O'Reilly Digital Media

This is now part three in a series of Lightroom 1.3 vs. Capture NX 1.3 comparisons, some of you are probably getting tired of these posts, but if you either have or are thinking about buying one of the new Nikon D300 digital SLRs, you might find this interesting.

If you remember with the Nikon D80 NEF file comparisons, the default images out of the two applications was actually fairly similar but the default Nikon Capture output was a bit brighter and some of the colors were more realistic and vibrant.

The main advantage that Nikon Capture NX 1.3 has when it comes to editing the image, is the U-Point technology, which allows you to edit individual areas of the image (like for instance the sky) and punch it up (or even de-saturate it entirely to gray scale) without disturbing the rest of the image.

The main advantage that Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 1.3 has is a much better user interface and workflow, especially when dealing with larger numbers of images, but also when trying to squeeze the most out of a single image.

Both applications allow you to export to Photoshop CS 3, so more advanced editing is not an issue, but for basic color and vibrance control a lot of Nikon photographers feel that (especially when they are confronted with a particularly difficult image), they can squeeze more image quality out of Nikon Capture than any other application.

Warning: I have not tested the Nikon D300, or the NEF files it produces, in depth yet, so this is a very early analysis and my findings and results may change dramatically as I start getting used to the camera and the image files that it produces.

Nikon D300 - Capture NX 1.3 - default image, resized, and saved to JPEG

My initial impression from processing the Nikon D300 NEF files in Capture NX 1.3 was that the files were somewhat soft and pastel like. Not really unpleasant but also not what I was expecting.

Nikon D300 - Lightroom 1.3 - default image, resized, and exported to JPEG

Imagine my surprise, to see more sharpness, vibrance and contrast in the Lightroom 1.3 default image file. It is actually kind of hard to see in these small images but in the application widows and at larger size, there is a noticeable difference. For the Mac users with the latest version of Safari, the difference will be pretty dramatic, even in these small images.

Conclusion: Well I don’t really have a conclusion yet, but am reminded why I continue to use a number of different editing applications to get the results that I am after.

In teaching various workshops, one of the key points I try to get across to students is to move around when determining the compostion. Everytime I remind them, I also remind myself.

It’s natural to shoot from a “comfort zone”, ie certain lens to subject distances, often from standing eye-level, same fast shutter speed, in our favorite sweater, etc. As a starting point this is fine, but I find that some of my best work has come from wandering far from this first exposure and looking at things through my camera in new ways.

The Composition Dance

I always remind myself, just a slight adjustment or small gesture can vault a picture from ordinary to extraordinary. Bend the knees and change the perspective, changing the juxtoposition of foreground subjects with the horizon.

Take chances-feel your way, shoot on impulse and I don’t edit in the field too much by looking at the digital preview (just some quick checks of the histogram)—it takes me out of the moment and disrupts my concentration. This is crucial when there is a lot going on and things are out of your control. By concentrating and shooting lots I hope to have to have some tough choices when editing back home in Aperture, as with this series in a Lesotho Church.

When there is a lot going on, I move around and shoot a lot, on impulse.

I want to have a lot to choose from to make some tough choices when determining my final frame in Aperture.

I don’t try and capture everything, but instead, identify visually rich opportunities with potential and concentrate on them. An inch wide, a mile deep. In the said workshops, I find many students are overwhelmed with the world around them. For example, at a parade with so much going on, if you try and shoot everything you might end up dissapointed. By focusing on the people and the floats that might make the best pictures, and shoot more of those subjects—the results will be better.

Other Tips

Keep camera perpendicular when possible to minimize distortion particularly with wide angle lenses. For those relatively new to photography, I recommend keeping zoom lenses at the extremes, the widest or longest setting, and move around with your eye to the viewfinder while composing the photo. Don’t underestimate the little things and pay attention to the entire frame.

Lastly, listen to your intuition. If you have a feeling you haven’t nailed the picture, you probably haven’t. So stay a little longer, work it a little harder—you will be rewarded.

