O'Reilly Digital MediaExplore the Future of Audio, Video & Photography
Just a quick shameless self-promotion: I’ll be leading a free presentation entitled “Extending Aperture with iLife ‘08 and iWork ‘08″ at the Apple Store SoHo on Thursday night, November 1 at 6:30 p.m. If you’re in the New York City area please feel free to stop by.
More information at the Apple Store SoHo website.
There are currently a lot of Mac users of Lightroom who are counting down the hours until Adobe releases a fix to get Lightroom working properly on Apple’s latest operating system, Leopard. From the recent announcements made, it sounds as though Adobe has started work on a release (1.2.1?) to overcome these Leopard shortcomings as soon as possible — mostly likely the next couple weeks.
As a Lightroom user that still has a fully functional application, there is currently one feature — that’s admittedly not trivial — that I’m counting down the days to: the ability to extend and customize Lightroom to suit my needs via scripting. Why do I find this a pressing issue right now? I’ve spent time over the last few days throwing together some JavaScript to automate some oft–repeated and mundane tasks in Photoshop (yes, that little language is at home in the mother of image editing applications and web browsers), and have again come to appreciate the utility of having scripting hooks in your workflow’s tools. That could also just be the computer programmer inside of me speaking.
But it’s not a matter of if scripting will be supported in a future version of Lightroom, it’s a matter of when, as Mark Hamburg — Lightroom’s chief — has mused about the subject before. However, as mentioned in the interview, knowledge of JavaScript won’t get you very far when it comes to Lightroom’s scripting support. Why?
Adobe’s staple applications (such as Photoshop & Illustrator, and the recent additions to the family such as Flash & Dreamweaver from the Macromedia acquisition) share a common look and feel: concepts such as palettes, workspaces, and generally speaking, the whole application interface look more–or–less the same from one environment to the next. And there’s a good reason for that: they share a common library of code that takes care of the heavy lifting common to all of the applications. The foundations of the application’s scripting engine could be considered as part of this toolkit; Photoshop, Illustrator, and others support a variety of scripting languages: JavaScript (supported on both Mac and Windows), AppleScript (only on the Mac), and Visual Basic (only on Windows).
However, Lightroom follows a different path; its interface & application logic is built using an embedded programming language called Lua, rather than using Adobe’s existing toolkit & libraries (which explains a lot regarding why Lightroom looks and behaves so differently from its cousins in the Creative Suite). Those who have cobbled together enough JavaScript to automate other Adobe applications (or just about any web browser) would do well to start brushing up on Lua in preparation for the introduction of scripting support in Lightroom (whenever that happens to be). The good news is that a strong grasp on the fundamentals of JavaScript (or any other scripting or “full-fledged programming” language, for that matter) will definitely go a long way when adding a new language to your toolbelt.
When I initially heard that Leopard was incorporating Cover Flow, I was less than impressed since, like Ben, it’s a feature I never use in iTunes. But it turns out that it’s a great feature for Aperture users, especially combined with Quick Look.
One of the primary reasons that I turn to Bridge is when I want to find or view an image that I haven’t imported into Aperture. For example, perhaps I’m searching for an image a client sent me, or one that predates Aperture. Or perhaps while using Aperture I opened a version of a file in Photoshop, and then I went on to create another version in Photoshop that I never bothered to import into Aperture. Until now, using Bridge was the best way to quickly look for the files.
Now with Leopard I can use the Cover Flow mode and quickly search though the appropriate section of my computer with a visual preview of all my image files. That makes it efficient to locate a file, particularly when you’ve forgotten its name. Sometimes you’ll need to look more closely at the file to make sure it’s the one you want, particularly if you are browsing through an entire folder of images. Rather than having to wait while opening a program, select the image in the Finder while in Cover Flow mode, and press the Space bar. Quick Look immediately generates a large preview of the image . In addition, at the bottom of the preview there is a double edged arrow. Click on the arrow to make the preview appear full screen. It’s impressive!
With the recent introduction of Leopard, Aperture was incrementally updated to version 1.5.6. Both were released on the same day. One was pre-announced and expected, while the other was not and came as a pleasant surprise. In the update to Aperture, Apple introduced several fixes aiming to make it work seamlessly with the new operating software and to make sure that the integration with iLife is just right. Recommended for all users of Aperture (even for those still in Tiger, Mac OS X 10.4.8 at least), the 130 MB update was made available via Software Update. This is to make sure that everything works well.
Attuned to Apple’s update cycle, the upgrade to Aperture seemed almost inevitable. Not to start and fuel a rumor, we generally agree that avid and long-time Aperture users can almost tell when an upgrade is in the offing. To a lot of Aperture users, it seemed not surprising, therefore, that an update became available at the heels of Leopard’s public availability. It was simply something that appears long overdue.
If you have already updated Aperture to version 1.5.6 in preparation for Leopard, you might feel that this update, while necessary, wasn’t that exciting. While making sure that Aperture plays nice with the new operating system, which, in general, is a good thing, photographers have been left wanting for more. I know because I felt that way. Understandably, voices of mild disappointment were raised. Not that it was critical, I am guessing we want to be spoiled just a little bit with something fun and exciting.
Through the years, Aperture developed and grew in a steady pace. It may be correct to say that its development was actually largely dictated by the photographers and the software’s users. Based on my impression, Apple kept the channels of communication open to anyone who wants to comment or suggest anything. We know that photographers are not a shy lot. They seemed to have said a ton of things, and in a way, it weighed a lot on the way Aperture has developed, and hopefully, will develop in the near future.
How does Apple gather feedback and information? We cannot say for certain what the complete strategy is, but at least, it is fair to say that Apple appears to be listening really well. Let’s see if we can enumerate some of the ways how you and I can get Apple to listen.
These are just some of the ways on how we can reach Apple. When we continue to provide information to Apple’s Aperture team by voicing our comments, feedback and feature requests, we are collectively providing Apple, based on our user experiences and feedback, the kind of knowledge that they can then sift through to design how the next version of Aperture will be like.
According to the official Lightroom team blog, we’ve got a few weeks to wait before we’ll be able to run Lightroom seamlessly on Leopard:
The good news is that we’ll be releasing an update in mid-November that will address key compatibility issues.
OK, I know this takes time, but arrrgh. But wait, there’s more!
The interaction between Leopard’s Time Machine and Lightroom’s catalog files is unknown at this time. Running Time Machine backup or restore operations while Lightroom is in use is not recommended until more information can be obtained.
So, even if you’re willing to put up with not being able to print and import dialogs disappearing under the main window, be careful out there.
Last week, I had a chance to sit down and chat with fellow Aperture trainer and Apple certified Color Management consultant Peter Stroumtsos. Peter has been making some really nice black and white prints using Aperture and his Epson Stylus Pro 3800, combining Aperture’s monochrome mixer adjustment with the Advanced Black-and-White mode on the 3800. With this combo, he has achieved a workflow that gives him the look of traditional darkroom black-and-white prints, with the speed and flexibility of Aperture. Here’s how he does it:
Prior to any adjusting or printing of photographs, Peter color calibrates and profiles his display using the X-Rite i1Photo. This important step ensures that what he sees on his display will accurately reflect the image that his printer outputs. The i1Photo can be used to profile various papers as they display color from the 3800, however we saw great results using the canned profiles that Epson includes with the 3800 for the Epson Ultra Premium Photo Paper paper (formerly known as Premium Luster Photo Paper) he is printing on.
Peter starts with a photo from the Aperture library and applies the monochrome mixer adjustment. He cycles through the default presets, evaluating how the image looks with the red filter, green filter, etc., and narrows the choices down to two or three presets that look the best. He toggles between his choices until he decides which of the built-in presets handle the black-and-white conversion the best; then if necessary, he manually tweaks the adjustment until the conversion looks good. To be sure he’ll get consistent results from the 3800, he uses Aperture’s Onscreen Proofing feature with the Ultra Premium Photo Paper profile (Pro38 PLPP.icc) to preview how the photo will look when it’s output on the paper.
When he’s ready to print, he customizes his printer settings to use the 3800’s Advanced Black-and-White mode. This mode uses the black and two gray ink cartridges in the 3800 to create the really impressive black-and-white prints. He can also choose to tint the print to cool or warm color tones. Using this flexible workflow, Peter says he’s finally able to get the same consistent black-and-white prints he was formerly only able to get in his darkroom.
One of the keys to accurate color in the digital age is white balance - both in the camera and in the processing this is perhaps the most important tool we work with to assure consistent and accurate colors, especially when it comes to skin tones. If you’d like to read up on how I manage white balance in camera you can read my earlier blog post on that subject here.
In the processing stage I learned a really good white balance technique from the master himself, George Jardine - Adobe’s Lightroom evangelist and photography guru. His advice is to start with the temperature slider and swoop back and forth with the slider going to extremes to really see the changes in the image as you go from one side to another, then slow that process down like a pendulum swinging back and forth. If you watch closely (and move the slider slow enough) you’ll see the perfect spot for the temperature slider when you go by it. With enough practice you’ll be able to dial this in fairly quickly.
The Tint slider is a little harder but in much the same way if you move the slider back and forth between extremes and slowly find that perfect middle spot then you can dial it in as well. I often find that I’ll get an image to the point that it looks perfect, then I’ll step away from the computer on a break and come back to it and see a little magenta or green cast in the skin tones. It will take time to train your eyes to see this. If you can’t see it straight away, try selecting a few of the preset white balance modes and toggle between them and your custom settings as in the image below. This can really help you understand where your white balance started and how you have modified it. A color calibrated monitor as discussed in my last blog post is a must here because you are completely trusting that your monitor is showing you accurate colors.
Now, one last note, in general when I am adjusting images the white balance is the last item I adjust in the Basic panel. I adjust the Tone and Presence sections first then deal with the White Balance because if I adjust the contrast, saturation or vibrance that will affect the white balance. So if I first adjust the white balance then the saturation or contrast or brightness I will have to go back and in effect adjust the white balance twice. So to minimize my time on each image I just save the white balance until last.
In my next blog post I’ll go over my sequence of how I work up an image in terms of the right panel in the Develop mode.
That’s it for this session. See you next week.
Adios, Michael Clark
For those of you wondering about Lightroom compatibility with Leopard, the answer is in Adobe’s Support for Mac OS X Leopard PDF. In this document, they state Lightroom 1.2 is not fully certified for Mac OS X Leopard and that future updates will address areas of Leopard compatibility.
From reading the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom User to User Forums, there are quite a few problems. More than I would have expected. In particular, printing seems to be busted. Hopefully, the update to address areas of incompatibility will be in the not too distant future.
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I like the way this three second time exposure makes the car lights look abstracted but still recognizable. I took this photo early in the evening from the location across the mouth of the Waldo Tunnel described in Alignment. I used a long lens, my 70-200 VR zoom combined with a 2X telextender at the maximum focal length. The 400mm effective focal length translates to 600mm in 35mm terms, considering the Nikon 1.5:1 sensor equivalence. In Photoshop, I cropped further in on the portion of the photo that interested me, namely the bridge roadway, walkways, and car lights. It probably goes without saying, but let me say it: cropping in on an image in post-processing is the logical equivalent of using a so-called “digital” zoom in-camera. Of course, you have more control over cropping in post-processing. But you don’t gain any magnification using a digital zoom, you just discard pixels, exactly the way you do when you crop. [600mm in 35mm terms, 3 seconds at f/22 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.] View this image larger. |
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Bill Cheeseman brought up what looks like a potential problem that all Aperture users wanting to use the Time Machine feature in Leopard should be aware of. I don’t think any of us want to take any chances with our libraries. I wondered how Time Machine might work with managed Aperture Libraries, using Vaults to back up. I think much more on this will come to light in the next few days and weeks and perhaps a final solution will come with the next update of Aperture. But in the meantime, let’s be careful out there.
From Apple:
“Issue or symptom
Running Time Machine backup or restore operations while Aperture is running may lead to inconsistencies in the Aperture database.
Products affected
Aperture
Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard
Solution
If you use Time Machine with Leopard, be sure to set your computer up so that Time Machine only does manual backups. Avoid performing either backups or restores while Aperture is running.
This document will be updated as more information becomes available.”
Now that Leopard, the new cat from Cupertino, is out, what’s the next, next thing for Aperture?
Well, quickly following its feline footstep is a new version of Aperture. Aperture is now version 1.5.6. According to the Apple website, this downloadable 130 MB update which has been released today, addresses issues related to performance, improves overall stability, and supports compatibility with Mac OS X v10.5. And that means, Leopard.
Actually, an Aperture update is long overdue. Photographers who have been using Aperture, as is in-step with its development phases, can actually somehow feel if an update is in the offing.
