to see how Nikon Capture NX will render colors on a raw image I can open that image from Lightroom into Nikon Capture NX. Or if an image needs some local adjustments I can go to Photoshop quickly. This topic has been covered by many of my peers on this blog already but I just thought I would revisit it and explain how I work with this option.

First, to set these options up you’ll have to adjust your Lightroom preferences - setting the External Editing presets to the software applications that you would like to use (as in the image below). Since I shoot Nikon, my external Editors are Photoshop CS3 and Nikon Capture.

Then when you want to work on an image in an external editor you can go to Photo > Edit in Photoshop CS3 or on the Apple platform just use the keyboard shortcut “Apple E” to export the image to your first choice of editing software as below.

Once you have finished working on your image in the external editor you can then save it and it will be updated in Lightroom. And depending on your choices when you exported it will either appear as a copy in Lightroom or just update the existing image. As in the dialog box below - when I export an image to an external editor I prefer to “Edit a Copy with Lightroom Adjustments” and have it stacked with the original in the Lightroom catalog. I prefer this because I don’t want to alter the original raw file in any way and usually I have already worked up the image in Lightroom about as far as it can go. For raw files this is the only choice you get.

For portraits I have found Lightroom to be exceptional in rendering accurate skin tones as long as I used a custom white balance in camera (see my earlier blog post on using a Custom White Balance). But every once in a while I open an image into Nikon’s software to see how Nikon Capture will render the colors. Sometimes they are better - sometimes not. The point is that every raw processor renders colors differently. If I prefer the Nikon colors I just save the image in Nikon Capture and then when the image appears in Lightroom I can continue working it up or export it.

One of my pet peeves with the default Lightroom settings is that it uses a “-Edit_1″ suffix for every image that is worked up in an external editor. Luckily this is customizable so you can adapt your own naming convention to images that have been worked up elsewhere.

By going into the preferences dialog again - in the External Editing section there is a place at the bottom of the panel where you can customize the naming conventions of your externally edited images. Click on the toggle, than cruise down to “Edit” as in the image below.

Once you are in the edit panel (as below) it is set up to work exactly like the Batch Rename dialog. Instead of the “-Edit_1″ suffix I prefer a simpler “v2″ or “v3″ suffix which just indicates to me that I have version two or three of the original.

The external editing feature is nice because it simplifies the process of working your images up in multiple software applications at the same time. This feature comes in handy especially if I want to use Noise Ninja to work on noise reduction in an image - with Noise Ninja as a plug-in for Photoshop this is really an easy way to deal with high ISO noise, especially since Noise Ninja currently doesn’t work as a plug-in with Lightroom.

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

Adios, Michael Clark

I frequently moderate panel sessions at digital music/media industry conferences. Many are regular annual (or semi-annual) events that have been going on for years. Every once in awhile, a new one pops onto the horizon. One such event is Play Digital, a one-day conference held at UC Berkeley (this year on SAT October 27th), focused on uniting forward-thinkers in digital media to share ideas about some of the developments in the space that impact consumers and their lifestyles. Speakers will represent both the creative and production issues along with many of the usual business discussions.

I’ve been asked to moderate a panel on the shifting roles in the digital music space as business models evolve. Joining me will be representatives of the different players in the ecosystem from the artist, label, device, distribution, and social networking communities. We’ll look at the power shifts between artists and labels, consumers and media companies, and more. It should be a fun and engaging dialogue; please come and “play” with us if you’re able.

I’ve been teaching introductory Aperture courses lately, so I thought I’d share some tips based on questions I’ve been hearing again and again. Last weekend at an AUPN workshop in Dallas I had three students ask the same question: how do you turn off the floating HUD that appears when you mouse over thumbnails in the Browser?

They were asking about the Image Tooltips HUD, which can be quite useful to get quick at-a-glance info about a photo in the Browser. But the beauty of this HUD is that it can be toggled on and off quickly; it can be pretty annoying if it keeps popping up whenever you move your mouse across the Browser. It can quickly be toggled on and off by going up to the View menu and choosing Image Tooltips, or even quicker, by pressing the T key.

The other topic that has been coming up repeatedly in my Aperture workshops is confusion around the master/version relationship, specifically when photos are sent to Photoshop via the Open with External Editor command. So, a quick review: the external editor is defined in Aperture’s preferences, under the Output section. This is where the editor is selected and an external editor file format is defined. I use Photoshop CS3 and 300dpi TIFF. When you select an image and choose Images -> Open with External Editor, Aperture creates a new master (leaving the original unchanged), converts it to the chosen file format, and then opens the image file in the selected external editor. It’s important to remember that the new image file is tracked as a new master file and gets stacked with the original master file.

When the image is saved in Photoshop, the changes are reflected back in Aperture, and the image thumbnail gets badged in the lower right corner with a small target badge. But what happens if we want to send that image back to Photoshop to continue our edit?

This is where things can get a little tricky. If no further adjustments have been made to the image in Aperture, the same TIFF Master will be sent to Photoshop when we choose Edit with External Editor. All layers, channels, and masks will remain intact. However, if we attempt to make any adjustments to the TIFF master in Aperture, a new version of that master will be created. And regardless of whether the original master is managed or referenced, this version will be another TIFF file that’s stored in the Aperture library.

The diagram below illustrates how Aperture uses badges to give us information about where these images came from:

Image 1 is the original RAW master file stored as a referenced image in my library. Image 2 is the TIFF that was created when I chose Edit with External Editor. Image 3 shows what happens when I apply an adjustment to Image 2 in Aperture: a new version is created and the target badge gets replaced with a standard adjustment badge. Finally, Image 4 shows what happens when I select Image 3 and send it back to an external editor: another master TIFF is created and badged with the target icon.

For lots of people, the upgrade to Lightroom 1.2 seems to have gone smoothly. Mikkel describes it as a maintenance upgrade. For me, however, it wasn’t quite as smooth. After upgrading, I’d run into spinning beachballs that required a force quit. I’d also run into images where Lightroom would put up the “Working” notice and never render out the image. And, more than a few times, some images in the develop module were displayed from their thumbnail view and all pixellated.

I shot these two photos of a dahlia to illustrate the impact of aperture on depth of field. The photo immediately below, with a large aperture of f/4, has minimal depth of field, while the photo far below with a small aperture of f/32 has much more depth of field.

The flower is in focus in both photos. In the low depth-of-field image (immediately below) the background is out of focus, and therefore visually separated from the foreground.

Dahlia at f/4, photo by Harold Davis.

In this situation, the low depth-of-field image is preferrable (at least in my opinion). An important point with low depth-of-field photos: since most of the photo will be out-of-focus, try to maximize the focus you do have by placing the camera as parallel as possible to the primary subject of the photo.

[Both photos: 105mm f/2.8 macro lens, 157.5mm in 35mm terms, ISO 100, tripod mounted. Above 1/1250 of a second at f/4, below 1/20 of a second at f/32.]

In a previous post I talked about using iPhoto and Aperture together by linking iPhoto images to Aperture’s preview files. What you are essentially doing with this method is creating a reference to Aperture from within iPhoto. This technique seems to work pretty well (with a few small caveats that came up in the comments section), but it also brings up a number of other possibilities having to do with the concept of referenced masters.

With Aperture’s own Referenced Masters we have the ability to store our original RAW images anywhere we would like. We can store the images to multiple external drives, DVDs anywhere we would like. With Aperture’s built in previews we can even keep jpeg versions of our files on hand at all times.

This is really good stuff for those of us with large and expanding library files, but there is another way referenced masters can help us. With referenced masters we can make multiple references to our files. What does this mean? Well, let’s say for example you want to maintain two Aperture libraries. One library exists on your desktop machine and is a master library of all of your work. The other library lives on your laptop and contains your recent project work and anything you may download to your laptop while in the field. Well, with referenced masters you can easily access these files from both libraries at the same time. Just use the relocate masters function in Aperture to move the files to a centralized place (network drive or your desktop machine) and Aperture will keep a reference to the new location. You now can do one of two things. Either re-import the masters as referenced masters into the second library, or you can export the Aperture project from your laptop and import it into your desktop’s library. By moving the project file you will also get a copy of any metadata and image adjustments you made while working on your laptop.

Now that your image masters live in a separate place you can reference them with other applications such as iPhoto or Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.

One technique in image asset management that I think has a lot of value is making permanent archives of individual projects. A really easy way to do this is to create a new Aperture library, import the Aperture project, which will include all metadata and adjustments and then use the Consolidate Masters feature. When you click Consolidate Masters you will be given a choice of moving or copying the files. Click copy, and all of your referenced files will remain in place. You can then burn the new Aperture library to a DVD for cold storage. Any other applications, including Aperture that reference these files will still be able to find them.

Over at Bagelturf.com there is a really good article about the dangers of using referenced masters. He goes into detail about these dangers and how to prevent accidents. Remember, once your masters are outside of your Aperture library you are fully responsible for them. So be sure to back them up! If you are new to the concept of referenced masters, be sure to check out the article on Bagelturf, here.

On the surface this image was fairly difficult to process in Lightroom and I will for sure have to take it into Photoshop CS3, to get the best results. The foreground of the image is in a very deep shadow and the sky was very bright. I did expose for the brighter part of the scene as much as possible, so that I would have a chance of using the picture, but I still had to use almost all the Basic tools in Lightroom to pull out an acceptable image.

First the sky - I used the localized version of the Tone Curve tool and dragged the highlight of the blue part of the sky down by a value of -99.

Fill Light - to bring out the shadow area in the image I used a value of 51.