Lightroom’s keywording infrastructure is pretty straightforward: by applying any number of keywords to your photos, you are essentially creating a catalog that can be searched through to retrieve photos that match your desired criteria. I have been pretty diligent about cataloguing the subject and whereabouts of my photos.

Having recently started my own photo blog (check it out!), I wanted to keep track of which photos I had posted within Lightrooom. Sure, I could always go ahead and check the archives of my site if, at some point in the future, I’m unsure whether or not I’ve posted a particular photo. But that process requires a few extra steps; I want the information to always be at my fingertips when flipping through my catalog. It turns out that Lightroom’s keywords are perfect for this situation, too: by simply creating an appropriately named keyword (“RMR”, in my case) and applying it to the photos I can keep track of which photos have been posted to my blog.

After seeing the value in this process, I took things one step further and created a keyword set named “Exported” to allow me to quickly flag—and retrieve—photos that I’ve sent to be published (both online and in print). Sure, I canfind this information elsewhere, but I had yet to consolidate it in one place until now.

Viva Lightroom!

After my last blog, several people asked for information about using the Tint Wheels. The Tint Wheels can be very helpful to either introduce or remove color casts. They differ from the White Balance tools in that the latter alter the color cast of the entire image whereas the Tint Wheels affect specific parts of the tonal range. There’s a wheel for the shadows, the midtones and the highlights.

Most of the time I use the Color Balance sliders and/or eyedropper to adjust the color cast in my images. However there are times when that isn’t enough, particularly if I’ve shot under mixed lighting conditions. That’s when the Tint Wheels can be particularly helpful. Using the Tint Wheels I can adjust the warmth - or coolness - of the midtones independently from the shadows or highlights. Sometimes whites become too warm when there’s incandescent lighting and so you can decrease the yellow tint in the whites.

Entering in metadata about your photographs is one of the more tedious jobs in the digital darkroom. Most of the time, I consider it to be a necessary, but unexciting step. Sometimes, when I’m feeling less charitable, I find it to be a pain in the arse. But, one of the big advantages of the digital darkroom is being able to find images in your library with a quick search, so it’s always valuable to do.

While performing this chore in Lightroom, I’ve found that I spend most of time focused on one of two views of the Metadata panel. The first of these is the Location view, which emphasizes setting up the places where you’ve taken your photographs. I find this view is most useful when I’m on road trips and care most about getting the right location set for my photos.

The second Metadata panel view I use is the Quick Describe. This is most useful to me for static events where I’m setting the location data at import time.

The trick is to find which one of the Metadata views works best for applying the metadata that you work with most often. You could, of course, always show the “All” view, but unless you’re on a large screen monitor, that results in quite a bit of scrolling, which is a drag.

One of the things I’d like to see in a future version of Lightroom is the ability to customize the view settings within the application. It would make me happy if I could take half of each of these views and smoosh them together. Apparently, there is an online tool for creating Metadata panel view sets, but it’s advertised as being for Lightroom 1.1 and we’re now up to Lightroom 1.3. Maybe I’ll play with it soon and see how it works. But for now, I’ll merrily keep toggling between the two views as needed for the particular task at hand.

I follow a simple, straightforward and consistent workflow. And it goes like this: after selecting my best shots and after applying enhancements using Aperture, I bring them one by one to Adobe Photoshop CS3 for localized editing, and then save the final edited images back into Aperture. In submitting the photos, I export from the final edited PSD images from Aperture into a designated folder before uploading to an FTP server. (Of course, for a more streamlined workflow, I can just submit and upload the photos direct to an FTP server with the free ApetureToFTP Pro 1.0.1.)

But before sending the photos out, I often want to check and review the information about the images. To do this, I pressed Control + Click (or Right Click) on the exported image, and scrolled down to Get Info. The Information Pane pops up, and as expected, I see there all the embedded information.