Here’s a speculation of one photographer prior to the announcement of the Aperture v1.5.6 update:
I can almost smell it in the air. And it smells ripe. A new version of Aperture may be inevitable. Soon. Very soon. Of course, I am speculating. Wildly at that. There may be nothing to any of these. And I hope you will forgive me. Partly, I’m excited (of which I may be attaching too much importance, credit or relevance) at two of the most recent events in the industry, the recently-concluded Photo+Plus in New York City, and the official release of Apple’s most-advanced operating system for the Mac, the Leopard.
Leopard’s amazing desktop and interface style is the new framework for Aperture.
Like me, were you not half-hoping, half-wishing and half-expecting that a new version of Aperture will be launched at the recently concluded PDN’s Photo+Plus in New York? And were you not also half-hoping, half-wishing and half-expecting that a new version of Aperture, or at least, even a “compatibility” update, will come your way in light of Leopard’s official release?
Well, it did happen. And now, we explore.
The last time there was some sort of an update that somehow involved Aperture (but maybe only in a minor sort of way) was when Apple released the Pro Application Support 4.0.2 in September 6, 2007, an update that addresses issues with keyboard interface reliability for Apple’s professional applications. This was after the freeware “Aperture to Final Cut Pro 1.0″ was introduced in April 9, 2007, that allows users to create FCP sequences straight from within Aperture.
And the last, last time something really major that happened to Aperture was more than 8 months ago, last Feburary 22, 2007, when Aperture became version 1.5.2. According to the Apple website, this version “sets the standard for professional photo management applications” and it works and manage photos of any type such as JPEG, TIFF, PSD, PDF, including a lot of the proprietary RAW. It was a whooping 136 MB upgrade.
Since Aperture’s introduction, not including the numerous professional applications and operating system supports, here’s what, historically, has happened so far:
Throughout its developmental iteration, a number of 3rd-party developers eagerly took advantage of Aperture’s extensibility by creating their own mostly free API plug-ins. Companies such as GettyImages, DigitalFusion, Digital Railroad, ExpressDigital, Flickr, iStockphoto, PhotoShelter, Pictage, SoundSlide, GlobalEdit, among others, has offered plug-ins that allow photographer to interact with their preferred services directly from Aperture. Likewise, developers from Apple and outside Apple developed all sorts of surprisingly useful, practical and functional free AppleScript and Automator actions that further refined and enhanced the usability and functionality of Aperture. Expectedly, more plug-ins and actions are being developed.
To check out and download the latest official updates, new 3rd-party plug-ins, action scripts and support for Aperture, visit and bookmark this download page.
Further to Ben’s post, apparently updating to 1.5.4 won’t be enough to prevent problems with Aperture. I’m loving Leopard already, but I have noticed that Aperture seems to be a bit less stable in some instances.
Update to the rescue! (I hope). Aperture 1.5.6, is a free update recommended for all licensed Aperture customers, “addressing issues related to performance, and improves overall stability, and supports compatibility with Mac OS X Leopard v10.5.”
The update release is timed to prevent any problems like the ones Ben referred to. I suspect there won’t be problems with the update installed, but lets use this blog to report on bugs or discoveries we find when using Aperture in a Leopard environment.
“Important Note: Aperture updates, such as the Aperture 1.5.6 Update, cannot be used to update previously downloaded versions of the Aperture Trial. The most current version of the Trial delivers Aperture 1.5.6, so no update is necessary.”
In the mean time I find it inspiring looking at the Planet Earth as my desktop on both my laptop and tower, though I imagine it could be depressing to some.
I’ve already annoyed several of my ichat buddies using the video effects pretending to be in Paris, or on roller coaster or in space. Lots of fun (for me anyways).
For anyone immersed in the digital music space, the past couple of weeks have brought some shifts that are reasonably seismic in nature relative to the shifting balance of power from record labels to artists. Here’s a summary of some the most recent (and significant) activities to highlight what’s going on:
*Oct 1st — Radiohead upsets the apple cart by announcing they’ll release their new CD “In Rainbows” via the Internet in 10 days (which was on Oct 10th), and would allow fans to pay what they wish for the download.
*Oct 8th — Nine Inch Nails announce they are leaving their label (Interscope) after over 15 years with them.
*Oct 9th — On what would have been John Lennon’s 67th birthday, George Harrison’s solo catalog is made available digitally on iTunes (the last of the solo Beatles catalogs to be released). The Beatles not far behind.
*Oct 16th — Madonna announces she’s leaving her label, Warner Bros, for a $120M deal with Live Nation.
*Oct 16th — Artist Nation launches with Madonna as its first signed artist; essentially a new form of a more artist-oriented ‘label’ if you will. Housed under the umbrella of parent, Live Nation, Artist Nation aggregates the diversified components of an artist’s distribution and revenue streams, including recording, touring, merchandising, fan clubs, and licensing of rights for traditional & digital use.
*Oct 16th — Led Zeppelin are no longer digital holdouts as they announce they are making their catalog available across a range of digital music stores in mid-November, of course including iTunes — which are making a ‘virtual box set’ of Zep tunes available for $99. This coincides with their ‘reunion’ charity concert taking place in London on November 26th to honor the late Ahmet Ertegun, former chairman of Atlantic Records (the band’s label) who passed away in December of 2006.
*Oct 23rd — The Eagles leave their label and sign a deal with Wal-Mart that gives the chain exclusive rights to sell all future releases from the group. This kicks-off with the release of their first CD in nearly three decades.
These are significant developments folks — and they usher in a whole new era where artists will be more directly engaged than ever with their fans, embrace themselves as the brands they have become, and stand to retain more of their revenue streams across the board. Long-awaited and long overdue.
Leopard has some great new features for digital photographers. For example, QuickLook is an exceptional way to get a quick view of an image file in the Finder. Meanwhile, CoverFlow, a feature that I thought was a stupid thing to add to the Finder, since I’ve never found it useful in iTunes, turns out to be a great way to flip through a folder full of images. I’m sure we’ll all be finding many new tweaks and tricks for exploiting Leopard’s new features in our digital workflows.
However, if you’re planning on upgrading to Leopard be sure that you update your Aperture to the very latest version, 1.5.4. I hadn’t done this yet, and Aperture was definitely very unstable under Leopard, and was having trouble finding referenced files. In fact, ALL referenced files in my project were showing up as broken links. A quick update to 1.5.4 fixed this problem.
Oct. 27 update: If you are using the latest Mac OSX Safari browser you will probably not see much difference in any of the images below. If you switch to another browser the article should make more sense.
I am afraid that today’s blog posting is going to end with more questions than answers. Maybe one of the readers of this posting can give me the answers I am looking for. Most of the time I find that Lightroom (Export) actually gives me a fairly decent image for website use, but every once in a while I come across an image that just doesn’t look anywhere near as good, after all the resizing and converting, as it did when I was looking at it in the Lightroom application window.
This particular image has a fairly wide range of tones and does not work well if the foreground subject matter is even slightly washed out, losing it’s three dimensional appeal.
Screen Shot of the image in the Lightroom window. Processed in PS CS2 - Save for Web, sRGB
Cropped in image of the Screen Shot. Processed in PS CS2 - Save for Web, sRGB
Exported from Lightroom - sRGB - JPEG
Exported from Lightroom - Adobe RGB (1998) - JPEG (just to show what happens with this setting)
Exported from Lightroom - Prophoto RGB - JPEG (just to show what happens with this setting)
Exported from Lightroom as TIF (16-bit Prophoto RGB) - Processed in PS CS2 - Converted to 8-bit sRGB and Saved As JPEG
Exported from Lightroom as TIF (16-bit Prophoto RGB) - Processed in PS CS3 - Converted to 8-bit sRGB and Saved As JPEG
So who can help me improve the quality of my Lightroom JPEG Exports? It just doesn’t seem right that I can get the best quality from a screen shot.
9 hours, 7 minutes, 45 seconds. I can barely contain myself. Leopard is coming out today and I have been chomping at the bit to write about it ever since I received my Developer’s Preview at Apple’s World Wide Developer Conference back in June. But I will have to continue to wait for another 8 hours 53 minutes and 35 seconds. Oh well.
While I wait, I thought I would talk a little about this year PhotoPLUS Expo in New York City. The show was pretty big as usual. This year I worked the booth for the Aperture Users Professional Network. If you haven’t joined yet, I highly recommend you jump over to the site and register. The paid membership is a really great deal considering you can attend any of the Road Tour stops for free. If you are in need of some Aperture help, take the 8 hour Road Tour course the next time it is in a city near you. You will walk out of that room having learned just about everything that can be done with Aperture. It’s a really great course, and you really can’t beat the price.
The booth was busy all three days. We had a classroom set up in the front of the booth where we were teaching three different 30 minute courses every half hour. I was stationed at the back of the booth where we had three workstations set up and staff waiting to answer questions in a one-on-one environment.
One of the neat things about working the booth was that I had my first opportunity to really sit down and use Aperture on a dual display. We had a Mac Pro with 4 gigs of ram and two 23 inch monitors set up. Aperture in dual screen mode is a dream to use. It is so easy and enjoyable to edit images and I got really excited about using the three-up mode for sorting through images. I had never tried this on a dual mode display before and it was really nice. I set the left display to show the three-up images in the viewer and the right display to show my currently selected image full res. By the end of the show I was shopping online at the Apple store, building my ultimate Mac Pro workstation. It’s just too bad that I will have to wait until I move back to the states to get one!
Another cool trick I learned from the AUPN guys is three-up zoomed mode. When you are in three-up mode you can click the Z key to zoom in on all three images at the same time. You can even scroll and pan around each image independently, as well as all at once. This could be really handy when trying to determine the best shot form a sequence.
While working at the booth I got all kinds of questions. It really amazed me how many photographers hadn’t even heard of Aperture (or Lightroom for that matter). So many people out there are still using the Finder and Photoshop as their workflow mainstays. I just don’t get it!
Here are a few of my favorite questions from the show.
“Is this editing software?”
“Are Apples good for creative people?”
“Okay, I bought Aperture, haven’t really played with it yet, how do I get started?”
“Do you like Aperture better than Lightroom?”
“Are you guys the magazine?”
“Where is the bathroom?”
There were many more, but those were my favorites. By the end of the show I was pretty worn out. We worked the booth all day and each evening we attended numerous industry parties. I’m pretty sure I saw Derrick Story walking through the crowd at the AUPN party at Industrial Color (he is pretty hard to miss). But I never got a chance to say hello as I was overwhelmed by the spectacular view from the 22nd floor overlooking Brooklyn and the Bronx.
This years PPE was fairly uneventful in terms of new product announcements. I was hoping for an Aperture update, but I didn’t get one. Nikon was busy showing off their new D3 (which looks amazing) and Canon has two new lenses that I won’t be able to afford any time soon. I had a nice time over at the Leica booth, drooling over the M8 and their new line of “affordable” lenses, and I stopped by the R.I.T. booth (my alma matter) to sign their guest book and say hello. But, most of the time I stood at the AUPN booth and showed off Aperture.
If you have never been to a PPE you should definitely try and go next year. If anything, it is a great way to shop for new gear and try out just about everything under the sun in the photography industry. Oh, and if you do have a chance to go, after you hit the AUPN booth, be sure to walk over to SInarBron. They always have an “interesting” setup!
8 hours 32 minutes 23 seconds….
From my rocky perch jutting out into the ocean near Sculptured Beach, I played with photographing the waves as the sun set. This tripod-mounted 1/4 of a second exposure caught the abstract expression of a wave crashing, while retaining some literal relationship to the play of warm light on the wave against the cool blue of the surrounding ocean.
Wave, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
[300mm in 35mm terms, 1/4 of a second and f/22 at ISO 100, tripod mounted.]
Some related images: Wave (after Hokusai), Breaking Wave, Wave Tangent.
At the recent PhotoPlus Expo show in New York City, one of the many seminars was something a little different. Entitled: Iron Chef Raw Processing—the format was similar to the popular cooking show.
Moderated by Photoshop/Lightroom guy Andrew Rodney, it was a competition that gave the audience a chance to see four RAW processors in action: Aperture, Capture One, Bibble and Lightroom, all in real time.
Dennis Reggie and Vincent Laforet supplied the RAW files and “a representative of each RAW converter manufacturer will have 15 minutes to process the images, with feedback from the photographers.”
As it turned out, 15 minutes was more than enough time for each of the programs to do their magic, and though I had my biases, I kept an open mind and was really looking forward to seeing the others process RAW files.
Aperture went first, together Vince Laforet and Apple’s Martin Gisborne took the audience through the process of finessing Vincent’s aerial shot of the New York Chrysler Building photographed from a helicopter at sunset.
Martin showed off the Exposure Slider first but ended up using the Highlight-Shadow Sliders to do most of the work, making more subtle changes with the Advanced Tab activated and the Radius Slider lightening and darkening the mid-tones.