Recovery - to lessen the overall effect of the fill light I used a value of 74.

Blacks - I added just a little bit of black for realizm, a value of 5.

Clarity - a full value of 100 to neutralize the flattening effect of the fill light

Saturation - not too much but enough to punch up the picture, value of +21.

On the other hand this picture tells another story all together. My nine year old son Man and I have been visiting this open air place of Buddhist worship since before he could walk. We hadn’t been here in a while and I though it was about time to pay respect to the mountain and to the Buddha who lived engraved on his side once again.

I have literally hundreds of images of my son at this temple and he has always been in great spirits during our visits, saying a prayer to the Buddha and leaving some money for the upkeep of the grounds. I remember that both his mother and I were really surprised when he insisted on leaving money in the donation box on one of his very first visits (I had to lift him up to the top of the box so he could put the money in).

On this particular trip we came upon a new prayer spot and were surprised by a small crocodile that darted across our path and dove into the pond at the base of the mountain. I am not sure how the crocodile got here, it was probably bought as a pet when it was a baby and released here to stay with the Buddha when it got too big.

The 109 meter high Buddha image itself was projected onto the side of the Khao Chi Chan mountain with a laser light, traced with chalk by mountain climbers and then blasted along the drawn lines, to create the grooves for the golden inlay. The Royal Thai Navy and Marines guard and maintain the site.

This image taken on the same day and at the same location had pretty good portrait lighting and did not require any adjustments in Lightroom (OK I added a little Clarity). There is also not that much of a story. This was taken on a path coming back down from the Buddha shrine (behind my back), on which I have photographed my son many times before over the last nine and a half years.

His mother says he is funny looking in this picture, but that is because I am using a 12-24mm Nikkor DX lens at 12mm and very close up, so I can get as much of his smile as possible (missing teeth and all) into the image. Once again visiting the Buddha at Khao Chi Chan has had it’s magical effect on Man.

Going from Lightroom 1.0 to 1.1 was a major upgrade, with considerable changes to both features and performance. Last week Adobe announced Lightroom 1.2 and while there are no new features, there have been some under the hood changes that you should be aware of.

Well, being in a foreign location certainly can force one to take one’s Lightroom thinking a step further. Here in Costa Rica, at this time of year, it rains every afternoon, sometimes, in sheets. The result is a lot of dark green on the ground and some very bright but totally cloudy skies. There are lots of shades and shapes in those clouds, but normally, no matter how far to the right you slide the Recovery slider, some of the skies are totally blocked up, provided you’ve also got enough detail in the landscape.

One solution to this is to shoot all your landscapes early in the morning, before the rain clouds move in. That doesn’t work too well when you’re suddenly confronted with overwhelming beauty at 2pm. Besides the overcast skies provide a soft light that lets you see lots of detail in the dark green landscape…provided you expose for it.

When I worked in Silicon Valley, I realized after a short while that a big part of my job as a manager amounted to finding ways to help people be creative. After all, if you have a collection of very smart employees, it’s wasteful to just tell them what to do - they probably know more than you do about the challenge at hand. So I started collecting my own thoughts on the subject, and also looked into a lot of the academic literature (in recent decades a sizable field of creativity studies has grown up). I guess I shouldn’t have been, but I was struck by the similarity of my personal experience and the research. It appears that many if not most creative people work in roughly the same way.

But only recently did I come across a slim, decidedly non-academic volume that, it turns out, pretty much said it all back in the 1940’s: “A Technique for Producing Ideas”, by James Webb Young.

Because I have been traveling with writer/story editor extrordinaire Kate Pattison from Oxfam, and since we are on a tight deadline—Aperture has proven invaluable.

When I had time to edit, I got rid of the unusable stuff by rejecting those images (9-Key) and deleting them. This freed up some library space as well as psychologically felt good by tightening up my library with only images that have a chance of being used in some context in the future. I liken this feeling to cleaning up my office or getting my car washed or having all clean laundry—I’m ready and energized to move forward.

An outdoor Church in Mozambique. Photo Copyright Steve Simon

In Aperture, I went to “All Images” and saw that there were 4907 images in my library. I selected them all and corrected the time encoded on each frame by choosing the correct time-zone. I love this feature in Aperture. I can leave my camera’s clock set to New York time and simply adjust the entire take using the Batch Metadata Change in Aperture.

Sadly, my Fuji camera had the wrong New York date and time information and I couldn’t figure out a way to change this first, so Aperture could then adjust the time zone. Fortunately the vast majority of my images were not shot on the Fuji, so this wasn’t a big issue. Aperture only adjusts from the original time encoded on each file. So if it was set for March 5, 2006 at a certain time instead of September 4, 2007 at the correct time, Aperture would make the time-zone adjustment, but only from the original “wrong time”.

The time the photograph is taken is important for Aperture users since it directly correlates to the much-loved auto-stacking feature, which allows you to coral stacks of images taken within certain time periods up to a minute. It’s also important for me when I set the image sequence by Date, allowing me to see the chronological sequence of my multi-day shoot.

Since the Fuji images were all out of sync time wise, I had to manually move these images into the right order with the others that were all together in the sequence they were taken. (Important for the Slideshow feature for example, when you want to have a show of images from the first to the last taken).

Information embedded into our images is a powerful thing. It makes it easier to find specific images, which may not be a huge deal now, but add 10 more years of shooting to your archive and trying to find something shot yesterday may be more challenging.

Once I had the time adjusted, I was ready to update my caption info. You may remember from a previous post that I had made some metadata pre-sets for the shoot. This was just to get some basic information into the files. Now it was time to finesse and add more detail to the metadata.

Photo Copyright Steve Simon

Since Kate was taking detailed notes and names along with all the pertinent ID data to identify people in group shots, I simply took her word file on a USB Key and copied it to my computer. It was a simple matter of cut and paste to take the pertinent info and paste it into the captions.

With a set of metadata presets matching the corresponding albums, I could quickly do a Batch Change to copy all the pertinent metadata to each of the image files in the albums. Worked like a charm and fast.

After I had all the images together in their respective albums with all the info embedded in each file, I was ready to do a preliminary edit before bringing my colleague Kate into the process. More on my post shoot process next post.

Sheep’s Head, a popular food in Mozambique. Photo Copyright Steve Simon

There are three adjustment sliders in the “Presence” section of the “Basic” panel in the Development module (whew, did you get all of that?): Clarity, Vibrance, and Saturation. There have been a few posts here on Inside Lightroom about Clarity and how it affects your images. That leaves two tools—err, more like one & a half—left to cover: Saturation and Vibrance.

Photoshop jockies and hobbyist photographers alike will recognize the saturation tool does and where to use it: bumping up the saturation of your image will intensify the colours in your image, bumping it down will take your image closer to monochrome. As always, the easiest explanation can be made by adjusting an image and comparing the before and after to see the effect; the version on the left is the original as imported by Lightroom, while the version on the right has had its Saturation increased. And, being humans, the eye will automatically pick out the fact that the skin tones are a little too saturated and appear orange, as a result.

Chances are, if you’ve ever searched for help on Aperture, you’ve found Steve Weller’s, aka Bagelturf, website. Here, for some time now, Steve has posted a wide range of well-written Aperture articles dealing with everything from high-level topics, such as the viewer, to technical subjects, including export plug-in development. Recently, he bundled up the plethora of articles on his site into a self-published, $24.95 PDF called Get Your Hear Around Aperture 1.5. I’ve been fortunate enough to have a review copy, and I have to say that I’m impressed with how much work he’s has done!

There are a number of excellent Aperture books on the market (shameless plug: including the one that Ellen and I co-authored, Aperture Exposed) designed to expose the reader to everything in Aperture; they’re written as reference/how-to guides to help you learn all about the program while providing some workflow suggestions and troubleshooting tips. Steve has taken a different approach. In the PDF’s introduction, he explains that everything here is from a personal perspective. Rather than taking a comprehensive, reference manual approach, he’s written about what he considers worth covering, what what works for him, what he’s discovered, and what problems he’s had. Furthermore, he explains that this PDF is “simply a large number of articles classified into sections, roughly organized into a sensible order. It’s a dip and skip book.”

Be aware that this means that some topics, such as processing RAW images and advanced image adjustment, aren’t covered while other topics, such as going from iView to Aperture, are. This also means that you should take some of the sample workflows for just what they are–samples that you’ll want to customize to be more appropriate for your shooting style (this is true with every suggested workflow, though!).

What really impressed me is the amount of detail Steve has discovered and documented in many parts of Aperture. I blogged recently about finding new features in Aperture. Reading his articles will give you a head start into discovering what buttons to poke! For example, most of us know about using folders to help organize our library. Yet did you know that folders that organize projects and other top-level content are blue while folders that organize the content inside a project are brown? In “Brown Folders In the Aperture Library,” with many descriptive screenshots, Steve describes the differences between the two, explains what type of folders you end up with when you import projects, explains how to move the files to get the organization you want, and more.

These articles, including “Brown Folders In the Aperture Library,” are available for free on Steve’s site (there is a donation link, if you want to thank him for his work), and you could save them each as a PDF if you don’t want to purchase the full collection. However, having an organized, searchable PDF is quite handy for when you want to read about Aperture without having an Internet connection or want to quickly search for a topic. Furthermore, the $24.95 price includes a year of updates to help prevent the book from going stale.