Then, dealing with color, the blues were massaged using all four Blue Color Sliders, partly to demonstrate their effect to the audience, which was made up of serious shooters paying more than 100 bucks to see the differences in the programs and make up their own minds.
Finally, a little Edge Sharpening for this very angular image and a new version of the master image was made and the before and after were then displayed in full screen glory.
As an Aperture loyalist, I took pride in the fact that however you sliced it, all the things that attracted me to Aperture were reinforced in the demo. Aperture would set the bar at a height that would be tough to come close to particularly in ease of use and elegance of interface.
When Dennis Reggie who was not an Aperture user brought his images up to the table, he was genuinlly surprised in how fast and how good the challenging wedding image he had chosen (mixed lighting, white dress and overall high contrast) looked, after it was imported into Aperture and came up on screen –even before a few minor adjustments were made.
When I chose Aperture, I stopped looking at the other guys, so I was looking forward to seeing other processors in a real workflow situation. I had heard a lot of good things about Capture One, with regards to image quality, though in this competition it was not as impressive. Its interface was dated, though the new interface of version 4.0 which is available as a free beta download looks strikingly familiar to regular viewers of this blog.
Bibble turned out to be the big surprise in the competion. I have heard of it of course but I never really looked further. Turns out it has some very innovative features that impressed the photographers on stage and the audience as well. The interface is not so pretty, but it has Noise Ninja built right in as it’s noise reduction tool, a very cool black and white conversion tool that simulates 20 film and paper combos of old, a feature named Gina, that is directed purely toward fixing skin tones and a kind of auto levels control called Perfectly Clear, which seemed to do miracles on a file with one click of the mouse.
The wow factor was obvious as both Vincent and Dennis seemed to be looking at this software for the first time as were many. It was nice to see a relatively small company step up to the table with such impressive features.
Lightroom went last with sliders like Clarity and Vibrance and Fill Light (which is similar to Shadow/Highlight in Aperture) and a great black and white conversion tool, all of which is also available in Photoshop and Camera Raw 4.
As an Aperture user I felt really good leaving the room. It reaffirmed my decision to choose Aperture and get on with my photographic life. The final prints were kicked out of an Epson Printer from Photoshop and they all looked good, but again, Aperture was at or near the top in my unscientific sampling of popular opinion.
In the end, it was stated that there is no perfect raw converter for every person or every file and like lenses in your bag, for professionals whose living is made with their images, they might want to have different Raw Converters to process different images.
When you have a special image sold for advertising and thousands of dollars are on the line, playing around with different converters is worth the investment in time and money.
I thought it might be fun to throw my personal wish list for features to be seen in the next version.
For all I know, Adobe may be working on everything on this list and much, much more. On the other hand, I have no idea whether any of these are practical. But for what it’s worth, the following are things I’d love to see in Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.0. These are just my personal wishlist, based on no “inside information” whatsoever.
1. Have a true regional adjustment mask…even if simple lasso with an interactive feathering slider.
2. Be able to make a PDF book from journal entries and a collection that could be submitted to any of the one-off publishing houses (or any other publishing house, for that matter). Perhaps this could be a new module called Portfolio. It would be nice to have an option to print this book on your own printer so that it could be presented as a traditional portfolio, too.
3. Web journal entries…that could also be played with a slide show. These would allow one to attach any kind of notes…even reminders about what to wear next time you go there…without having them attached to your pictures when you send them. Aperture already has this feature.
4. Get a LightZone plug in or have some other way to expand/contract specific grayscale tonalities. It’s too slow to have to export to another application.
5. Get serious about encouraging third parties to make useful Lightroom plug-ins. I’ve yet to see any.
6, Fix having to lower brightness when you jump to Photoshop and back…and why haven’t I seen more complaints about that? Is it just my computer?
7. Provide ASMP standard keywords and metadata within the application, so that the world would have a starting point.
8. I’d like to see the pre-set previews in the workspace, rather than the Preview window, though I realize that the Preview Window can be enlarged. Of course, you can do that now, to some degree, by simply clicking on the pre-set and then hitting Cmd/Ctrl + Z if you don’t want to keep what you see.
9. I’d like to see a pre-set be “mixable” with the current settings and the be able to save that result as a pre-set, too.
10. How about automatic sky darkening? I suppose one could do that as a pre-set, actually.
Now I’d love to hear your ideas…not that I’m the one to talk to. You should tell Adobe, too.
Ok, here’s a question that has me stumped. Maybe someone out there has an answer, The question comes from Eric Charles, directed to me on the ASMPNorCal Lightroom forum. He wonders if there is a way to set a specific crop ratio as a default in Lightroom’s Develop module.
Man, I wish I hadn’t just snapped the mic off my pocket voice recorder. Today I got a hilarious call from a robotic telemarketer. Apparently hoping to add impact, the programmer set its speech synth to use a British accent. The greeting went something like this:
Hello David. This is Ian from the university. If there’s one thing holding you back, it’s your lack of a college degree.
I typed that phrase into a handful of online speech synths to try to track down the voice. (If there’s one thing holding me back, it’s probably my curiosity.) The closest match I found was Acapela Peter:
Compare that to the uncultured American voice you get by clicking the “listen” link above. Are British robots more persuasive? I remember hearing, perhaps at O’Reilly’s Where 2.0 conference, that German GPS devices don’t use female voices because Germen men don’t like to take directions from women, but maybe that’s an urban legend.
For more on speech synths, see Digital Media Insider Podcast 3: Singing Computers.
On a balmy afternoon in late October I studied the topographic map of the USGS San Francisco North Quadrant. This map shows (among other areas) the hills above Fort Baker outside Sausalito, and the northern side of the Golden Gate Bridge.
It seemed to me that there was a ridge that could be climbed going up from above Fort Baker. You can tell on a topo map if something is steep when the contour lines on either side of the white space representing the ridge top are spaced close together. If the contour lines aren’t drawn too closely across the top itself, there’s a good chance you can get up.
My hope was to find a location across from the northern end of the Golden Gate Bridge so that I could shoot through both towers.
Golden Gate Alignment, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
I picked up my friend Mark and we parked on Wolf Back Ridge Road, high above Sausalito. Technically, this is a private, no-trespassing area carved into the Marin Headlands section of the Golden Gate National Recreation Area.
We donned our hiking boots and backpacks, and scrambled down a steep hill to find the Coastal Trail. Heading south, we passed a high tension tower, and then trudged up the hill over the Waldo tunnel. From there, I could see a straight shot down the ridge I had observed on the topo quadrant map.
The ridge line ended on a rock platform. Yes, the towers of the bridge aligned perfectly from north to south. The setting sun lit the bridge from the west, and the waxing moon provided fill lighting from the other side.
I positioned my camera on the tripod, braced it with my camera backpack to keep it from vibrating in the wind, and exposed for thirty seconds. The time exposure turned the car headlights and tail lights into lines of light beneath the bridge in alignment.
[230mm in 35mm terms, 30 seconds at f/20 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]
No matter how many times I take my camera with me to new destinations—whether it is across an ocean or just one timezone away—there is a common thread from one trip to the next: I can never remember to adjust my camera’s internal clock to the new local time. My cell phone takes care of itself and I may or may not adjust the watch that is on my wrist. But once I grab my camera bag and get off the plane (or out of the car) the first thing I want do is start taking pictures, not fiddle with my camera’s settings—unless the setting happens to be the aperture, shutter speed, or ISO.
Typically I don’t even realize that I forgot to adjust my camera’s clock until I see that a photo taken in daylight was reportedly taken at three in the morning or some other ungodly hour. Luckily, Lightroom makes adjusting the capture time of your photos a snap, and it provides a few different options depending on what your needs are. Simply select the photos that need to travel through time and select the “Edit Capture Time…” option from the “Metadata” menu while you are in the Library module, and then choose one of the following actions:
The other day, I found myself wishing for a note pad in Aperture so that I could write comments and notes about some of my images. I wanted to be able to write random things, like directions to a certain spot, in a file that’s stored in my project right next to my albums. Initially, I was thinking that making a photo blog or such in iWeb that I just kept on my hard drive would be an ok workaround, but I wasn’t satisfied. The next morning, while standing in the shower (we all do our best thinking in different places!), I realized that Aperture already has a great notepad–web journals!
Web journals are an often-overlooked type of website built into Aperture that allow you to place blocks of images and text side by side on a page. To make one, select the images you want to include (you can drag more onto the web journal later), and choose File > New From Selection > Web Journal. Then, pick some images from the browser, drag them onto the web view, click the Add Text Block button, and start typing. Repeat the process for each set of images you care about, finally ending up with a complete journal. If you feel like sharing the journal with others, you could export it to the web, but you also have the option of just keeping everything private and local to your Aperture library.
It’s quite possible that you’re wondering why I don’t just use IPTC or custom metadata. Well, I don’t want to set metadata that might get exported with the image. Furthermore, if I want to make notes about a set of images, I might just pull one representative image to refer to and comment on, even though my comments are really about multiple images. I don’t want to worry about keeping the metadata in sync across multiple images, either. Yes, I could setup some smart album to only show images that have certain metadata set, but web journals provide an easier solution.
When I sat down with Albert Watson in New York, I knew what I wanted to talk about. I wanted to hear how the industry has changed over the course of his 250 Vogue covers. I wanted to know how he prepared for the only wedding he’s ever shot: Prince Andrew’s royal marriage. And I wanted to understand the difference between shooting a high profile model and an acting superstar.
In this interview with Albert Watson, he openly addresses all of these questions. I recorded it in stereo to capture the spacial ambience of our interaction.
PDN has cited Watson as one of the 20 Most Influential Photographers. He is fascinating, and I hope you have a moment to listen to what he has to say.
As the photographer for O’Reilly conferences the last three years, I’ve had lots of opportunities to make photographs of Tim O’Reilly. Most of these photographs are standard stage fare with front lighting and general stage props. They get the job done, to be sure, but I’ve been trying different things over time to make a more unique shot. At the Web 2.0 Summit last week, almost everything lined up just right and I had the opportunity to make a photograph of Tim that I really like.
You can now get from Apple’s Aperture download page, a new free export plug-in that allows you to directly connect to the GLOBALedit website. If you are already using GLOBALedit, or you are considering of using GLOBALedit, and you are on the Mac and Apeture platform, then this plug-in is definitely for you.
GLOBALedit, a company owned and operated by Industrial Color, is yet another online digital workflow solution primarily directed to professional photographers and their creative network of affiliates, associates and clients. It allows for the sharing and collaboration of what they say as “massive photo libraries” with many different people from various locations via the Internet. The plug-in is a direct gateway into your GLOBALedit web-based account. Once your photos are uploaded to GLOBALedit, they are now available to anyone in your work team for use. Using the GLOBALedit interface, you can do such things as edit, approve, and distribute your high-resolution image files. You can also handle online the many associated tasks with images such as photo selections and approval, contact sheet creation, image markups and retouching, layout creation, metadata layering, and long-term file management and archiving. What you are getting with GLOBALedit is a suite of tools that bridges your work and spans the network from across desktops and online environments. And, with what they claim as a secure and scalable infrastructure, they also boast of being able to accommodate huge libraries and photo collections in RAW format. With this setup, you’re supposed to make the most out of your photo images because they are easily and readily available online for your and your team to work on, and because of the workflow tools they’ve programmed, for you to be able to make the most out of these digital images by pushing them as content to your business channels. In no time at all. GLOBALedit wants to help you streamline and even simplify the whole expanse of production, post-production, content deliveries, and image management within a single framework. And with the plug-in, beginning with Apple’s Aperture. This solution might be just what you’re looking for. Head over to the GLOBALedit site at http://www.globaledit.com and to the Industrial Color site as well at http://www.industrialcolor.com for more details, and to assess for yourself whether this online solution service will work for you.
The interface of GLOBALedit’s plug-in for Apple’s Aperture allows you to sign into the service and enter comprehensive data.
We were impressed with Edirol’s R-09 handheld digital recorder when we reviewed it, and thanks to a free firmware update, it just got better. OS 1.30 adds support for 8GB SDHC memory cards, which by my quick calculation should boost the recording capacity to eight hours in 24-bit, 44.1kHz WAV format or more than 132 hours in 128kbps MP3.
The new firmware also adds a splitting function that lets you start a new file with a single button press while recording. That could make it easier to zoom in on specific parts of an interview or concert later.
In other upgrade news, Edirol has released a windscreen for the R-09, addressing one of the main shortcomings we found in our review.
Just back from my first experience of PhotoPlus, and so glad I have been procrastinating on submitting my 2008 travel/conference budget. Now I know that this one goes to the top of the priority list. It seems everyone brings their A game to the Javitz Center for this show, and the result is an ambiance of enthusiasm, professionalism, collegiality, and focus on serious photography.
I’d given myself an assignment (more on that later) that motivated me to walk the entire floor, and I found the professional enthusiasm that one would expect at the “big guns” (Canon, Epson, Nikon, HP…) and familiar high-profile friends (Adobe and Apple) extended to other booths as well. I had terrific talks with knowledgeable staff at LowePro and Think Tank (camera cases), Photodex (PC friendly slideshow software), xTrain (online training), and Leica (who were really friendly and engaged despite the fact I was there inquiring about a case for my Panasonic and not their lovely cameras and lenses).
And then there was the setting. The Javitz center has a naturally lit open galleria, an easily understood floorplan, and a Starbucks with an entertainingly enthusiastic staff. The lighting and sound experience on the expo floor created some of the best convention atmosphere I’ve experienced. And of course, there’s the big picture setting, New York itself, a place where grime, noise (electronic in this case), and being stuck in traffic can give a (lucky) novice photographer one of her favorite shots, taken from the PhotoPlus shuttle bus window on the way back to her hotel after a great photography-filled day.
Monitor Calibration is one of those rare topics that isn’t really talked about that often, but it is the cornerstone of any digital workflow. If you don’t have a calibrated and profiled monitor then any work you do in the Develop module in Lightroom has no relation to the outside world. I cannot recommend strongly enough that every digital photographer that wishes to print his or her images or send them out to friends, clients or anyone else buy at least a minimal color management system.
Last winter, I wrote an article on color management and a how-to guide on how to calibrate and profile your monitor in my newsletter. You can download that issue of the newsletter here:
http://www.michaelclarkphoto.com/winter_2007.pdf
Just to define terms calibrating your monitor is something that can be done without a calibration device. On a Mac go to your monitor color preferences in the system preferences panel and click on calibrate. The dialog will walk you through the steps required. While calibration is good you really need to build a profile to get accurate colors and doing so requires a color calibration device like the X-rite i1 Display 2. This device is basically a spectrometer that measures the color of the light your monitor produces and creates a profile (or translator) which your computer uses to filter the colors your monitor produces. Hence, with the profile your monitor now produces accurate colors with a known gamma, luminance and color temperature. If that sounds very complex don’t worry, the software makes monitor calibration and profiling a very easy process.
Ever notice how all the TV’s in an electronics store have different colors? It is the same for every monitor out there. Hence the need to bring those colors to a known standard so that everyone sees the same colors. And since monitor colors can begin to drift after even a short period like a few days or even a few weeks this is an ongoing process. I profile my monitors every two weeks at a minimum - more often if I am shooting and processing lots of images while on assignment. And while laptops are great, they do not calibrate very well. Critical color work is best done on a desktop computer with a good quality monitor and in a controlled environment (i.e. a room with the lights dimmed and no stray reflections).
The newsletter goes into more detail on the specifics of color managing your monitor so I won’t get into it here. If nothing else get the new Huey Pro that was just released and then you can know that while adjusting images in Lightroom you are seeing the true colors.
That’s it for this session. See you next week.
Adios, Michael Clark
Derrick wrote a nice tip on his personal site about using Adobe Camera Raw to correct mixed lighting and it reminded me that I’ve been meaning to share a tip about how to deal with this issue in Aperture. Whether you’re shooting with a manual white balance setting or letting your camera determine white balance, it’s still tricky to deal with images in which you’ve got two different temperatures of light. I’ve had success in combining Aperture’s white balance adjustment and selective color adjustments to correct images that suffer from “mixed lighting syndrome”.
Case in point: the image below. This is a favorite photograph of mine, capturing a posed, but very natural moment. Unfortunately, my camera was set for automatic white balance and set itself based on the neutral white of the background — around 4000K. My subjects in the foreground (also known as “Mom” and “Dad”) were lit by a desk lamp nearby, resulting in a color temperature of around 2700K.
The original photograph, suffering from mixed lighting
My first step in correcting this image was to use Aperture’s white balance adjustment: I used the eyedropper tool and clicked on the white sweater sleeve at the left of the photo. Doing so resulted in the image below. I was pleased with the improved and more natural white balance on my subjects in the foreground, however this adjustment created a new problem: my background was now overly blue.
White balance adjusted
So the next step was to explore the color adjustment panel. I selected the cyan color and dragged the saturation slider almost all the way to the left, pulling most of the cyan out of the photo. A little tweaking of the range, and the result was the image below. A vast improvement over the original and a photograph suitable for printing.
The final photo, with white balance and cyan color adjustments
I also echo Derrick’s sentiment that this technique definitely works better on some photos than others. Give it a try if you’ve got a photo in your Aperture library that could benefit from these adjustments. And be sure to share your feedback in the comments.
I thought it would be interesting to see my image of Church Towers from the Yosemite Valley floor in winter as it might have looked as a palladium or platinum toned print. Here it is:
Beyond the Forest: Toned, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.
First I converted the image to black and white in Photoshop, using the so-called Ansel Adams effect (results below). I converted the black and white image to grayscale, then converted the image to Tritone, picking colors and adjusting the curves to get the effect I liked. As a last step, I converted back to RGB added a red-tinged adjustment layer in Color blending mode to pick up a hint of red for my “toned” digital image.
View this image larger.
While photographing the giant heads of the Bayon temple of Angkor Thom a few days ago, I remembered that I had recently found and put a few of my old special effects filters from the 1970s into my camera bag. I know that we are now all used to doing all our special effects work with Photoshop, but the Spectralstar defraction grating filter was very popular in it’s day. I hope you enjoy this Retro effects blast from the past.
Although Angkor Wat (a Hindu temple built in the early 12th Century) is the most popular and most visited temple in Siem Reap, Cambodia, the most visually (and photographically) striking temple in the Angkor Archaeological Park is the Bayon temple with it’s giant faces and many stone carvings on the walls depicting battle scenes from wars and many facets of every day life.
Bayon is the main temple in the walled and moated city of Angkor Thom which was the last capital of the Angkor Empire and was built during the later part of the 12th Century and the earlier part of the 13th Century by the Buddhist King Jayavarman VII and his successor Jayavarman VIII.
All images are processed in Lightroom with very slight adjustments to Color Temperature, Fill Light, Recovery, Clarity, and Vibrance.
Automator.us has released a new add-on for Aperture that provides a sophisticated, automated way to get client approval of a set of images. The new Publish For Approval package is an AppleScript-based application that works as follows:
• A web page is created of your images, and sent to the client.
• The client clicks on any images that they approve.
• Back in your Aperture project, the approved images are automatically put in a Smart Album.
No longer do you have to put up a web page and ask the client to look at it and report back which file names they like. Now they can do the selection for you, while you go goof off somewhere else. Uh…I mean, while you’re off shooting another job. When you get back, you’ll find a Smart Album full of choices waiting for you.
You don’t even have to have a domain or .mac account. Publish for Approval uses the Mac’s built-in Personal Web Sharing feature (which is basically just an Apache server). However, if your machine is behind a firewall, you may need to make some changes to your router to open up the Personal Web Sharing port (port 80, the same as any other web server).
You can download Publish for Approval for free from here. However, while it’s free, it requires that you also have the ACGI Dispatcher. You can download a free 30-day demo, so that you can see if Publish for Approval is really for you. After that, you’ll need to pay the nominal $15 registration fee.
Full instructions and screenshots are provided at Automator.us. In addition to being a very cool way to interact with your client, Publish for Approval is also a great example of the power of AppleScript, and Automator’s built-in scripting capabilities. In addition to Publish for Approval, since Aperture’s release, Apple has added such features as multi-card import, , Publish for iPhone, and other goodies, all via AppleScript.
With most software programs for those not blessed with a photographic memory, it’s a matter of use it or lose it. As photographers we constantly take pictures, but even if I’ve been away from the camera for a short while I tend to forget certain shortcuts that I might have used previously.
The Control-Click options in Aperture are many and powerful and can speed things up during a long post processing session.
By Control-Clicking on a picture, a range of options are available to you (see below) from rating, deleting and export to updating previews or summoning the loupe.
If you Control-Click on a project, you can create new books and albums for that project, delete, import, export, relocate or consolidate masters or start a slideshow.
It’s just one more way to speed things up and make you a more savvy Aperture user.
I’m hoping to see and meet Inside Aperture viewers and bloggers at this week’s PhotoPlus Expo in New York. You might find me at the blueearth.org booth on the show floor.
Suppose you could do an entirely different processing interpretation of the same photo for different end uses, keep them all in you Library where you could reference them easily, and even create a slide show, printed portfolio, contact sheet, or web gallery of the whole collection without ever using up a spec (well, ok, maybe a spec) of extra space on your hard drive.
I’m surprised I don’t hear about more people talking about this feature more often. I mean, what a great way to give more confidence to your art director? If you haven’t already done this, you won’t believe how simple it is: All you have to do to create a visible different version of a given photo is right click on its thumbnail in the Library module and choose Make Virtual Copy from the menu. An exact copy of the selected thumbnail appears alongside it. You can make as many of these of the same images as you like, process each one in an entirely different way, and then be able to show your client (or friend) all those variations on that image. Just use any of the Lightroom commands to process each one differently.
As we get set to do the final push on Mikkel’s Photoshop CS3 RAW book, this news via Adobe’s John Nack is certainly timely. Although the ubiquitous Lightroom vs. Aperture debate rages on (and sometimes clouds our perception), turns out most professional photographers polled by Infotrends still use the classic Adobe Camera Raw/Bridge/Photoshop combo for their RAW workflow.
No surprise really, considering the fact that most photographers believe they need Photoshop anyway, and there’s no added cost associated with using ACR for RAW processing once Photoshop is installed. ACR gives you RAW processing comparable to Lightroom’s develop module, and speed and functionality improvements made in Bridge 2.0 have improved the experience. (According to Derrick, what makes the process viable is that, “Now, Bridge actually operates at the same speed I do.”)
I see anecdotal evidence of ACR’s popularity all around these days. I’ve watched first-hand as Mikkel returned from his Lightroom immersion, to really get in the flow of the Bridge-ACR-Photoshop process while revising his book. Deke McClelland’s final session at Photoshop World, “Forget Levels, Forget Curves, Correct Everything in Camera Raw”, had a large, engaged audience of both attendees and industry experts. And just this week, Derrick’s got a great post at The Digtial Story about how ACR helped him effectively and efficiently process images from his interview with Adobe’s Mark Dahm.
While this entry is not specific to Lightroom per se — it is just as applicable to other imaging applications such as Aperture or even the duo of Camera Raw & Photoshop — it crystallized while sorting through a few hundred shots that need to be widdled down and edited within the next couple days.
After dumping your shots into Lightroom, I find it relatively easy to go through my shots, weeding out the rejects and eventually flagging the selects; the task may take some time to accomplish (depending, obviously, on how many shots have to be inspected), but it’s relatively straight–forward compared to the next step: making the necessary tweaks to the selected shots.
So if you find yourself unable to make your images pop the way you want them to (or if you are unable to decide which ones should pop), try taking a break; something as simple as getting up to stretch your legs could provide the kick start you need, or it might require coming back the next day after a good night’s sleep to let your subconscious mull over your work.
I often find myself losing a grasp on what constitutes natural, balanced light when making white balance adjustments on images shot in varying and less than ideal situations (see my post from last week as an example). By taking a break, it’s easy to come back to your images and see that the tint of green is too strong, for example.
It might be tempting to try and plow through your shots (especially when on a tight deadline), but give your eyes — and brain — a break and come back to Lightroom with a fresh perspective. Your work will be better for it.
This week I’m going to talk about a bug workaround and then give you a tip for using the Tint wheels. Recently I’ve been getting occasional black previews on images that had been successfully transferred from the CF card. Initially the previews were fine. Then after I work on the image in the Adjustment HUD, suddenly the thumbnail preview becomes black. Sometimes the larger preview in the Viewer remains, and sometimes it turns black as well. It’s annoying and frustrating, but not deadly. All you need to do is click on the New Image from Master icon (or go to Images >New Version From Master in the Menu bar) and a new version is created complete with a preview. To copy the adjustments you made to the original file, use the Lift and Stamp tools. So far I’ve not had any trouble with that corrupting the new version. Hopefully Apple will fix this bug soon.
Now here’s the tip. The tint wheels in the Adjustment HUD are useful to make subtle separate adjustments to the colorcast of the shadows, midtones, or highlights. Sometimes people hesitate to use the Tint wheels because there is no obvious way to reset them individually. However if you double click inside the tiny circle - the part that you drag to set the colorcast - it will snap back to the center of the wheel. You can think of it as a pseudo joystick that you drag to the desired position. Then to return to center, just double click.