If you’re looking for a gentle introduction or comprehensive reference to Aperture, this isn’t the right book for you. However, if you’re looking to learn more about how Aperture works–what goes on inside a vault and a library, ideas to make Aperture work better in your workflow, and how to do some non-obvious tasks (especially with metadata), I’d recommend Get Your Head Around Aperture 1.5.

Just in time for annual Talk Like a Pirate Day, I got this disturbing note from someone who read my “How to Stop Music Piracy” blog:

I recently found an area manager of a store selling illegally produced CDs, mostly dance club mixes by Hex Hector and people like that. He offered ten songs per CD. He makes a lots of money selling these illegally copied CDs. I told him he should not be selling CDs that are copies. He laughed and said no one cares. He had a catalog of 100s of CDs that he offered customers. Is there anywhere to report this or is it true that no one cares?

I replied, “Wow. That’s sad. You might try contacting your Better Business Bureau or local Consumer Action office. I suppose the RIAA would be interested too, as well as the local police.”

According to my correspondent, here’s what happened next:

When you run the script from the script menu (complete instructions are on the download page), you’re asked to provide some info such as title and location for the gallery. If you provide the correct file path for where the gallery will ultimately reside, the “Mail Image Link” will work correctly, which is a nice touch.

I think this is a nifty way to optimize web galleries for the iPhone directly out of Aperture. If you’re not going to serve them from your Mac, you’ll have to retrieve the folder out of the Webserver directory and upload it to the location you want. (You can find the gallery here: Library > Webserver > Documents.)

An easy way to make these gallery links on your iPhone is to use tumblr. It’s a great tool for making bits of information available to any web-connected mobile device.

A few weeks ago I discussed using Lightroom as a Digital Asset Management tool and while answering some questions posed by readers I had the idea that giving each project its own catalog might be an interesting concept. The pros are that you can then archive the Lightroom catalog with the XMP metadata files and along with the images. And hence the catalog would always be available at any point in the future to re-adjust those images - and the previews would be saved as well. Also, since there would be a relatively small number of images in each catalog this would help Lightroom to work as fast as possible.

There are not really any downsides to using this method. You would lose whatever DAM functionality you got from Lightroom - but for my work that isn’t a huge downside as I have my images organized very well. So for this blog post I thought I would like to walk through my methods for creating individual catalogs for sets of images.

First, you’ll need to go into the preferences and change the Default Catalog settings to “Prompt me when starting Lightroom” as in the image below.

Changing the preferences as above will allow the following dialog box (below) to pop up each time you start up Lightroom. In the dialog box you can simply click “Create New Catalog” and then name the new catalog and tell Lightroom where to put it. In this case I would generally put the individual catalog in the folder with the images so everything is easy to find. I would also name the catalog with a similar name as the images will be labeled with. This way I can tell which catalog goes with which images.

Now you can import images into your new catalog just as you normally would. Since I usually don’t have more than a few thousand images for each job Lightroom should stay pretty zippy.

If for some reason I want to switch to another catalog I can go to File > Open Catalog or File > Open Recent and choose a recent catalog as in the two images below. Lightroom version 1.2 is set up to easily switch between catalogs and can do so without exiting the application.

Now I can already hear many saying “why would I want to do this?” It is a good question. I’m not saying this is “the” way to go but it is one option that the Lightroom catalogs offer. In my normal workflow I normally keep the total number of images in any one catalog under 5,000 so that Lightroom doesn’t slow down. One of the great features of Lightroom is that it allows you to edit extremely fast and I want to maintain a certain speediness with the software to lessen my time in front of the computer. Hence this is a new option I am exploring.

For my normal workflow there are no downsides to creating individual catalogs for each project. At the moment, I normally delete folders out of Lightroom after 45 days or so anyway. To view those images or work with the processed tiff files I go to Bridge and work with them in Photoshop after the 45-day period. And if I need to reprocess an image then it is simple enough to open it in Adobe Camera Raw 4.2 (CS3) instead of having to re-import that image into Lightroom again. But with this new way of using the catalogs I can just open the pertinent Lightroom catalog and be right back to where I was when I processed the images - along with all of the virtual copies I made as well.

The only possible downside to this scenario is if as Lightroom keeps improving and as new versions come out those catalogs become unreadable. That remains to be seen. Either way, I think I will slowly move to this system as it also makes it easy to deal with images that are downloaded to my laptop then transferred to my office imaging computer.

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

Adios, Michael Clark

Last Tuesday night, at an ASMPNorCal event led by Bill Atkinson and Joseph Holmes titled, The Color of Nature: From High-End Digital Capture to Fine Art, I watched an entire room of professional photographers experience an epiphany.

A reader of my Photoblog 2.0 writes: “I notice that in more than one of your photos you use high f-stop values. Your results look great, despite what I’ve read about diffraction problems occurring at such small apertures.”

The reader is perfactly correct on both counts. I do often use small apertures in my macro photos. For example, the photo of the iris shown below was taken with my 200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm equivalent terms) at the smallest possible aperture, f/40. It is also in fact the case that most telephoto lens (and the lens I used for the iris photo is a macro telephoto) exhibit the most optical sharpness within the range of 1-3 f-stops from the maximum aperture (in the case of the 200mm f/4 that would imply the range between f/5.6 and f/11).

Why this discrepancy between the best the lens can offer optically and my choice of aperture?

View this image larger.

Before answering the question, first a word about optical sharpness. Optical sharpness is an abstract (rather than practical) concept. In the real world, sharpness varies from lens sample to lens sample. There’s certainly no guarantee that your particular lens will deliver the same optical results as the lens tested by the manufacturer (or by a third party). In case you are interested, this page has links to good resources that explain lens testing, and shows you how to test your own lenses.

The only real way to get a good handle on the characteristics of your particular lens is to use it again and again, and check the results carefully at a high magnification.

In any case, the optical sharpness of a lens is only one of the factors that determines total sharpness (you also need to consider the qualities of the sensor that will be recording the image, and software that is applied to sharpen the image).

Now we get to the meat of the matter. Photographic technique is far and away more important to the ultimate apparent sharpness of a photo than optical sharpness (or the other hardware and software considerations I’ve mentioned). Of course, you could contradict me by taking things to the limit: a plastic lens coated with vaseline will never produce an apparently sharp image. But given a halfway reasonable lens, the incremental difference in sharpness between the sharpest and least sharp apertures is close to irrelevant.

To give you an example, intentionally creating intermittent sharpness (some parts of a photo are sharp and some are not) makes the sharp parts of the photo look sharper than they would if the photo were at one overall level of sharpness.

With both telephoto images and macro images, and doubly so with macro telephoto shots like the iris, depth-of-field (the range from front to back of in-focus elements) is shallow. My most important concern in this photo is to maximize depth-of-field, to get as much of the image as possible in focus: hence my choice of a small aperture.

Here’s an excellent article about sharpness from a practical viewpoint.

Popular Mechanics have a great Hey Martha article 25 Skills Every Man Should Know. How did I rate, as red-blooded Aussie Urban Hobbyist keen to get more analog skills in this digital world?

1. Patch a radiator hose

Oh, that would assume I had a car. Almost no-one I know has a car, one friend does, and I think Marcus at the office does. But I think I can do that. Tick

2. Protect your computer

I protect my computer by trying to use free or open source software where possible. Hackers and virus-writers go after mass software, by and large. Tick

3. Rescue a boater who has capsized

I learned surf rescue at school. I wonder if they mean rescue like take to the shore or rescue like swim out and right the boat? Hmmm. I am much more buoyant now. Half tick

4. Frame a wall

I don’t even know what this means. Does it mean I could put a wall frame up. I’ve helped making walls before, so I guess so. Tick

5. Retouch digital photos

Tick

6. Back up a trailer

Again, a car would probably come in handy. I have backed up trailers before, but Australia is actually full of trailer-backing-up experts who will kindly insist on taking over the job at the slightest wobble. Half tick

7. Build a campfire

Are they kidding? In Australia? Start a fire in our droughts and you can set the country on fire. The ability to build a campfire should be a criminal offense here. Our Parks service thoughtfully provides gas barbecues along the highways for this. And who would go camping with all our snakes? No Tick

8. Fix a dead outlet

I can certainly check a fuse. But our power is 240 volts, not something you want to be poking around with. (Actually, I probably would be able to do something.) Half Tick

9. Navigate with a map and compass

And go where, exactly? East is the Pacific Ocean. North is bush. West is bush. South is bush. When I lived in Taiwan I used to get terribly lost, until I realized that I was unconsciously checking the direction using shadows: I had no idea I used shadows for direction until then. Nature’s compass. But I am OK with maps, from navigating when flying with my dear old dad. Half tick

10. Use a torque wrench

Oh, now the pretense at not being a complete girly boy falls into a shambles. I don’t even know what a torque wrench is. No tick

11. Sharpen a knife

I can sharpen carving knives, but my success with other knives is not good. Half tick

12. Perform CPR

Again, we learned this in our life-saving training at school. But I wouldn’t choose myself if I needed it. Tick

13. Fillet a fish

Sure. But some fish are more tricky than others to do well. It really is a job for the professional. Tick

14. Maneuver a car out of a skid

See 1 Half Tick

15. Get a car unstuck

If your car is stuck in mud here, you probably have a bigger problem than the mud: you have to watch out for flash floods or crocodiles. Half Tick

16. Back up data

I use web-based software for most things to do with important data, so I don’t have local copies. But for my hobby stuff, it is a good reminder. Tick

17. Paint a room

Tick

18. Mix concrete

I think I can remember. Tick

19. Clean a bolt-action rifle

Guns are illegal in the cities here; the government had a big buy-back project a few decades ago that was very successful. I suppose things are different in the USA, which is so full of bears and the vicious coyote and the varmint, and which is surrounded by neighbouring countries who are likely to invade at the drop of a fur-skin cap or sombrero, hence the need for a well-formed militia. I gather the North has been having trouble with the South too. I’ve never even touched a gun.No Tick

20. Change oil and filter

No Tick

21. Hook up an HDTV

I don’t watch TV except for Dr Who, and that not on HDTV, so I expect I could. Half Tick

22. Bleed brakes

No Tick

23. Paddle a canoe

Tick

24. Fix a bike flat

Tick

25. Extend your wireless network

If extend means to add another node, the sure. If it means wander around the house trying to find some position for the receiver that actually makes it everywhere that people go, then sure. Tick

So my score: 16 out of 25. I think my three brothers would each have gotten almost 25/25 each: they are the butch ones. But the article does strke me again with the same impression I get whenever I am in the USA: how gadget-centered people are. I suppose that is a pretty poor criticism for an article from that magazine. An accompanying article justifies the article in terms of are people becoming less handy which is a fair question.