Starting tomorrow, I’ll be shooting the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco. It’s the 3rd year in a row I’ve shot this show, and I know from experience that a very challenging conference to shoot. Web 2.0 Summit is a single track event with short sessions and more than one thing happening at once all day long. Not only are the big names going to be on stage, they’ll be in the audience and out in the hallways. And every possible shot is important.
This photo shows a translucent Dahlia petal with water drops resting on the petal and refecting a peony bush in California’s moderate autumn. The petal was blowing slightly in the wind. In order to get the depth of field I needed at a fast enough shutter speed to stop the motion (1/40 of a second), I boosted my sensitivity setting to ISO 640. Raise high the ISO, photographers!
Photo © Harold Davis
In post-processing, I edited out noise from higher-than-my-normal ISO selectively. I didn’t do anything about noise in the petal or water drop areas, because diminishing the noise would have softened these elements, and I wanted them to stay crisp.
You’ll notice that I used quite a combination of macro equipment for this extreme close-up (see below). The Nikon 6T is a + 2.9 diopter close-up filter, and the 5T is a +1.5 filter. Since stacking these filters is additive, I get +4.4 diopters magnification using this pair, and relatively good optical quality in the bargain.
[200mm f/4 macro lens (300mm in 35mm equivalent terms), 36mm extension tube, Nikon 6T and Nikon 5T close-up filters stacked, 1/40 of a second at f/36 and ISO 640, tripod mounted.]
I met with Mark Dahm, Adobe Senior Product Manager for Photoshop Elements 6, last week at Adobe HQ in San Jose, CA. If you’ve been following the product cycle, Elements 6 for Windows was recently released, with the Mac version coming early next year.
I had a lot of questions for Mark. Down one path, it appears to me that Elements 6 serves the same role for Windows users that iPhoto does for Mac photographers — its workflow oriented, easy to use, and had lots of output bells and whistles. I wanted Mark to expand on some of these features. Down the other path, I was curious about the different product cycles for the Mac and Windows versions.
Mark did a great job on down all paths. I think you’ll enjoy this 30 minute interview with Mark Dahm recorded on the 11th floor of the West Tower inside Adobe San Jose.
I’m developing a real respect for the people who make their living in tech support. They are the ones on the front lines who constantly have to figure out if a problem is a bug, a user-error, or simply an unappreciated software feature.
I was working with a client recently who had been struggling with getting consistent color from his photos in Aperture. Like many other digital photography enthusiasts I’ve talk to over the years, he was mystified by color management, and had grown accustomed to trying to predict what his photos would look like when output, and then making adjustments to attempt to compensate. This is what I like to refer to as “shotgun color management”. It’s inaccurate, messy, and can be an incredibly inefficient use of time.
Getting predictable, accurate color in Aperture doesn’t have to be something to stress about. Devices such as the i1Display 2 and the Pantone huey are both known as colorimeters. They cost a few hundred dollars and include software that allows you profile to your display so that your computer is capable of displaying color accurately. Place either of these devices against your screen, run the bundled software, and it will create a custom color profile for your display that you can manage in the Color tab of the Displays System Preference. This is a good place to start with minimum investment.
For anyone outputting photos to a high-quality inkjet printer, you’ll want to look at a spectrophotometer such as the X-Rite i1Photo. This is a more powerful (and more expensive) color metering device that is capable of reading accurate color from paper and other mediums in addition to an LCD or CRT display. With a spectrophotometer, photographers can create custom color profiles for each of their inkjet papers. Combine these custom output profiles with a custom display profile and you have accurate color from top to bottom. You can use Aperture’s built-in softproofing feature — available as the “Onscreen Proofing” option under the View menu — to preview what your photos will look like when output to a printer using a custom output profile.
For more info on color in Aperture, check out this conversation with Joe Schorr or explore the Pro Color section on Apple.com.
One of the best features about Lightroom, perhaps even the best feature is how Lightroom allows us to edit our images quickly and painlessly. I have touched on my editing process with Lightroom in several posts but never actually explained it in detail.
First, as I have said many times in my blogs, to allow Lightroom to run as it should you’ll need to render the 1:1 Previews. To do this, first select all the images you need to edit and then go to Library > Previews > Render 1:1 Previews.
Once the previews are created the editing process can get under way. For myself, I use a logical progression of steps - at least a progression that is logical to me. I’ll just say it now, there are a million ways to edit your work - this is just one method that I use with great results. Depending on the subject matter, number of images and how much time I have to edit, I’ll go through and check to see that each image is in focus. I’ll double click on the first image from the grid view which gets me to 1:1 view. Then I’ll leave the left panel open in Library mode so I can see the Navigator. This allows me to see where I am on the image. With my right hand on the arrow key I can quickly crank through hundreds of images in a just a few minutes to see if they are all sharp. Anything even slightly off gets deleted and erased from my hard drive unless it was an intentional blur or an intentionally out of focus image. If I am under the gun and my clients need the images ASAP, then I’ll forgo the sharpness check until after I have done my edits.
The next step is the initial edit. Here I use Library mode as set up below with the Navigator still present and just go through image after image with one hand on the right arrow key and another on the 1 key (for 1 star). I use the star method because that allows me to rank my images at multiple levels. The initial edit is a gut reaction to each image. At this point I know they are all sharp so I don’t worry about that. I just go through and rank everything that I think has any merit whatsoever as 1 star.
Once I have gone through the initial edit, I get up from the computer and go do something else for a few minutes. I’ll go check the mail, get a snack, whatever. I think a crucial part to any workflow is to get away from the computer for a few minutes here and there just so you can be attentive while editing and especially while processing your images.
When I get back to the computer it is time for round two. I’ll set the filter to show only 1 star images then go through those and upgrade the images that warrant it to 2 stars. In this round, I’ll also go in and set some of the best images to 3 or 4 stars just to make sure I don’t overlook them in future edits. I’ll continue the editing until I get to round 3 and then take a look at what I’ve picked. In general, any images 4 stars and above get processed and exported as ProPhoto RGB tiff files. And sometimes the 3 star images will make the cut as well. It all depends on how many images I shot and just how many good images I have. I don’t have any special star rating guidelines. Sometimes the 5 star images are the only ones that get processed, sometimes I don’t make it above 3 stars in the editing process. I can say in general that 5 star images do get consideration for my portfolio.
I have found that Lightroom cuts my editing time significantly (meaning a HUGE cut!) compared to my old Bridge and Adobe Camera Raw workflow. I have already gone into using the Compare Mode for editing in a previous blog post - you can see that one here. I tend to use the Compare Mode intensively in the later rounds of editing - and sometimes even in the 2nd round if I have shot a lot of sequences or similar images. In general the survey mode doesn’t do much for me as the images appear small. Compare mode allows me to really go in and view two images side by side to tell which is the image with the better expression or body position of an athlete.
I tend to fire away while shooting so that I have lots of options. I may never be at that same location ever again and I may never be able to get a similar image as often times things just happen - like great light or in the case of the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta I went to yesterday - incredible forms that just appeared. In a case like this where I shot 45+ very similar images, I am sometimes bracketing exposures, or focus points or as is normally the case shooting lots of different compositions while the magic happens. That makes for a tough editing job back in the office. Hence, for these type of situations I make sure that I spend some time with the images. Ultimately, the best images will stand the “test of time” and hence we all need more than a few seconds with each image to really pick the winners.
Once I get a decent set of images edited I move to the developing phase of my workflow. And that takes considerably longer than the editing part unless I am just working up one or two images for a client.
Below is my favorite image from the shoot yesterday. The forms look like aliens or ghosts and it is really a striking image that may even make it into my portfolio at some point. We’ll see what I think of it here in a few weeks before I make that decision.
The reality is that the editing never really stops. A week, two weeks, or even months later I go back and look at images - and every time I get a call for a submission I am constantly reassessing which images are the real winners and which aren’t - and that is all personal taste.
That’s it for this session. See you next week.
Adios, Michael Clark
There are two things that are really exciting me today. One: Game Development as an academic pursuit is finally being taken seriously. That means Game Audio is going to get a big boost in the halls of music departments and post-production programs across the campuses of the world. The vast amounts of dialogue recording sessions, multiple versions of music cues, and interactive control schemes that constantly need to be worked out will now have a developing methodology; meaning, nobody will need to start from scratch!
When the average player experiences the sound of a typical game title on the typical game console, the sound that comes out is taken for granted. For those of us in music and audio for games, we hear the countless hours of sound effect cue lists, music file conversions, and working out how it will all perform with the game engine. With academic formalization, we are now coming into an age where the mystery of game audio can actually be studied, analyzed, critiqued, and taught as a craft. No more starting from square one. With many of the game program environments seen popping up around the country (and the world), the opportunities to integrate these fresh new game tracks are found with the classes in animation, software prototyping and post-production.
This brings me to the other thing that excites me today: new methods of accessing old material. You can teach technical methodology all you want, but where does one get the inspiration to be creative? Where does one find that rich content to add engaging audio texture to an otherwise sterile digital environment? The analog domain! I’m not just talking about going out and recording Mother Nature with your USB microphones. I’m looking at the new line of products from Ion Audio.
Originally targeted at the dance and re-mix scene, Ion has come up with a number of USB turntables for converting vast phonograph collections into digital goldmines of sound. Fair license given its due, the sounds, beats and scratches of “turntablism” could very well be the salvation of game audio! Another one of their products allows mixing and beat matching of MP3s. And to top it off, these guys also offer a USB cassette deck! How cool is that? Now you can repurpose every single cool sound that was ever generated from your old garage band tapes. Now THAT is advancement in entertainment technology!
At last week’s Apple Expo Paris, music technology was pushed into a corner, and quite literally so!
In the West corner of the expo hall, French music technology reseller, univers-sons.com, presented the “Music Performance” booth. Demoed by competent and friendly staff, visitors could take a close look at the latest products from major players in the industry like Steinberg, Mark of the Unicorn, Mackie, M-Audio, and many others.
Just a few steps away, a small “class room” environment was dedicated to 45-minute hands-on tutorials (although I dare say that the “Master Class” label was a tad too ambitious) focusing exclusively on music production software like Steinberg Cubase 4, MotU MachFive 2, or Ableton Live.
While no product releases were celebrated at Apple Expo itself, a few noteworthy products were on display that were announced shortly before the show: Apple Logic Studio, Propellerhead Reason 4, and Apogee Duet, and I’ll throw in a mystery announcement for good measure, as well.
So, let’s see what we have here…
One of my favorite backup tools, Synk Professional has added in special support for Aperture users. After many requests, the developers at Synk decided to add a special clause that allows the software to backup your Aperture library incrementally. This means that instead of the software seeing seeing the Aperture.library package change as a single unit (meaning any small change would require the entire library to be backed up again) Synk can now see down into the package and will only backup the changes.
Synk is a pretty powerful backup tool to begin with. I have it set up on all of my machines to backup every hour to a network drive in the apartment. It runs entirely in the background and works beautifully.
I have spent quite a bit of time researching and trying out different backup tools for the mac, and in the end I chose Synk Pro. The main obstacles I found with most of the backup tools out there were the following. I needed something that would be able to backup multiple user accounts at the same time. Synk Pro accomplishes this by giving you the option of running the backup as root (or any other user on the machine for that matter). I also really wanted something powerful in that it would have to allow me the ability to create multiple plans with multiple destinations. Synk Pro supports “N-Way” backups meaning you can literally backup your machine to an unlimited number of destinations.
One problem I have found with all backup software has been large files that change often. The three biggest files that have fit this category have been my Aperture library file, any Parallels hard hard disk files, and my iDisk’s .dmg file. The last two were easy to solve. I simply told Synk Pro to skip any .hdd files located inside the Parallels directory. I don;t keep any valuable data on the Parallels disks so I don’t mind losing them in the event of a crash. As for the iDisk, I decided to just turn off iDisk syncing. I don’t use my iDisk enough to require syncing and now that my iDisk is 10 Gig (actually I have mine set to 8 gig with 2 gig left for email), syncing it takes up that much more disk space. But the Aperture library file was still a problem. I could tell Synk to skip it and deal with backing up Aperture using the Vault system, but I wanted something automated.
I guess a number of other users did too, because it seems that the makers of Synk were somewhat opposed to the idea at first. After reading through the forums I found that the Synk policy was to treat all package files as a single unit. They really didn’t want to change their tune on this, but after many requests form users they made an exception, just for us (and iPhoto users).
There has been a good deal of speculation as to what Leopard’s Time Machine backup system will do to applications like Synk and all the other popular backup clients. Many feel that with Time Machine there will be little to no need for third party backup programs. Personally, I can’t see this happening. We can’t say for sure until Leopard is released to the public later this month, but I feel pretty strongly that there will always be room for an application as powerful as Synk Professional.
Synk comes in three flavors, and starts at $25 for the basic Synk Backup version. Synk Professional, which is the version I have had the most luck with costs $45.
For more information check out their website at http://www.decimus.net, and for more information about Synk’s support for Aperture and iPhoto users, check out the release notes for version 6.2 here.
I wasn’t really meaning to post another article on white balance this week, but I had a similar experience to the one David Miller related in his posting, just two days ago.
On a trip to the Rayong Aquarium (located in Ban Phe, Rayong Province, Thailand), I came across a small group of local bosses having a very serious discussion. Unfortunately since I was not really an invited guest in their environment, I had to shoot clandestinely at ISO 1600 and an Auto White Balance setting that had no chance of reading the scene accurately (and the Presets where also not going to be much of a help this time).
The original image as it came out of the camera, please notice that I have chosen the background as the neutral gray target for the targeted white balance setting “eye dropper” (in the application you actually see the eye dropper at this stage not the arrow). I tried another variation on a gray area of the fish but it gave me a much colder overall result that I did not like so much.
After using the targeted white balance tool on the background, I cooled the scene down a bit with the color temperature slider, I also used the Noise Reduction and Sharpening tools in the Detail menu (to compensate for the ISO 1600 setting). As usual I used quite a lot of Clarity, some Vibrance, a touch of Recovery and a dash of Black to make a (very) murky scene come to life.
Just a quick message to capture my enthusiasm for this new version of the Vocalist Live stomp box. I got mine today, and I feel like I’ve been given a gift that I’ve been longing for my whole musical life…
For those of us, including myself, who are major Lightroom fanatics, it’s easy to think that it’s everyone’s holy grail. I was recently lucky enough to be included in an email conversation between to very professional photographer friends and ASMP members, Larry Angier and Jan Pehrson. The conclusion I came to after reading this is that it’s always wise to consider all the tools when we’re trying to make our workflows as efficient as possible.
The following are all the quotes from Larry’s emails to Jan after she had written him that she was thinking of switching over to Lightroom:
“Though I have been using Lightroom since the public beta in late 2005, I still use Photo Mechanic and probably won’t replace it with Lightroom any time soon.
Lightroom is a great program in many ways, especially to create web galleries and proof sheets. However, it is just too slow for adding IPTC data, renaming, sorting, ingesting, initial editing, etc. Part of the slowness is that it renders the raw data on each image and wasn’t designed for massive amounts of images like Photo Mechanic.
You never know where this site is going to take you. After blogging about my trip to Africa, I received an email from Inside Aperture viewer Brendon McClean, who read that I was taking this big trip to Mozambique and South Africa, and offered me help and assistance if I was heading his way.
As it happened, I got his email the day before my flight to Cape Town and I was happy to meet up with an Aperture user and see a friendly face in a city I had never traveled to.
Brendon and another photographer friend met me for drinks and gave me leads and ideas and a history of the region—the kind of information you won’t get in guide books and I’m very grateful to him and the legion of bloggers out there willing to help others with similar interests.
I’m visiting Cape Town to meet with a group of Grandmothers for a new project I’m starting. Grandmothers Against Poverty and Aids (GAPA) was formed as a support group for Grandmothers in Khayelitsha, Cape Towns largest Township. Many of the Grandmother here have lost their own children to HIV/AIDS and are now raising Grandchildren, even Great-grandchildren.
Photographed indoors with the Mamiya ZD and flash. Copyright Steve Simon
In my last book Heroines and Heroes, Hope, HIV and Africa, I dedicated the book to The Grandmothers, who inspired me, so here I am meeting more amazing women. When I see these Grandmothers in their own environments and the hard work each day brings them, my admiration for the Grannies grows stronger.
I decided that for this project, I wanted to make the prints really big, to shine a spotlight on the Grandmothers with a resolution my 12 megapixel Nikon just couldn’t provide. So I got a Mamiya ZD Digital back with the 645AF Camera and a 75-150f4.5 lens, specifically for this work.
I realized early on that the speed of which I work with my Nikon D2X would not happen with this camera and ended up using both. The Mamiya is a beautiful combination, but the write speeds for the 22megapixel medium format are quite slow compared to my Nikon, so I needed to slow things down and work a bit differently.
Also, originally I thought that tight traditional portraits would be the way to go, but I decided that capturing these amazing women in their own environments interested me more. I don’t have the fast wide glass you need to work inside many of the homes so I’m using both cameras, the Mamiya when the light is bright and I have the space and the Nikon for interior portraits.
Nikon D2X and 17-55mm Zoom. Copyright Steve Simon
The Mamiya back is new to the market, so there is still no support for these RAW files. Therefore, I shoot RAW plus JPEGS and import the JPEGS to edit in Aperture and end up using Photoshop to play with the RAW. After giving myself over to Aperture, I can see the tremendous difference Aperture has made in the way I post-process. I really don’t want to be in Photoshop, it is slower, less intuitive and just not as much fun.
The experience made me realize just how little I end up leaving Aperture and makes me wonder what the next update might bring.
Darwin Chamber, whose “3D” soundscapes I recommended last year (see interview), is back with a new Halloween underscore.
I just received his new album 3D Halloween Sound FX (Collectors’ Edition) via iTunes gift certificate, which is a cool way to do promotion. (Now if only the e-mail were accompanied by the sound of the mail cart that used to set off the “promosexual” reviewers every afternoon at my last music magazine….)
Anyway, Chamber’s new compilation is miles above the typical bucket of clanking chains, fake screams, and goofy cackling you hear on typical horror SFX albums. His tracks are cinematic and lyrical, painting audible pictures in your mind, and the 3D processing adds extra tingle. Check it out at the iTunes Store and get ready to scare your neighborhood.
Chambers says he has a 3D Christmas album coming out in November as well. That might make a welcome change from cloying carols.
George Mann’s previous post illustrated the effects of Lightroom’s white balance presets. In the event that one of the presets don’t fill your needs, you are, of course, free to set your own balance, either with the eyedropper (as George describes), or by manually adjusting the Temperature & Tint sliders. The following anecdote illustrates one such situation.
Last week I shot a conference that took place in less–than–ideal lighting conditions: the stage and its speakers were lit by relatively dim incandescant lights reflected off red, orange, or brown surfaces: carpet, floors, and walls all added to the glow. Looking at the images in Lightroom at the end of the first day presented me with less–than promising results: virtually all of the images had a strong orange/red tint and were noticeably lacking in the contrast department. Luckily, Lightroom’s adjustments (white balance, contrast & clarity, and a few curve tweaks) on the RAW files were able to bring the shots back to something much closer to reality.
Imagine waking up one day and realizing you can’t see right out of one or both your eyes. It would be pretty terrifying, right? But not likely to happen to you because bad eye trouble and loss of vision happens to old people and you’re not old, right?
Well, partially right. Some eye diseases such as macular degeneration, cataracts, and glaucoma are more common in the elderly. But they happen to younger people as well. Those of us who photograph outdoors may be doing some things that may increase the risk of eye trouble down the road. I’m blogging about this to alert you to a few of the things that you might be doing inadvertently that could increase your risk for eye trouble later and to warn you about symptoms that you must pay attention to immediately or risk permanent eye damage. (I learned the hard way and hope that by sharing a few things, perhaps my experiences will help one of you somewhere along the way.)
The chances are that most of you wear sunscreen if you’re going to be outside for any length of time. But do you wear sunglasses when you’re photographing? Polarizing sunglasses - which I love for driving - are a pain when you look through the viewfinder, especially if you have a polarizing filter on the lens. The resulting cross polarization makes it challenging to fine tune composition and nearly impossible to manually focus. The result for me is that when I’m out photographing I often skip the sunglasses. That leaves my eyes open to all the UVA and UVB rays - which are thought by many to contribute to cataracts. And the damage is cumulative. UVA and UVB protective non polarizing sunglasses are in order while photographing.
In this posting of a few months ago, I showed how you can create an automated Aperture/Photoshop printing process using a Finder Folder Action. The idea was that, if you wanted to print using Photoshop - either because of its color engine, or because you want access to your printer’s driver color (something Aperture doesn’t allow) - then this method would provide a simple automated process that would let you launch a Photoshop-based printing process by simply exporting the image to be printed from Aperture.
The glue that ties the two applications together, and makes the whole procedure work, is a Folder Action. A Folder Action is a standard Finder feature that lets you attach an AppleScript to a folder. Any image that’s placed in that folder will trigger the AppleScript, and if the script is written properly, its functions will be applied to that image.
You can use this same mechanism to automate other Photoshop actions using Automator. For example, say you have an Aperture project that contains a series of images that you want to merge into an HDR image, or perhaps there’s a Photoshop filter that you want to apply to an image, or maybe you like Photoshop’s built-in web gallery features better than Aperture’s. You can achieve any of these operations by creating a script that performs the actions, and then attaching that script as a Folder Action to a folder. When you want to apply those effects to an image in your Aperture library, simply export the image from Aperture into the folder. The Folder Action will automatically process the image.
In this way, you have a simple, automated process for applying Photoshop operations to any image in your Aperture library.
Now, that first step that I described - the one that says “create a script that performs these actions - that initial process might be somewhat flummoxing, as it requires you to understand a fair amount of the AppleScript scripting language, as well as have a familiarty with Photoshop’s AppleScript dictionary. Because scripting is not something that most Mac users are comfortable with, Apple created Automator a very powerful application that’s bundled with every Mac, and which allows you to create complex scripts using a simple drag-and-drop process. With Automator, you can easily create “workflows” that take control of multiple applications and perform very complex operations. What’s more, these workflows can be attached to folders as Folder Actions, meaning you can trigger them by simply dropping an image into a folder.
By default, Automator doesn’t include any facility for creating workflows that control Photoshop. However, if you download my free Photoshop Action Pack you’ll get a set of 87 Automator actions that allow you to control just about every feature of Photoshop. I haven’t yet updated the collection for the latest CS3 features, but you can still execute almost all of the Photoshop operations that you’d ever want to perform using Photoshop CS, CS2, or CS3 on either an Intel or PowerPC-based Mac.
The Action Pack includes a 70 + page manual that provides detailed tutorials and examples, as well as an introduction to using Automator, so you should find it fairly easy to get up to speed. Note, though, that most of the queries that I receive about the Action Pack stem from the fact that most people don’t read the first five pages of the included manual. So, if you find yourself a little confused about how the Action Pack works, ten minutes with the documentation should have you up and running very quickly.
Why would you use Automator to script Photoshop when Photoshop has its own built-in Actions palette? There are a few reasons. First, Photoshop’s built-in actions don’t allow you to perform any logical operations, while my Action Pack does. So, for example, you can create a workflow that processes all of the grayscale images in a batch using one set of operations, and all the RGB images using another. Or, you can resize portrait images to a different size than landscape images. The Action Pack also lets you script multiple applications from within a single workflow. So, for example, you can create an automation that processes images in Photoshop, then automatically uploads them to an FTP server, and then burns the whole batch to a DVD.
Finally, you can save Automator workflows as Folder Actions, and attach them to a folder. When you export an batch of images from Aperture into that folder, each image will be processed using the attached workflow.
All-in-all, if you have any desire to automate or script Photoshop, Automator and the Photoshop Action Pack provide you with more power and easier workflow creation than Photoshop’s Actions alone.
To return to the previous examples, if you want to create an automatic procedure for batch processing HDR merges from within Aperture, you would first install the Photoshop Action Pack and create a workflow that uses the Merge to HDR action.
Attach this workflow to a folder as a Folder Action, and any images you export into the folder will get merged into an HDR. The Photoshop Action Pack manual has detailed instructions on using this Merge to HDR feature.
If there’s a Photoshop feature that you want to script that’s not supported by the Action Pack, you can use the Do Action action to trigger any Photoshop Action that you’ve created. That’s a little confusing, I know, so let me phrase it a different way. In the Photoshop Action Pack you’ll find an action called Do Action. It triggers a Photoshop Action - that is, an action you’ve created with Photoshop’s internal Actions palette.
For example, the Action Pack does not include any way to apply the Solarize filter. But, I can easily create an Action within Photoshop that applies a Solarize filter. I can then trigger that Solarize Action from my Automator workflow using Do Action:
Detailed explanations of the Open and Render actions are provided in the Photoshop Action Pack documentation PDF.
With the Photoshop Action Pack, you can create automated Photoshop operations that can be triggered from within Aperture simply by using the Export Versions or Export Masters command.
Working an assignment as a team has many perks, not the least being that you have two angles to work shots with and twice as many chances to capture fleeting moments. Another perk is that you have two sets of eyes to edit your images with. Pınar Ozger and I have been working together on various assignments for almost a year now and have been exploring quite a few ways of how to edit our work together, the most fun of which to date has been something I call Pair Editing, a photographic version of Pair Programming where we hook two keyboards and mice up to the same system so that we can work on a set of photos.