However, the differences may be that people are becoming more handy at small-room skills and less handy at large-workshop skills. In Taiwan, the DIY stores provide an assembly service because it is not cultural to DIY. But I notice in the local hobby stores here, especially for modeling, that almost all the customers were Chinese, so I don’t think it is fair to say that the urge to build isn’t cross-cultural. But what is interesting about the Popular Mechanics list is that almost all of them are useless skills for me to have: urbanization is what deskills people. We are in the age where we should be asking “Can you use a Dremel?” rather than “Can you use a torque wrench?”

What about “Can you shape and fibreglass a surfboard?” Or “Can you sew a patch into your jeans?” or “Can you trap a spider?” or “Can you fight fires?” or “Can you remove ticks from pets?” They are more practical mechanical skills for us here!

Finally, when I lived in the country and needed something done, the thing to do was to ask a woman. It is not so tragic if men don’t know all these skills, because they are only half the population. I guess that goes without saying.

A mysterious email arrived the other night. It said, “Please find enclosed two pictures of Midi Controllers. Do you know the make and model of this two units?”

The top one looks like a commercial product; the bottom one looks more homemade, but I could be wrong. Any guesses? Please leave a link. I’m off to browse Analogue Haven.

There was some exciting Pro App news from Apple this week: after almost 3 years, Logic Pro has been updated to version 8. Among the feature updates in this version is what Apple calls a “Next Generation Interface”. This is a welcome update, as ever since Logic was acquired by Apple back in 2002, its interface was never updated to match the slick polish of the rest of Apple’s Pro Apps. The biggest change in the new interface is that its formerly jumbled series of floating windows have now been combined into a single window separated into panels. Each panel allows you to interact with your media in a different way, whether it’s browsing, editing, or composing. Sounds familiar, right? Check out these screenshots:

Logic Pro 8

Aperture 1.5

Logic’s new interface looks like it was crafted by the same UI artists that created Aperture’s look and feel. The two applications feel like brothers: from the very concept of a paneled, single-window workspace, to the visual execution of that concept with rounded edged panels, flat grey colors, and a subtle 3D feel to the tabs and buttons. They even share some of the same toolbar icons. This is in contrast to Final Cut Studio’s applications, which have a different look to them, but still feel like they belong together in their own family.

I think it’s worth thinking about how Aperture’s UI affects the experience of working with your photos. For me, an admitted design aesthete, one of the reasons I like Apple hardware and software is the pleasure I get from both looking at and interacting with my Macs. And I appreciate the thoughtful craftsmanship put into Aperture’s UI just as much I enjoy the industrial design touches of my MacBook Pro. From a usability standpoint, Aperture does what I need and it “gets the job done”. But there’s more to it than that: the actual experience of working in Aperture is also a big part of why I enjoy the application so much.

We now know that Aperture’s interface has influenced other applications coming from Apple. It will be exciting to see how Aperture matures and whether future Pro App revisions will borrow from Aperture’s look and feel.

Time to go experiment in Logic…

One of my favorite features in Aperture 1.5 is the ability to store my master image files anywhere I want. By using the Relocate Masters and Manage Referenced Files functions in Aperture’s file menu I can easily take care of the task of spreading my RAW images files across as many external hard drives as I wish. Referenced files are really the core of how my workflow works, allowing me to quickly import images into Aperture as Managed files on my laptop’s hard drive and then later relocating the masters for backup and storage to larger disks. So far it has really worked out great.

The one part of the equation that I have been trying to solve for some time now is what to do with all of the older files. These are the files that I want to keep, but that I also don’t really want to worry about constantly backing up and making sure they are secure. I also would like to have reasonable access to these files, so the idea of moving them to DVD or a separate hard drive and putting them on the shelf somewhere kind of frustrates me. Call me lazy, but I really don’t like having to search through piles of DVDs just to find a single image.

Enter Amazon’s Simple Storage Service (S3). For those of you who haven’t already heard, Amazon offers a scalable and fairly cost effective online storage solution. It was designed with the web developer in mind, offering businesses a quick and easy way to set up a redundant server quickly and easily utilizing Amazon’s extensive network of servers throughout the world. But now, with the aid of an application like JungleDisk, just about anyone can sign up and take advantage of the service.

For my own situation I immediately recognized S3 as being a great way for me to manage my image archive. So here is what I do.

First of all, I don’t recommend using S3 for al of your master images. You have to consider the amount of time it will take to upload your files and the fact that once they are uploaded you may wish to have faster access to some of your more recent work. However, for those files that you shot months or years ago, the ones that you still want to hang on to but don’t necessarily need on hand at any given moment, S3 is the way to go.

To get things set up you first need to create an Amazon Web Services account. It is pretty easy to do. Just go over to Amazon’s website and scroll down the page until you see the link in the left hand side-bar under Amazon Services.

Step two is to download JungleDisk. JungleDisk is a pretty cool application that interfaces with S3. It is easy to set up and comes with all the instructions you will need. In the end, what you get is the JungleDisk monitor application that allows you to connect to your server space, and monitor upload progress. The application also creates a server icon on your desktop that looks like any other server you might connect to. This gives you the ease and freedom to interact with your S3 server in the Finder window. In the JungleDisk preferences you can name the volume whatever you want (I chose Amazon), and you can also choose to encrypt all of your S3 data.

Now before we go on here, let me just add that you can use this for any type of data, not just images. I have already uploaded plenty of files from my Documents folder that I just don’t need on my computer anymore. In fact, to make my life really simple I made a single folder on my Amazon volume called Archives, and in that folder I made a sub-folder called Micah, and beneath that I mirrored the standard folder structure that OS-X creates for each user account. So I have a folder called Documents and one called Pictures and so on.

Back in Aperture you have a couple of choices about how you go about uploading your master images. The easiest way to do it is to use the Relocate Masters function found in the File menu. Just select the Project you are interested in and then select all of the images within that project that you would like to relocate and click Relocate Masters.

Then choose your JungleDisk volume and select a location. I like to put things in a folder beneath my Pictures folder called PhotoWork. By selecting the Day/Month/Year sub-folder format option Aperture will create a really nice and easy to navigate sub-folder hierarchy for me, and if I continue to use the same option for pictures in the future, Aperture will continue to add to the hierarchy as needed.

Now it is important to note here how JungleDisk works. When Aperture relocates the master image files, it may seem to happen fairly quickly. In fact what is happening is the location you are actually moving the image masters to is a cache location on your local hard drive. Once the files have hit the cache location, JungleDisk will begin uploading the files to Amazon in the background.

You can monitor JungleDisks’s progress and what is really nice is that JungleDisk seems to handle pausing really nicely. I can close JungleDisk at anytime, or close my computer, and JungleDisk will pick up where it left off the next time you open the application. You can also set JungleDisks cache size to whatever you want.

The second way to move your master up to S3 is to move them manually. If your images are already Referenced on an external hard drive, you can simply copy them to your JungleDisk volume. Once they have finished uploading, you can use Aperture’s Manage Referenced Files feature to reconnect to your images that are now stored on S3. An advantage of this method is that you can keep two copies of your files. One on Amazon and one on your external drive. This may make it more convenient to access current projects, using Amazon as your online backup, and then later when you decide it’s time to put the project to bed, you can do the Manage Referenced Files trick to switch the reference over to your files stored up on S3.

Oh, and let’s talk about prices for a moment. Amazon has some interesting ways of chargning for their services. They charge for the total amount of space used each month, as well as the transfer bandwidth you take up. They also charge for GET and PUT operations, but it is still fairly unclear to me how that all works when using JungleDisk. The end result is still pretty cheap, relatively speaking, and I can rest easy knowing my data is redundantly backed up both physically and geographically.

No, Amazon’s S3 is obviously not a replacement for services like Digital Railroad and Photoshelter, but is sure makes a nice compliment.

I know it often seems like several of us on this blog site are talking about the same thing, but I assure you that it is pure coincidence and I hope all the readers get as much out of the varying opinions as I do. It is actually interesting to me that so many of us are talking about using Lightroom on the road lately and how much it helps us perform our daily jobs.

In many ways it shows me that no matter how much some things change, everything seems to go full circle at some point. At the dawn of the photographic art experience, photographers used to carry their entire studios and darkroom laboratories with them on horse drawn carts. In America this was well documented during the Civil War and the western migration of settlers, miners and cowboys, immediately following the war.