Yesterday, while working up a set of photographs for a portrait shoot, we stumbled into another interesting methodology, which I’m going to tentatively call Blind Team Editing. Pınar was taking the lead on this particular project and had rated a bunch of poses of our subject. But, before she went further and made the final cut, she wanted to get my input. She didn’t, however, want my input to be affected by the rankings that she had already given. Instead, she was interested in seeing my unbiased selections so that she could see the set of photos that we both thought were strong.
How high can you go? How low can you go? At least when the question is ISO…the answer depends on your hardware. In the case of my Nikon D200, high ISO (shown below) means ISO 1600. Low ISO (far below) means ISO 100, so there’s a 16 times difference in the amount of light being captured due to the sensitivity settings in the two photos, which were taken one after the other and post-processed in exactly the same way.
View this image larger.
It’s important to understand that by increasing the ISO you are not really increasing a sensor’s ability to capture light, but rather just amplifying the signal with all the negative implications for Signal to Noise Ratio you might expect.
As a practical matter, bear in mind that noise shows more in dark areas than light areas (witness the lower left of the high noise version of this photo). The implication: in long exposure time and/or high ISO situations, where you know there will be plenty of noise, try to expose so dark areas don’t go really dark (at least if this doesn’t mean blowing out highlights).
View this image larger.
[Both images:142.5mm in 35mm terms, tripod mounted. High ISO version: 20 seconds at f/36 and ISO 1600; Low ISO version 30 seconds at f/11 and ISO 100.]
The fishing trawler was returning to port through the Golden Gate. As the boat headed for the channel of moonlight, I realized that a long time exposure just wouldn’t do. I wanted to capture the trawler in the moonlight, not an abstraction of the boat rendered into colored lines of motion over the exposure duration. So I boosted the ISO to 1,000 and opened the shutter for a brief (for night) period of 2/5 of a second.
View this image larger.
[300mm in 35mm equivalent terms, 2/5 of a second at f/5.6 and ISO 1000, selectively post-processed for noise, tripod mounted.]
Wearable electronics continue to astound. First we had the graphic EQ T-shirt:
Now there’s the Wi-Fi finder T:
With flat-panel displays getting thinner and more power-efficient, I bet we’ll be able to walk around with rotating photo galleries on our chests soon. What will you wear on yours?
I’m finally getting up to speed with Photoshop CS3 and I’m really excited about the new Photomerge. The old one was ok, but the new one really rocks and does a great job of merging and blending multiple images shot in sequence. I just wish it integrated better with Lightroom.
I frequently teach Aperture workshops and I often end up running my presentation and demos from the same MacBook Pro that I use as my everyday workstation. This makes it easy to prepare for workshops, but it can introduce some problems when I demonstrate the Aperture experience as though I were launching it for the first time. Like most experienced users of Aperture — or any software for that matter — I’ve grown used to the customized workspace that I setup inside Aperture.
My customized preferences include setting Photoshop CS3 as my external editor and specifying that Aperture not launch automatically when I insert a CF card. Also, I particularly like customizing the far right of my toolbar with the icons for the three default layouts: basic, maximize browser, and maximize viewer. (Weren’t these in the default toolbar set in Aperture 1.0? Can someone back me up here…?)
At center, the icons for Aperture’s three default view modes
There are keyboard shortcuts for these views, but I’m so used to clicking these icons that I find something amiss when they’re not there.
When I present to groups, I like to roll Aperture back to the pristine default workspace and preferences that a new user would experience. So my solution for easy switching between the default Aperture environment and my customized setup is to backup my com.apple.Aperture.plist file in my ~/Library/Preferences/ directory. Before starting a workshop, I quit Aperture, rename the file com.apple.Aperture.BACKUP and then relaunch Aperture.
Backing up Aperture’s preferences
The application is restored to its default preferences. I can demo the Welcome Screen, setting up the external editor preference, and customizing the toolbar. When I’m done with the workshop, I simply delete the com.apple.Aperture.plist file and remove the .BACKUP from my customized preference file. Relaunch Aperture and things are back to the way I like them.
How do you like to customize Aperture? What icons do you add to (or remove from) the toolbar?
Last week a few readers said it would be nice to see a few examples of Chromatic Aberration and how it was removed. I didn’t include any with the last post because chromatic aberration is different in every image. But I thought this week as an expansion of last week’s blog post I would include a few samples just to show what to look for and what overdoing it looks like.
The full image shot with a 10.5 mm Nikkor Fisheye lens
With the fisheye as I said in the last post I am guaranteed to have some chromatic aberration, especially with the sun peaking over the mesa in the background. Hence for this image I selected the Highlight edges option as that was the only place that there was any chromatic aberration.
Chromatic Aberration (color fringing) on the highlight edges in the lower right corner.
Lower right hand corner with the Red/Cyan CA removed. Notice there is still some blue fringing that needs to be removed.
Lower right corner with the Blue/Yellow CA removed - and hence all of the CA is removed.
An example where I have taken the Blue/Yellow slider a little too far which creates a yellowish CA fringe.
So, there you have it. Normally an image will exhibit CA in both corners of the image but in this example the other corner is blue sky and hence there are no edges to exhibit CA.
That’s it for this session. See you next week.
Adios, Michael Clark
When I recently reviewed Sequel, Steinberg’s entry-level music production software, I was seriously impressed by the quality of the musical content that ships with it. If you wish to try out Sequel yourself, you can do so now, as Steinberg is offering a downloadable trial version of the software.
For obvious reasons, the trial version offers only a limited subset of Sequel’s sample and loop library — the retail version offers a whooping 5GB’s worth! —, but there is still ample content in there to play around with.
The download for the Mac version weighs in at 433MB, the one for Windows at 347MB, and you can try out the software for up to 45 days. If you decide to buy Sequel, you can import the projects from the trial version into the retail copy via a software tool also available on the download site.
To take Sequel for a spin, go to the Sequel website and click on the “Download Now” link under “Sequel Trial Version.”
I have been to Georgetown, Penang Island, Malaysia many times over the last three decades but it has been close to ten years since my last visit and I had expected a lot of changes. To my very pleasant surprise there was actually very little visible change, outside of a whole new generation of automobiles.
The new vehicles clogging the narrow lanes and roads of Georgetown are predominantly locally designed and manufactured small hatchback vehicles. Very noticeable is also the large number of young women driving these small cars and many of them in traditional Malaysian Muslim dress.
There are of course also a number of large new office buildings, hotels and condominiums, but they are for the large part not situated directly in the old Georgetown district, which has been preserved to look pretty much like it has for the last hundred years or so.
There are quite a lot of advertising signs and some new modern touches (such as some very unusual public benches of various designs, scattered around the town). The advertising signs have always been here though and the city has always been pretty colorful, so it is just the specific content that has changed not the general look of the place.
For my Lightroom exercise of the week I have decided to use an images from Georgetown, that contains some of these various elements, with various White Balance settings. The sky has been fairly overcast this week so the light has not been very strong or dramatic in the morning or evening hours. The middle of the day is of course mind numbingly hot and not so good for photography, since we are very close to the equator here, with the sun directly overhead.
To quickly see the difference between the various white balance “filters” just watch the car as you move between images, it is a very neutral gray metallic color.
01 - White Balance - As Shot (auto white balance in camera)
02 - White Balance - Auto (auto white balance in Lightroom)
03 - White Balance - Daylight
04 - White Balance - Cloudy
05 - White Balance - Shade
06 - White Balance - Tungsten (not usually a good choice unless you have used tungsten lighting)
07 - White Balance - Fluorescent
08 - White Balance - Flash
09 - White Balance - Custom (eye dropper selection of car door panel)
I’d like to officially announce my newest podcasting endeavor: The Puzzle Podcast.
I’m co-hosting this short weekly show of brainteasers with David Leschinsky, the owner of Eureka Puzzles, a popular puzzle and game store in Brookline, Massachusetts. David is the show’s “Puzzle Guy,” while I’m the rube that has to answer the questions.
The premise is simple: we pick a puzzle type for the week, explain how it works and do an example or two from the genre. We finish each episode with a harder puzzle for the listeners to work on until next week’s show (when we’ll give the answer). If any of you listen to NPR’s Car Talk puzzler, this should sound pretty familiar.
Car Talk aside, the motivation for starting this show was actually this episode of This American Life. After listening to that show, I was inspired to do some more puzzles, so — always looking for free stuff first — I went to my computer to find some puzzle podcasts. I figured there would be dozens of them, so I was shocked to find exactly one: the NPR Sunday Puzzle with Will Shortz from the New York Times. I do like this segment, but it focuses on one specific type of word puzzle — and it is really just part of a longer radio program.
So, with the strong feeling that there should be a good puzzle podcast that featured puzzles of all types, I decided to start one. I quickly registered PuzzlePodcast.com, contacted David (who I knew from this interview I did with him for Boston Behind the Scenes), and got recording.
Now, this isn’t just an ad for my latest show. I’m writing this here primarily because of this post David Battino made on this blog about my use of microphone-enhanced hats for interviews. This is the same setup I’m using for my new show, and I still love it. I can go to my co-host’s store to record an episode with only a pair of hats, a pair of headphones, a Zoom H4 (with this add-on interface from The Sound Professionals), and my Giant Squid Audio Lab microphone set, all tucked into a small bag. Even in a somewhat noisy stockroom with concrete walls, the hats do a great job.
Of course, you don’t have to take my word for it. I’d like to invite all of you over to PuzzlePodcast.com to hear the recordings and try your hand at our puzzles. There are now four episodes posted, with new ones coming out every Tuesday morning. If you like the show, send in your puzzle guesses for a chance to win our weekly prize.
As my co-host David always says, Happy Puzzling!
One of the greatest ironies of the power of Lightroom is you’re more or less forced to keep your original image unsullied by your adjustments. I’m always preaching the blessing of that…even to those who are working strictly in Photoshop. But in Lightroom, as long as you haven’t poked the Delete key AND click on Erase from Disk in the resultant dialog, there’s no way you’re going to destroy your original after trying too hard to retouch a portrait and realizing that you’ve really ended up with something that’s quite unsightly. The few times I have had to poke at the Reset button, it’s been a real life-saver.
By the way, although you can use Lightroom to readjust an image you’ve adjusted in Photoshop and then had Photoshop save to Lightroom, you probably won’t like the results because all that 12- or 14-bit information has likely been lost unless you’ve made sure that Lightroom’s preferences have been set to save to a 16-bit image. Even then, if you’ve converted from 16- to 8-bit to use some of the Photoshop commands that don’t run in 16-bits, you’ve already thrown out all that extra data.
In June of this year, Aperture added support for the Leica M8, among other cameras.
I have to admit, I have always been jealous of The Leica Shooter. Armed with a small camera and a few tiny lenses (compared to the beefy SLR kit), Leica shooters have roamed the world capturing iconic images we all know.
The legendary “Leica Look” and creamy bokeh have been talked about since the camera first appeared. From Capa and Cartier-Bresson to Winogrand and Salgado, the list of photography giants who have chosen this tool represent a good chunk of the history of photography itself.
During the past two weeks, I was told by several photographers about an article in the September 24th New Yorker Magazine entitled: Candid Camera: The Cult of Leica. It is more a love letter to a camera than a technical review.
The photogs who told me about the piece all said the the same thing; “after reading it, you will want one.”
Personally, I have used SLR cameras since I started shooting pictures as a 12-year-old in my home city of Montreal. It is second nature to me and I’m most comfortable with this type of camera. But like most photographers, I had dreamed of owning a Leica; but like most photographers, I couldn’t afford one.
“When you take a picture with an S.L.R., there is a distinctive sound, somewhere between a clatter and a thump; I worship my beat-up Nikon FE, but there is no denying that every snap reminds me of a cow kicking over a milk pail. With a Leica, all you hear is the shutter, which is the quietest on the market. The result—and this may be the most seductive reason for the Leica cult—is that a photograph sounds like a kiss.”
The Cult of Leica, Anthony Lane
I finally bought a used M6 with a 35mm lens in the late 90’s, and I took it and my SLR’s on a road trip through the Northern United States.
I wanted to love it, but compared to my Nikons, it was slow. The rangefinder focus was sometimes hard for me to see, and occasionally I would forget the f-stop was at 16 when the exposure needed f4. Though I took some great shots with it, including one of my favorites of a giant cow in North Dakota, I ultimately abandoned it for the familiar clunk of the SLR.
Copyright Steve Simon
But I believe that the Leica Rangefinder is a system that needs to be committed too, and I wasn’t ready for that kind of commitment at the time.