Over the course of the 150 years or so since those earliest days, darkrooms became ever more complex and stationary. In the last half century most photographers, even professionals, actually gave up using the darkroom all together and started using professional photo labs with large and very complicated processing equipment, instead of controlling the images themselves.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom may not have been the first digital darkroom software package, but it has brought the power of the self operated photographic darkroom back to every photographer and most significantly I think, it has brought back the completely self sufficient mobile photographer.

The big difference is of course that we no longer need to carry a wagon load of equipment and chemicals with us. As a matter of fact if we are selective with our gear, we can carry the equivalent of what Mathew C. Brady used to carry in a horse drawn wagon, in our carry on airline bags.

This may be a sneaky way to do it but after a month or so of negotiations, I can finally announce that I am now in the process of producing a new book for Rocky Nook, The Traveling Photographer - which deals with the subject of managing both photographic equipment and digital workflow while on the road.

This book would not have been possible to write without the current digital darkroom revolution and I consider Adobe Photoshop Lightroom to have played (and is still continuing to play) a very major role in that revolution. So it is of course natural that in the next three months during which I will be working on the book, all my blog postings here at O’Reilly Digital Media - Inside Lightroom will be in some way be related to the production process of this book.

Not that I will be mentioning the book all the time, but the subject matter of my posts will be closely related to what I am working on. Which is what I first started speaking about in this post, all of us who are posting here are having many similar experiences, so we report on those experiences and sometimes our paths cross pretty closely.

Many of our digital media bloggers are out of the US right now working on assignments. But starting next week on Sept. 17, there’s a great opportunity for those of us in the States.

Rick Smolan and the team that produced A Day in the Life of America: America 24/7, is tackling their biggest challenge to date: “America at Home.” I was down at Rick’s office recently to learn about this endeavor. It’s really quite exciting, and you can become a part of it. Basically, it works like this:

The entire American population is being invited the week of September 17th-23rd to participate by taking digital photographs of what “Home” means to them, and then submitting them to MyAmericaAtHome.com. The end result will be a mixture of photos from the public and the 100 professionals who will also be capturing images of what defines the home. The photos will then go into a coffee table book titled, “America at Home” to be released in March of 2008. When the book is released, buyers will have the option of personalizing it by putting their own family pictures on the photo jacket.

If you have a good idea for an entry, start making plans now for your shoot the week of September 17. For more information, you can also read the official press release.

I’m writing this from rural Mozambique, a small community called Machaze, where the only electricity is at the Oxfam office and is only on when the generator is humming.

So far my equipment choices have worked out well. Aperture is performing flawlessly. After each day’s shoot, I back up the managed library stored on my OWC bus-powered 200GB 7200RPM drive to a Western Digital USB2 160GB bus-powered drive.

This is working well, but you may remember from a previous post that I planned on using my Firewire bus-powered drive as a vault, which would have been much faster, but with one Firewire port on my older MacBook Pro, and no extra outlets on the drives—it can’t be done.

So as a result, it takes a couple of hours to back up my 95GB library into the vault, but I do this as I sleep so it doesn’t really slow me down.

The shoot has been going well. I’m using all the stuff that I brought, which makes me think I made the right choices. My Aperture Library is up to over 95GBs in just a week of shooting, but only now, do I have some time to go through the work and delete the un-usables.

I’ve been lucky that during this assignment we’ve always had a vehicle and driver at our disposal, as well as a secure base to leave my backpack. I was worried that I might have to lug all my belongings with me everywhere, but this has not been the case.

Working in available light meant holding steady and shooting a few frames and using the zoom and loupe features in Aperture. Home-based caregiver, Fernanda Joaquim, 30 looks out the window of her home. Photo Copyright Steve Simon

The heat and vibration from traveling to rural areas on really rough roads has loosened the rubber zoom ring cover, but the lens is still working great. If you read my previous posts, you know the list of stuff I brought with me. Some of my best choice of things to bring included the small LED flashlight that clips to my vest, which has proven invaluable during the many nights with no electricity. As have the mosquito nets, which I like to wrap myself in to keep out the many strange creatures I am cohabitating with.

The red dust or sand that blows up from the soil here have blanketed me and my equipment—but I have to say that the D2X and Fuji S5 have both worked fantastically to seal out this potential problem and both sensors have been relatively dust free. I have my Arctic Butterfly on standby, but have yet to call it into action. FYI—I have not taken the 17-55mm lens off the D2X nor the 70-200mm from the Fuji S5—two reasons perhaps for dust free sensors in dusty conditions.

Because we are shooting at all times of the day, and often not ideal lighting—I brought along my Nikon SB800 flash as well as my Quantum Turbo Battery Pack, which allows me to shoot quickly, with fast recycle times even at relatively small apertures like f8, 11 and 16 at mid-day. I have also enjoyed shooting inside the many small huts I was invited into. I rarely go over ISO 200 with my Nikons, yet I’m still able to get sharp, beautiful images at fairly slow shutter speeds—I just make sure to brace myself and shoot many frames. Later, using the loupe and Zoom features in Aperture, I’m easily able to pick out the sharpest frames.

HIV/AIDS Activist Samuel Doris Campira, 39 photographed in available light inside his home. Photo Copyright Steve Simon.

Well, I’m headed to another country to do a bit of babysitting. Some old friends have a ranch in Costa Rica in a stunning location just south of one of Costa Rica’s national parks. After a couple of weeks of hanging out with them, they’ll be vacationing in Mexico. During that time, I have to take care of their lovely estate, complete with swimming pools, tennis courts, and horses. So I’ll be able to keep you posted on what it’s like to be using Lightroom steadily on location in the tropics. After all, O’Reilly’s already done that for Iceland and the Antartic…so why not someplace smack dab in-between?

The best time to winnow and edit in Lightroom is on a plane to a cross continent or international destination. There’s lots of time to do it in and nearly no distractions whatever.

I have a confession to make: I rarely do as much editing and keywording as I should…even given the efficiencies of Lightroom. It’s not a very good excuse, but the reason is that I’m simply too anxious to get on to the next project. So what happens is that when a big trip or a long location assignment happens, my laptop hard drive is crammed to the gills. So then, I’m motivated to get rid of stuff I don’t need and to do a better job of cataloguing the images I do need.

There is one problem, though: juice. Not the kind they serve on the plane before breakfast…the kind they don’t serve on the plane while Lightroom sucks up your battery power. The good thing about that, though, is that when your laptop dies you’ll have time to read the travel books about the place you’re headed for and the manual for that new camera you bought and expect to use when you arrive.

Cropping and/or straightening your photos can be initiated in one of three ways:

• tapping the “r” key,
• selecting “View” and then “Crop” from the menu, or
• clicking the “Crop Overlay” button displayed in the command bar underneath your photos in the Develop module.

All three are equivalent. Once invoked, the command will overlay a grid of two evenly–spaced vertical and two evenly–spaced horizontal lines on your photo to make cropping your photo with the “rule of thirds” and/or straightening your photo with a plumb vertical line a snap.

Aperture is a big program. It might not be as big as Photoshop or Final Cut Pro, but it still does a lot! In fact, there’s so much in there that it’s rare to find someone who uses every single button and feature regularly at an expert level. What this means is that once in a while, you stumble on something new to you that’s incredibly exciting! Unfortunately, sometimes it’s tough to tell exactly what you did that gave you the new, cool result.

Last week, I received a very kind, excited email from Renato Domith Godinho who found one of these features. Specifically, he discovered that you can rotate an image to an arbitrary angle in a book layout, even though the interface doesn’t clearly show you how. When he emailed me, he wasn’t sure exactly what he did to rotate the image, and thought that perhaps he’d found a semi-secret feature. I have to admit that I almost felt like a louse, bursting his bubble of excitement, when I emailed him back to tell him specifically how to rotate images.

In case you’re wondering, to rotate images when making a book:

1. Select the Edit Layout button
2. Click on the image you wish to rotate
3. Move the mouse just outside the image, by one of the gray squares
4. The cursor will change to crosshairs, and you’ll be able to drag the cursor to rotate the image

The overall point, though, is that it’s worth spending time exploring features that you might not use regularly, such as making a book or a light table, both in Aperture and other programs (as a side note, I don’t think you can rotate images arbitrarily in the light table). It’s amazing the subtle features you’ll discover! And who knows, perhaps you’ll discover something that completely changes your workflow!

Additionally, I want to encourage everyone reading Inside Aperture to feel free to email us or post a comment, asking us questions you have that other people might be interested in or suggesting topics that you’d like to see us discuss! It’s sometimes hard to think of fresh ideas for posts, and some people get upset if our topic isn’t 100% about Aperture (I found this out the hard way when I posted about what the new MacBook Pro features meant for Aperture users). Tell us what you’d like, and we’ll do our best!

Some images simply pop in color and can stand a healthy dose of vibrance. Others just work better in black and white. Luckily, with digital RAW capture, you can postpone the decision of whether to finish an image in color or black and white until you get back home and can work with it in the digital darkroom. Then, you can render an image in multiple ways until its perfect. When render a black and white image in Lightroom, the Greyscale Mix is a great tool that’s been well covered. There’s another tool, however, that you can use on black and white images that you might not be as familiar with. It’s the Split Toning tool.

There are a few things about Aperture’s Projects pane that can be confusing to new users. What’s great about the Projects pane is that it provides so many options for keeping even a massive library organized. The combination of Projects, Folders, and Smart Albums provides tremendous organizational flexibility and power. However, there are a couple of things about the visual presentation of the Projects pane that can be confusing.

1. The Library entry in the Projects pane does not contain any images or projects. While it appears that the Library entry a the top of the Projects pane has a hierarchical relationship to the rest of the entries in the pane (it can appear as if your projects are somehow contained by the Library entry - not an unreasonable assumption) it actually doesn’t. The Library entry doesn’t hold images or projects, it simply allows you to select different filters for automatically culling images from your entire library, not just from specific projects. If you want to look at all of the 5-star images in your library, just click on the 5-star entry and allof the images in your library that have 5-stars will be displayed. Opening or closing the Library entry does not show or reveal Projects, though.

2. An album in one project can contain images from another project. While, hierarchically, an album inside of one project appears as if it’s restricted to images within its parent project, you can actually drag an image from any other project into that same album. Albums are entirely project independent - they can exist inside or outside a project, and can contain an image from any other project. As always, when you add an image from a different project, only a reference to that image is stored inside the album.

Finally, remember that Albums - and Smart Albums - can sit inside or outside of a project, and that you can constrain the scope of a Smart Album by placing it in a folder along with the projects that you want it to mine images from.

Back in the early days of music technology, there came to pass the big divide between “fresh” live music and “canned” music. Of course what we are talking about is recorded music, which has been elevated to such a fine art in these digital days.  But the big divide still exists as to the difference between a live performance and the “studio version” of a track. On stage there is no bigger stigma than to be caught lip-synching to a recorded track of your voice, or even your own band; just ask ELO, Milli Vanilli, or Ashlee Simpson.

I have a confession. When I started to think about performing without a band, back in my post-band days, I was swept away with technology. Having a computer play my keyboards and drum machine really seemed like a cool thing. I would just sing and play lead over it all just like a real band. But when it came to playing to the mechanical tempo, I thought “I may as well be playing to a recording.” And guess what? I left the computer at home and started doing just that. Several gigs of soul-less performances left me tired of the stage.

The above experience, I would put into Category One. In the same category I would put Karaoke, which is to say there is nothing wrong with this traditional drinking activity. But singing to a pre-recorded backing track is just that. There have even been technology schemes to make Karaoke more interactive, such as programmed reverb settings for the chorus and auto-harmony for the big ending. There is alot of technology happening in Karaoke machines lately. But still, if you loose your place, you are hosed.

Category Two is even more technology dependent, but can be quite fun. Using MIDI, a truly interactive musical performance can be achieved by triggering the progression of a tune to a tap of the foot, press of a key, or even the recognition of a musical phrase. If the software engine is smart enough, all you have to do is play. But how many tunes do you want to program like that? Programming environments like MAX/MSP, SuperCollider and even Ableton Live allow for very immediate performance response. Adding snippets of digital audio to the scheme brings more realism and this is exactly what is happening in high-end video game sound tracks today. When you prowl away from the action in Halo, the orchestra goes mellow. When you head into the heat of things, the musical activity gets hyper. Of course in a game, you don’t have to care about what’s going on with the music in order to enjoy yourself. So how does THAT translate to a live gig?

The winner by default is Category Three. Instead of performing on top of canned music, or trying to get canned music to play with you, this final approach is to just play finished tracks with a bit of modification and manipulation. Experimental DJs and turntablists have landed on this concept to great success. An entire industry is dedicated to mutating the recorded song. Even the traditional mixers are making a decent income. This seems most evident when “live” venues are headlined by celebrity DJs and stadium-sized festival audiences are grooving to the wheels of steel. Although critics of club DJs have been quoted as saying "a monkey could do it", as one of the most identifiable performance art forms of the 21st century, I guess it doesn’t matter what the content is, so much as how one “opens” the can.

I have three zooms in the 70mm to 200mm+ range, and they couldn’t be more different from one another. My favorite of the bunch is the Canon 70-200 f/4 L. I think it’s one of the best lenses I’ve ever owned in terms of sharpness, color fidelity, and that magical X-factor that’s hard to describe, but you see it in the pictures. I keep the 70-200 in my Canon 5D kit for assignments.

I also have an older Canon 70-210 f/3.5-4.5 USM that I bought for the original film-loading Elan body. I liked that lens on the Elan and have many good pictures to show for it. Since I don’t shoot much film anymore, I moved the 70-210 to my lighter, “grab as I run out the door,” Canon XTi kit that also includes the 17-40 f/4 and an older 24-85 f/3.5-4.5 USM. It’s a nice ensemble for bopping around because it’s so light.

The thing that I’ve realized however, is that I can really tell the difference between these two zoom lenses, and need to shoot accordingly with them. I’ve used the 70-200 L on the XTi before, and I know the types of pictures it renders. Yesterday, however, I grabbed the “light kit” on the way out the door to take some snaps at the Giants-Dodgers game at AT&T Park. That meant shooting with the older 70-210.

Note to self: for sporting events, I should swap out the older 70-210 for the newer L lens. Its resolving power is so much better, showing the fine detail in uniforms, etc. even in action shots. But I do like the portraits with the older lens. It has a flattering, softer quality that still renders the eyes nice and sharp, but the skin tones look younger.

So, during the shoot at the Giants game, the action shots weren’t as good as I knew they could be with the 70-200 L, but I did end up with some very nice crowd portraits. I kept in mind the strengths of that old workhorse, and adjusted my shoot accordingly. That being said… I wish I had a 70-200 L in both kits.

Photo by Derrick Story. Canon XTi with 70-210mm f/3.5-4.5 Canon USM lens. Focal length was 155mm, f/6.7 at 350th of a second, ISO 200. RAW file format.

This week I have been shooting rock climbing in Devils Tower National Monument in the hinterlands of Wyoming. It has been a long week of heavy packs and hard work. But I also had the chance to photograph an incredible musician and help her produce images for an upcoming album. Her name is Jessica Kilroy and she is an incredible singer and songwriter - check her out on iTunes. I highly recommend her music - I was blown away.

Back to the images, we went out and shot in a meadow just next to Devils Tower and using a strobe captured some very nice images. I wanted to ad an artistic touch to the images that would really make them stand out on the album cover.

Develop module with the Lightroom presets panel open on the left.

Once I imported the images I had Jessica make her selects in Lightroom - which she picked up super fast. Then I went to work on a few of the images to show her some possibilities. Below is the result of my initial processing.

Image as it was initially processed - a very good start.

I liked the image as it was processed above but wanted to play around with it a little more. At times like this I often go over to the Lightroom Presets panel and see what kind of results I can get with the built in presets. I selected the “Aged Photo” preset and really liked the desaturated look of the image (see below).

Image after applying the Lightroom preset “Creative- Aged Photo”

I don’t know if this image will make the cover of her next album but it was fun to see just how fast Lightroom can help create distinctive images.

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

Adios, Michael Clark

Photoshop Lightroom Adventure is going into reprint, which means it’s selling very well AND I have a chance to fix any small errors or typos in the book… So, dear readers and owners of my book, I’m asking for your help, and I’ll reward you if you help out.

I’ve been getting an average of three or four inquiries a week about licensing my photos. This is a good thing. It’s fun to interact with people who are enthusiastic about my work (and, hey, even willing to pay to use it!). These inquiries are coming almost entirely from my web presence in Photoblog 2.0 and on Flickr.

The size of these licensing deals has ranged from fairly small (for example, an image to be used by an alternative medical practioner in New Zealand for a logo) to book covers and global advertising campaigns. The international reach of the Internet, as shown by this commercial interest in my digital photo library, thrills me.

The volume of these licensing inquiries has been getting to the point that I felt it was time to create an information page about licensing Harold Davis photos. Of course, my hope is that by putting information about how to find my photos and license them in one place I will spur additional interest.

As I put together the licensing information page, I was really struck by what a “mash-up” my online presence is: I handcode web pages in PHP, I use WordPress to manage my blogging, and I use Flickr as my web image repository. I’ve also “out sourced” my comment management to Flickr, and I use Flickr’s taxonomic categorization tools and tagged searching mechanisms. For full-text search, I’ve got a Google search box tied into my blog and content sites. Paypal lets me easily accept international payment for web usages that would otherwise not really be practical.

I know it’s been said before, but what a tangled web we weave…

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

Over the last few months, I’ve written several posts about Aperture’s seamless integration with iLife and iWork via the iLife Media Browser. A few weeks ago I posted about using your Aperture photos with iWork’s Pages to create print layouts and I received a lot of good feedback from readers pointing out that there are other ways of getting images out of Aperture and into other applications on your Mac.

So today let’s talk about drag-and-drop. When you drag image thumbnails from Aperture’s Browser and drop them into other applications, the JPEG previews get placed into the target application. If you have a large display, you can do some smart window management and arrange Aperture’s window so that it doesn’t fill the screen. This makes it pretty easy to arrange another app’s window next to Aperture and drag your photos from one window to the other. But if you use a MacBook Pro like I do, then your screen real estate is going to be limited. However fear not: there are some great features of Mac OS X that we can put into action here. So take a minute, stretch your fingers and hands out, and read on. We’ll use iMovie as a sample destination for our photos.

Method One — Drag-and-drop combined with Exposé

In Aperture’s Browser, select the photo or photos you want to get into your iMovie project. Click on one of the selected photos and begin to drag within the Browser. You’ll see a little translucent thumbnail of your photo stuck to your cursor. If you had multiple photos selected, you’ll see a red badge in the lower left corner showing how many photos you’re bringing with you. Now, the important part: without releasing the mouse button, and without moving the cursor outside of the Browser window, activate Exposé’s All Windows mode. (The default keyboard shortcut for this is F9, however depending on your configuration it could be function-F9 on a laptop or F3 on the fancy new Apple keyboards.) Exposé will show all open application windows. Move your cursor over iMovie’s window and hold it there for about three seconds until iMovie comes to the foreground, then drop your photos into iMovie’s project panel. Your preview JPEGs from Aperture are now part of the iMovie project.