“Asked how he thought of the Leica, Cartier-Bresson said that it felt like “a big warm kiss, like a shot from a revolver, and like the psychoanalyst’s couch.” At this point, five thousand dollars begins to look like a bargain.”
Anthony Lane
“At Photokina, the biennial fair of the world’s photographic trade, Leica made an announcement: it was time, we were told, for the M8. The M series was going digital. It was like Dylan going electric.” Anthony Lane
The Leica M8 had its problems when it was first introduced, but they seem to be ironed out and the Leica shooters that use it are singing the praises of the camera. Maybe I’m finally ready for commitment.
Adobe’s given Lightroom users a few options to customize the application’s interface to their liking: the abilitity to create an “identity plate” immediately comes to mind. There’s at least one more purely visual preference: the “end marks” that appear at the bottom of Lightroom’s panels. To get an idea of what I’m talking about, simply scroll to the bottom of either (left or right) of the panels in any of the modules and you’ll see an icon at the bottom (or the end, if you prefer). The film canister in the image below serves as my end mark…
The Canon G9 is incredibly compact, considering its pro features such as Raw, custom functions, 6X zoom lens, image stabilization, face detection, and FlexiZone AF focusing. At 12.1 megapixels, it has plenty of resolution for photo quality 13″x19″ prints. And the large 3″ LCD makes composition and viewing a pleasure — all of this for less than $499 US. Is the G9 too good to be true?
After a week of shooting, my opinion is that the G9 lives up to its specs. I’ve become a true fan of face detection, and when used in combination with the optical image stabilizer, my percentage to sharp, well-exposed candids has gone way up. I love the G9’s custom functions (C1 and C2) that enable me to switch to an entire range of settings with just a turn of the mode dial. My only concern is the image noise at ISO 400 and above. It’s exactly what I anticipated with a high-resolution, small sensor camera. I’ve posted a sample shot with a 100 percent enlargement in my full review on The Digital Story.
If you’re shooting with a G9, please post a comment here with your impressions. This is a camera that photographers are going to want to know more about. It’s certainly not a substitute for a DSLR, but it is a capable companion.
This past weekend, I was presenting at the annual BetterPhoto Conference and had the fortune of sitting in on a session by Lewis Kemper. Now Lewis is a very smart photographer and Photoshop whiz, but unfortunately he uses Lightroom instead of Aperture. However, he presented a quick and easy technique to make an image span the full tonal range, improving how many images (especially from cloudy days) look. It’s easy to do in Aperture, too!
Specifically, Lewis pointed out that it’s easier to make tonal adjustments to your image in black and white. In fact, if you make your image look good in black and white, it’ll most likely look good in color, too (the specific reason that I say “most likely” is a bit too long to cover in this blog post).
What’s going on behind the scenes is that our brain’s ability to see in black and white is very well developed and very high resolution: we gather a lot of information from luminance. Color vision isn’t as robust, many animals even lack color vision, and our color vision is quite low resolution compared to our black and white vision. By switching to black and white when adjusting our image, we’re able to ignore color and focus on tweaking what our higher-resolution luminance vision will perceive.
Without further delay, this technique, as you’ve probably realized, is:
Before
After
Try making a new version for these adjustments and comparing it to the master. I think you’ll be pleasantly surprised!
While in Barcelona a few weeks ago and visiting Antoni Gaudí’s Casa Batlló, I found myself taking pictures in a room with a very interesting balance of sunlight and tungsten light sources. In most situations, setting proper white balance means dialing in the color temperature of the primary light source so that neutral colors come out neutral. In this particular case where I was photographing sculptural white walls illuminated with two very different light sources, however, white balance became a purely creative decision. If I were limited to shooting JPG images, I could choose to shoot with a daylight white balance and let the tungsten illuminated surfaces go yellow. Or, I could choose to shoot with a tungsten white balance and let the daylight surfaces go blue. But, since I was shooting RAW, I decided to postpone the decision and determine the white balance I wanted to use in Lightroom.
In my previous post, I described the storage solution that I’m planning to use on an extended trip - sans computer - to Africa. This trip won’t be the first time that I’ve gone on a shooting expedition without a laptop for backup, but it’s the longest that I’ve ever attempted, and so I needed to contrive a reasonable way to offload my images.
One of the reasons I’m opting to leave my MacBook Pro behind is that I’m planning to spend a fair amount of time in the backcountry, and don’t want to have to worry about the extra weight (let alone the danger to the computer). The trouble with backcountry, of course, is that power outlets are spaced really far apart and I will have many things to power: battery charger for the Canon 5D; two Digital Foci backup drives; cell phone; iPod; an external flash and GPS unit that are AA-powered.
Obviously, the easiest way to deal with power problems is to take lots of extra batteries and try to keep them all charged whenever an outlet is available. However, with this many gizmos, multiple batteries is not really practical. And, of course, the iPod doesn’t allow for battery swapping. (The Digital Foci backup drives do, though, which is a very cool feature.)
I usually carry two 5D batteries with me, because they’re small and light and easy enough to carry into the field. But all my other devices will have only their internal batteries.
I will be dependent on three different charging options. The first, of course, is simply to charge everything up whenever an outlet is available. Fortunately, these days, almost all AC adapters can automatically switch between different voltages, so it’s no problem to take them from country to country and plug them directly into a wall. However, just to be sure, you should always check any device and make sure it says something to the effect of “Input: 110-240V”. Almost any adapter will have a sticker on the back that indicates its power capabilities. Similarly, if you plan on taking a power strip, make certain that it can handle multiple voltages.
Getting to more remote areas in South Africa will require a car, which means there will always be a cigarette lighter available. This will be my second level of battery defense. With car chargers for all my devices, I can easily keep everything charged while on-the-go.
For my Canon 5D, I’ve opted for a Sakar Digital Concepts charger. There are a lot of things I like about this charger. First, it has removable faceplates that allow it to adapt to charge several different types of batteries. So, if you carry multiple cameras that use different battery types - say, a 5D and a Rebel XTI - you can charge them both with this charger.
Second, it can plug directly into a wall for wall charging, which means you don’t have to also carry along your normal Canon charger. And finally, it includes a car charger cord, meaning you get everything you need in one package. It’s also very light, which makes it suitable for backcountry use.
The Digital Foci media drives offer an optional car charger, so I picked up one of those as well. Similarly, I grabbed car chargers for the iPod and my cell phone. So, with all of these cables, I can stay charged as long as I’m near a car.
Getting into the backcountry in South Africa is not easy, but I would still like to try some extended hikes and possibly overnight trips which will take me away from the car. For those excursions, I will take my Solio charger. Priced under a hundred bucks, these lightweight, small solar chargers are ideal for going off the grid. What’s great about the Solio is that it has an internal battery. So, you can leave the Solio in your campsite during the day, in direct sunlight. It will charge up its battery, and you can then charge your devices off that battery during the night. Leave it out the next day, and the cycle can continue.
To charge a device off of the Solio, you need a special cable. The Solio ships with an iPod cable, so it’s ready to go for iPod charging, and the company sells other cables for just about every type of cell phone. With the Solio, I’ll easily be able to charge my iPod, iPhone and Treo. Of course, my biggest concern will be the camera.
Solio sells a special cable that’s basically a cigarette lighter socket. As such, any device that you can charge off of a cigarette lighter can be charged off of the Solio. That will take care of the camera as well as the Digital Foci drives. Since I’m already packing car charger cables for those devices, I can just plug those into the Solio.
The Solio also comes with a cigarette lighter adapter so that you can charge the Solio of off a cigarette lighter. This allows you to easily gas it up while driving, even if its cloudy. The Solio is really like carrying an extra battery that’s compatible with all your gear. I’ve used these a lot on backpacking trips, and actually carry two, since they’re so light.
So, with this scheme, the only thing I don’t have covered are my flash and GPS, which both run on AA batteries. Currently, solar AA chargers are not great. They take forever to charge and are fairly large to carry. There are car chargers for AAs but, since I’m already loaded down, I’ve decided - regretfully - to just go with alkalines and carry a few sets of batteries. I much prefer rechargeables simply from an environmental standpoint, but this seems like the easiest, lightest way to go. I’ll just be sure to pack them back to the US for recycling.
I’ve used this power scheme on other trips, but never one this long, so we’ll see how it goes.
It’s frustrating getting simple questions I can’t answer. The other night, at the Apple store in San Francisco, I talked about the Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Adventure, and then demonstrated Lightroom. When I was finished with my song and dance a hand immediately shot up and asked: “Why doesn’t Lightroom generate thumbnails on export that can be seen on my Mac desktop?” I was stumped. In fact, I never noticed that Lightroom didn’t generate a thumbnail and I also work on a Mac.
Chromatic Aberration is one of those topics that rarely gets discussed but is a huge concern when processing digital images. Chromatic Aberration is caused by a differing refractive index for each wavelength of light - hence red refracts at a different angle than say blue. This results in what is commonly called color fringing appearing in an image and especially in the corners of an image shot with a wide-angle lens.
In my experience, my fisheye almost always exhibits chromatic aberration in the corners, especially on high contrast edges. If I look close, I will normally see some amount of chromatic aberration in images shot with any lens - from my 17-35mm all the way up to my 300mmm. This isn’t a defect in the lens build - it is just simple physics. If you wear glasses and look at any edge out of the corner of your eye then you can see that same color fringing as the light passes through your glasses. With high-resolution digital cameras these days the amount of CA is only exacerbated. It has always been there with film but we didn’t seem to notice it as much due to the lower resolution of 35mm film.
Because chromatic aberration is so common I look for it in every image (just in case) when I am processing my selects. Lightroom, with the upgrade to 1.1 included some new chromatic aberration controls that are very effective. The Chromatic Aberration tool has been augmented so that you can choose to only work with “Highlight Edges” or “All Edges”. You can also turn off the CA adjustment. It seems to be much more effective with these new controls. If you just want to remove fringing on the edges of your highlights then you would choose “Highlight Edges”. For more extreme color fringing you would choose “All Edges”. In my experience it just depends on the image - I use both settings equally.
There are two sliders, one for Red/Cyan fringes and one for Blue/Yellow fringing as in the screenshot below. It is rare that you only use one slider to take care of the fringing. Normally there are both R/C and B/Y going on in an image, sometimes on opposite sides of the image. Generally, you move the sliders in opposite directions for the best effect until the fringing is removed. If you use wide angle lenses often you’ll want to make sure to look in the corners at 100% for color fringing. With fisheye lenses on a digital camera, as I said above, you are pretty much assured of fringing and will have to use this tool to remove it.
The reality with using these sliders is this isn’t a speedy process. First you’ll have to zoom into 1:1 viewing mode so that you can see how moving the sliders is affecting the fringing. Then I normally start with the Red/Cyan slider since red fringing is the most visible. Adjusting the sliders so the fringing is gone will take some time. If you go to far with the sliders, you’ll just introduce fringing of another color - and sometimes you have green fringing which is a combination of red and blue so you’ll have to experiment with both sliders to take that out. There are no shortcuts.
Also a little side note, in Lightroom if you are looking at the full screen version of your image after you have removed the chromatic aberration you’ll still see the fringing - it only goes away when you are zoomed into 1:1 view. When you export the images it will be removed but strangely it isn’t taken out for the normal view.
That’s it for this session. See you next week.
Adios, Michael Clark
As a kid growing up in the 80s, I used to love watching The Joy of Painting on PBS when I got home from school everyday. For any of our international readers who may not be familiar: in each episode, Bob Ross, that bearded genius of the 30-minute landscape painting, would create an amazing scene with his oil paints. Sure he was a little far out — he liked to paint with a baby squirrel in his breast pocket — but I’m sure he inspired thousands of people who may never have otherwise attempted painting to pick up a paintbrush and give it a shot.
One of Bob’s many mantras was that there are no mistakes in painting — only “happy accidents”. I thought of this the other day while using Aperture when I pressed a keyboard shortcut and mistakenly activated Onscreen Proofing. I had been demoing this feature at a workshop and left my Proofing Profile set to Generic Gray Profile.
The Proofing Profile menu
When I mistakenly pressed Option-Shift-P, the image in my viewer appeared in grayscale. It took me a moment to realize what I had done, but as luck would have it the photo looked great in black and white. I immediately turned off Onscreen Proofing and began experimenting with the Monochrome Mixer adjustment. After trying out a few adjustments, I settled on a custom preset and ended up with a great black and white photo that I may never have created if not for my “happy accident” of activating Onscreen Proofing. It’s funny how unexpected creative inspiration can be.
Unfortunately Bob Ross passed away in 1995, but his website still sells a great collection of instructional DVDs. So get on out there and start experimenting in Aperture with black and white. And don’t forget to paint some happy little clouds…
The original photograph
Onscreen Proofing activated and the proofing profile set to Generic Gray
The final photo with a custom Monochrome Mixer adjustment
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