Method Two — Drag-and-drop combined with the Application Switcher

Start out the same way as method one: grab the photos in Aperture’s Browser and do not release the mouse button. Activate the Application Switcher by pressing and holding the Command key and pressing Tab. Press Tab until you’ve highlighted iMovie, release both keys and release the mouse button when the cursor is over your target destination.

These tips are not unique to Aperture; they work throughout Mac OS X in the Finder and many other applications. Next time you have to get assets from one application to another, try experimenting with these methods. Do Aperture users prefer these methods or the Media Browser? What are your thoughts on one method versus the other? I’d be curious to hear from readers on this.

Aperture has a real advantage to the photographer in that you can set up your own customized work environment. Not only can you change the way Aperture’s layout is set up, you can also change your surround. If you are in the normal viewing mode Aperture offers a gray background for both your image viewing area and grid view. And, when you are in full screen mode Aperture places your images against a black background.

In the Preferences pane you can also customize the brightness of both the viewer are and the grid view area backgrounds.

But which is the best choice for image editing. Well, the answer to that question relies on a number of factors. In addition to these factors you also have to consider the variables of your environment. Are you working at your desk under tungsten light, window light, or fluorescent light? Have you calibrated your monitor? And if so, what settings did you use?

On top of all these questions, the real, most important question you should be asking yourself is, “how will this image be viewed?” Are you going to be making a print to be viewed in a gallery, or will it be stuck to your refrigerator? Or, are you planning to post this image on the web?

But let’s get back to the concept of surround for a minute. One of the most elementary concepts in imaging and perception is called Simultaneous Contrast. At the top of this post is an image that explains simultaneous contrast in very simple terms. The two smaller squares are exactly the same shade of gray, but because they have different surrounds, one of the squares appears lighter than the other. Your visual system is playing a trick on you. So, extrapolate this simple experiment to Aperture. Obviously we can see that viewing and adjusting an image on a gray or black background can make a huge difference as your visual system will perceive lightness and color differently depending on the surround.

Apple has a really incredible resource on their Pro website having to do with color and perception. If you really want to understand all of these variables, I highly recommend you check out this site.

In addition to being a great primer on color management, they also delve deeply into color perception. Check out the part by John Paul Caponigro that deals with Simultaneous Contrast. He really gets it right.

All of this color theory stuff can seem a bit daunting at first. It is important to sort of “get” some of these concepts, but it is more important to be able to apply them to your real world workflow and image editing environment. What I think is really cool about John Paul Caponigro is that he is a fine artist, and not a color scientist. He is applying this knowledge to his art, which is exactly what we should all be doing.

I hadn’t checked the digital workflow forums in a while and thought I better check to see what is giving Lightroom users problems these days. To my surprise I saw that the biggest issue still seems to be performance related, with various posters complaining about how slow the application was on their computers.

Since I don’t really have too much of a problem myself and I do not use the newest and fastest computer, I tend to ignore most of these posts and usually figure that it is just operator error. I mean we all know how messed up some our friends computers are and no matter how much we try to help them, they refuse to change their bad habits. To them it is always the newest program they have jammed into their computer that is at fault, not their own bad habits.

I’m admittedly kind of a Mac snob and I can’t help telling people to switch to Mac to solve their problems, but this is not completely right, so I thought I should at least try to understand what is going on. One thing I noticed right away is that most of the people with performance problems tend to complain about how long it takes to do some simple thing to thousands of images at the same time. Now I don’t know about you but I never really have the need to do something to thousands of images at the same time. I guess it could happen but it makes me wonder whether these people are just experimenting with the limits of the program, or do they really need to process that many images at one time.

The other problem is that they have multiple external hard disk drives, CD-ROM/DVD drives, and Flash memory readers attached to their computers with image files on all of them and all of them hooked up to one catalog in Lightroom. I do understand why some people need this, but they are usually working for large corporations or image banks of some sort and they have other image management solutions available to them. For me Lightroom is a perfect image management application for handling small to medium sized projects, it is not yet ready to handle the image management needs for the Olympic Games or a major publication, maybe in the future yes, but not now.

I have very few performance issues because I work only with current project files and leave the rest of my images off line. When I am finished with that particular project, I export the catalog and also store it off line. This way everything seems to work much faster and smoother than when I was cataloging and trying to manage way too many images at the same time.

Realizing that some people do need to have all their images available at all times, I decided to dig a little further and found that quite a few people were finding significant speed increases by turning the auto-write XMP files function off in the Catalog Settings dialog. Turning this setting off in effect saves your metadata changes to the Lightroom Catalog and not to a separate XMP file that can be transported easily to another application or back to Lightroom from deep storage. The effect is most pronounced when large numbers of images are scattered over a number of different devices, especially so when the catalog was searching for images that were at that moment off line.

Here is a more in depth acknowledgment and explanation of the problem, by Lightroom Engineer Dustin Bruzenak, and an indication that things will probably get better in the near future.

Performance & Auto-write XMP

There are a number of problems to solve in night photography, including seeing what you are doing, not falling off a cliff in the dark, running out of juice in your batteries, and dealing with digital noise. The payoff, if you can manage all this, includes wonderful star trails, night music, and the digital landscape of the night as human eyes have never seen it.

Like any other photograph, a photograph of the night needs to be exposed properly. To digress slightly, a proper exposure is not merely measurement of of the average amount of light falling on your subject, and setting the camera accordingly. Proper exposure involves creative assessment of whether a photo needs to be exposed for portions of the subject, and possible further adjustments to make the image lighter or darker.

The good news is that digital photography usually gives us instant feedback as to whether our exposure was at least in the right ballpark (just review the photo in your LCD).

The bad news is you often can’t review a long night exposure in real time because, well, the exposure is too long. Take a 90 minute exposure like the one below that shows the moon dropping into the Pacific Ocean. In addition to the 90 minute exposure time, it took about 45 minutes for my Nikon D200’s processor to chug through the image and save it. Even if you want to stay up all night (and I didn’t, I was fast asleep when this photo was taken), you get one crack a night. Before I could have made another exposure, the moon would have been long set and dawn would have been approaching.

Here’s where the exposure equation comes to the rescue.

View this image larger.

The exposure equation says that any given exposure (remember, an exposure controls the appearance of your photo, and is not merely a measurement of light) is set using three variables: shutter speed, f-stop (aperture), and sensitivity (ISO). To maintain a constant exposure, if you slow the shutter speed down to let in more light into your camera, you must compensate by selecting a smaller f-stop to allow less light into the camera (or by selecting a lower ISO).

Conversely, once again to hold an exposure constant, if you speed up the shutter speed, which lets less light into the camera, then you must compensate to allow more light into the camera by choosing a more open aperture setting (or by boosting the ISO).

In practice, you can use the exposure equation to run tests for long exposures like the 90 minute night exposure shown above. The method is to use a short as shutter speed as possible, with the camera lens wide open. You can then play with the ISO to get an exposure you like. A back-of-the envelope calculation will tell you how to set the camera for the long exposure.

Here’s how this method worked to find the exposure settings for image above. I set the camera to make 30 second exposures at f/4. I then tried exposures at various ISO values. The image below came out fairly well at ISO 640 (I tried ISO settings between 200 and 1,000).

Now I had my baseline. I knew two of the three variables in the exposure equation for the long-exposure photo: I wanted to take it at ISO 100 to reduce noise as much as possible, and I wanted a 90 minute exposure (the length of time from the beginning of the exposure to a few minutes after moonset). The missing variable was the f-stop (aperture), and I could use my test exposure and the exposure equation to find this value.

To go from 30 seconds to 90 minutes meant I would be letting in 180 times as much light (without other adjustments). To go down in sensitivity from ISO 640 to ISO 100 meant reducing the amount of light by 6.4 (OK, call it 6 to make calculations in the dark easier). Divide 180 by 6 and you can easily see that the aperture I selected should let in roughly 1/30 of the light as f/4.

The aperture in a lens is approximately circular, and the designation of aperture openings (f-stops) is on a logarthmic scale. Starting with f/4, each of these apertures lets in roughly half the light of the preceding aperture: f/4, f/5.6, f/8, f/11, f/16, f/22. So, 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 * 1/2 equals 1/32, which is why I chose f/22 for my exposure (at 5393 seconds and ISO 100). Since I thought the test exposure was a little too bright (the reflection of the moonlight below shows some highlight blowout), I wasn’t unhappy to cut the exposure by a little bit extra (by dividing by 6 rather than 6.4, and by cutting the aperture by 1/32 rather than my estimated 1/30).

View this image larger.

Related story: Night Music, Exposing the Digital Night.
Related site: Digital Night by Harold Davis.

Well, they’re not so much hidden as easily forgotten. In this blog, I’m going to remind you of some of my favorite features that are so subtly presented in the interface that, if you’re not careful, you can easily forget are there. Of course, if you start using them often, they become such a habit that they become unforgettable.

1.Be sure to include “all rights reserved” in your personal metadata, not just “copyright Your Name 2007″
2.Don’t forget to use collections. Then you don’t have to move an image out of its catalog. Put images into major collections, then create sub-collections and put the appropriate ones into there, too. Start now. It takes a long time to go backwards and cover all the collections. The good news is that any collections are useful, so adding more is just more useful. Also, as you build collections and then process images, you may want to add some of those images to certain collections.

3.Should you convert to DNG? Pro: DNG is a format that’s likely to last a lot longer than a proprietary format for a specific camera. Con: You may have uses for non-Adobe RAW software that won’t read .DNG files because their makers are competing with Adobe.

Read on to be reiminded of some things that you’ll find especially useful to remember in the Develop module.

Copyright Steve Simon

Okay, the six-week big trip through Mozambique and South Africa continues. I’ve already bared-all with the description of what I take with me equipment wise. The big question remains, what kind of underwear and how many?

Clothes

10 Pair Underwear (Ex Officio Boxer-Brief Quick wash and dry)

Okay, officially too much information for the Inside Aperture Blog.

10 Pair Socks
3 Long Sleeve Quick Dry Shirts
2 Long Sleeved Jerseys*
1 Fleece Zip Jacket
1 Sweater (it’s Africa and it’s Winter there, and it does get nippy)
2 T-shirts
1 Gortex Jacket
Two Jeans
1 Mosquito Net
1 Silk Sheet
1 Mosquito Head Net
1 Mosquito Hat
1 Hat
1 Sports Towel
Sandals for the Shower
1 Travel Pillow
Travel Umbrella
First Aid Kit
Blundstone Original Boots, tough, breathable and comfortable.

Copyright Steve Simon

Electrical

Plug adapters for South Africa and Europe/Angola/Mozambique. If you come to South Africa remember it takes a unique big plug adapter, which you should always have before your trip, but you can get them at the Airport in Johannesburg. Some hotels also have the European plug.

Copyright Steve Simon

Health

Toiletries: You know what you need to make yourself beautiful. But here are a few things you guys might want to have in your bag. Ladies, you’re on your own.

Shaver
Shaving Cream
Skin Cream
Shampoo/Soap
Brush
Toothbrush
Toothpaste
Floss
Deodorant
Nail Clippers/Scissors
Mini Toilet Paper Roll (These little travel sized Charmins come in a plastic mini-roll and are priceless)
Vitamins (lots of C)
Ear Plugs
Brush
Little Toilet Paper
Kleenex
Moist Wipes
Deep Woods Off Moist Wipes
Insect Repellent with Deet 35

A good Travel Alarm Clock or a watch with an alarm feature you can figure out that is loud enough to wake you up is really important!

On my last trip they called me “The Pharmacist”, since I had a bag full of over-the- counter medications ready for anything a hypochondriac could dream up. Depending on where you are going, you may want to consider taking this stuff, particularly in places where finding a pharmacy is not easy.

Copyright Steve Simon

Pharmaceutical Carry On Kit

Insect RepellantAfter Bite
TernaFlu Strips
Rolaids
Neutrogena Sun Block
Ear Plugs
Murine Eye Relief
Dramamine
Advil
Aleve Caplets
Vitamin C
Jetease
Antihistamine
Imodium Chews
Malarone (Malaria Drug)
Cipro
GasX

Utility Bag

4 Mini Toilet Paper Rolls
Clothespins
Clothesline
Seat Covers
Duct Tape (mini roll)
Gaffer Tape
Kleenex
Soap Leaves
Woolite Suds
Mosquito Repellant for Clothes

Not needing all this stuff is the hope, so prevention is the best idea. Here are a couple of products that may just help alleviate the need for bringing a bag full of drugs.

I found these while on a layover at the airport in Munich.

Orthomol Immun

Comes in 10 ready to drink bottles, which are micronutrients for frequent travelers. Full of vitamins, the pharmacist in Munich where I found them said they really work to reduce jet lag and build up the immune system, which is crucial during long voyages. I’m going to give the product a try this trip and I’ll report back to you.

The other anti-jet lag product I found at this same little travel pharmacy at the Munich airport is something called Jet Ease, from a company in New Zealand. These 32-tablet strip packs are also vitamin rich and they say it will help reduce the effects of jetlag.

Copyright Steve Simon

More on how Aperture performed on the big trip next post.

Lightroom’s Develop module has 7 groups of adjustment tools:

1. Basic,
2. Tone Curve,
3. HSL / Color / Grayscale,
4. Split Toning,
5. Detail,
6. Lens Corrections, and
7. Camera Calibration.

These groups appear in the image below, and on all but the first group there is what appears to be a little switch, as highlighted below:

Back in the days of slides we all judiciously created little stick on labels with identifying information about an image as well as our contact information, and then carefully applied them to every slide before we sent them out. We hoped that our slides - often originals - would find their way back to us and be properly credited when used. In today’s digital world, carefully applying identifying labels is at least as important, if not more so.

You probably know that there is a pop up menu in Aperture’s Import window that allows you to choose a Metadata view to add information to your images during downloading. However, if you’re like me, none of the pre-existing options have quite the right combination of information. However you can create a customized view - or several views - to meet your needs.

To create a customized metadata template to use during Import (or any other time) follow these steps:
1. Open the Metadata Inspector (Window >Show Metadata)
2. Choose Metadata View > All IPTC and fill in the information you want to import with every image
3. Click the Metadata Action icon in the upper right corner (it looks like a sun or gear) and choose New View
4. Type in a descriptive name for the new view and click OK.
5. The Metadata Inspector will change to reflect your specific entries, and there will be an empty check box in front of each potential field. Check each field that you want to appear on your import template. You can include some empty fields such as Event or Keywords, that you’ll fill in at the time of Import.
6. Your new View will appear in the Add Metadata drop down list. The Autofill Editor will make it easy to quickly fill in the information. (But a word ofcaution, don’t click Return/Enter to accept the Autofill Editor’s suggestion, instead use the tab key to move to the next field.
7. You can opt to complete your template in different ways and save those as Presets by clicking the Metadata Action icon and choosing Save As Preset. (For example, you might include your phone number in one preset and not in another.) Presets will also appear in the Metadata drop down list. Unfortunately empty fields disappear in the Presets, so you’d have to append another view to include any empty fields you need to customize such as keywords or event.
8. To remove a customized view or preset, choose Manage Views or Manage Presets from the action icon. Then choose the view or preset and click on the - button.

Using a customized template during import ensures that all my images have at least basic contact and copyright information with them even if I email them to others immediately. By including the keyword placeholder, I automatically add keywords that apply to all the images I’m importing.

I’ve recently been playing with Raw+Jpeg on my DSLRs while testing the new HP Photosmart A626 Compact Printer, which enables me to insert my memory card directly into the unit, view the pictures on its large LCD, then output up to 5″x7″ prints. Since the HP (and other direct printers of its ilk) can’t process Raw files, I’ve been shooting Raw+Jpeg so I can have my cake and eat it too.

The problem is, after I’ve had my fun printing out snapshots, Aperture grabs both the Raw files and the Jpegs off my card during upload and stores them on my hard drive. I’d just as soon Aperture upload only the Raws and ignore the Jpegs — they’ve already served their purpose.

If you’re shooting Raw+Jpeg for some specific reason and are using Aperture to manage your library, let me know your approach.

Last week, I was Wiesbaden, Deutschland, hanging out with fellow photo geek Patrick Lenz. We ran about, took lots of pictures, and traded notes about both photography and Lightroom. Wiesbaden was a lot of fun, especially since it’s off the beaten path for tourists. As we traded tips and tricks for using Lightroom, Patrick showed me some really nice little tricks to working with Lightroom, including a few ways to really speed up metadata entry.

I’ll be leaving for South Africa this week to help Steve Simon with a shoot that he’s doing there. He and I will work together for about a week-and-a-half and then I’ll be on my own for another ten days, trying to work my way into the bush for some landscape shooting. As Steve describes here, planning for a trip like this can be tricky. We’ll be travelling around in-country a lot, and I don’t want to carry much, but I also don’t want to find myself wanting for a piece of kit that I’ve left at home. Also, because I plan on going backcountry, I need to bring a tent, sleeping bag, stove, and other items that I normally wouldn’t bother with.

So, I’ve decided to go computer-less.

I agree very much with Micah Walter’s post that the immediate feedback of digital shooting, as well as the immediate post-processing made possible by a laptop computer, can really change the way you shoot. Personally, I need to let images sit, unobserved, for a few weeks before I can make a reasonable assessment of what I really think of them. Very often, if I look too soon, I find that I’m disappointed. Only with a little time am I able to judge them fairly. Consequently, to ease the weight burden, and to see what it’s like to remain in a shooting mindset for the duration of the shoot (rather than going back and forth between shooting and post) I’m leaving my Mac, and Aperture, at home.

This, of course, creates several issues that need to be dealt with using other technology, the main one being how to handle the storage issue. I will be shooting with a 5D, exclusively raw, and I tend to bracket a lot so storage will be an issue. With a Mac I could, of course, dump things onto a hard drive and be done with it.

Fortunately, Steve will have his Mac with him, so there’s a chance that I can let him hassle with carrying the computer around, while I simply “borrow” it from him in the evenings. (My hopes are that his internet access is currently so limited that he won’t be able to learn of my plan until it’s too late.) I have prepared a bootable external drive configured the way that I want it, so that all I have to do is reboot his machine off of that drive, and I’ll have my own self-contained environment, that will pose no threat to his own files, settings, or organization. This, combined with some blank DVDs might provide a reasonable backup scheme.

The problem with this idea is that Steve will also need to be offloading his images. If our only time is late in the day, and we’ve got a lot of images to move, there might not be enough time for me to swipe his computer from him. And, of course, I’ll only have access to his machine for the first half of the trip.