This is exactly what I did with last week’s photo assignment, a casual portrait session with Maniya Barredo. Maniya Barredo was prima ballerina for the Atlanta Ballet, and she is now the artistic director of the Metropolitan Ballet Theatre in Georgia.

What surprised me, which I may have previously overlooked, is the fact that the Information Pane now seems to show a whole lot more data than it used to. And since these information are automatically embedded in the photographs, these are the kind of information that you may or you may not want to share when you send out the digital image files via email or FTP, or when saving them to a CD or DVD for distribution.

What information can be “read”? For starters, in the topmost section labeled General, what is displayed includes: kind of image file, actual size of the image, where it is located, when it was created and when it was modified. And then, it also includes the image label and color, the name and extension, what software to use to open it, a preview of the image, and settings for sharing and permissions.

On top of this, there are other (and even more) information listed. The entire metadata of the digital image file shows up. Listed in the More Info section are: pixel dimension, the make of the capture device, the device model, color space, profile name, focal length, alpha channel, red eye, fnumber, exposure time, and even the date when the image was last opened. And because the image has been imported to Aperture, and then exported out of Aperture, additional IPTC data that you’ve encoded upon import are listed as well. This includes the headline title, instructions, city, state or province, country, and perhaps most importantly, keywords — each and everyone of them.

And as if this is not enough (and this is probably a very useful thing), there are aspects in this Information Pane that you can change or update on the fly.

For example, you can change the file name and hide its extension. You can choose and designate a different application as the default when opening the image. And, you can set sharing and permissions.

But wait, there’s more. Other than these settings and metadata adjustments, perhaps the most practical thing you can do is to add comments to the blank editable “Spotlight Comments” area. You can write any comment you want in the allotted space. But in the interest of assisting the Mac’s internal search engine, it may be most practical and logical to just type in keywords each separated by a comma.

You have to remember that from right inside Aperture, you can of course create a version and “edit” in or out the metadata, IPTC and all other information that you want a particular image (or even a set of images via the lift-and-stamp tool) to carry when you export it out direct to an FTP server. I consider this to be one of the most powerful and flexible capabilities built right into Aperture. It’s just interesting to know that we have the option to do it after, and even when out of Aperture.

I selected another image, this time, a RAW image file saved to a folder which was referenced in Aperture. This particular image was from yesterday’s photo assignment, a landscape shoot of Savannah’s well-preserved and well-maintained and well-operated historic district.

The Information Pane of this image showed the same kind of information as the one exported from Aperture, but with one main difference. Despite the fact that I manually typed in the IPTC data and a whole lot of keywords when I referenced the image along with the other images in Aperture, these did not show up. In the processed PSD photograph I exported from Aperture, all the additional IPTC metadata information did show up. But picking on the Referenced image direct from the file folder will not read the metadata and IPTC data that have been added inside Aperture. The original image files in the original file folder from where they have been referenced truly remains untouched.

What this means is that if I want the IPTC metadata and keywords to show on all images, I will add it when importing to Aperture and then export the images from there. But if I want to pick an image from a designated folder without the additional metadata, it is still possible to add keywords by simply typing it into the Spotlights Comments area, which somehow, appears to serve the same purpose: top-level Spotlight search recognition.

To put this into a test, I typed in the only word common to both the Maniya Barredo and the Savannah photos: Georgia. Despite the fact that both photos were archived on an external hard drive, and despite the fact that the Maniya Barredo photos contain the word Georgia as a keyword from Aperture and the RAW file contained the word Georgia in the Spotlight Comments, both images showed up as primary choices.

Of course, none of the managed images inside Aperture showed up in Spotlight. One difference therefore between a Managed and a Referenced image, is that you’d be able to search through your library of images via Spotlight if and when the Referenced images is keyword-tagged in Spotlight’s Comments with the search parameters.

Since now I know that all images I export out from Aperture carry over all the metadata and IPTC data, and since I have a clear idea on how they can be searched through Spotlight, this gives me another reason to be more conscious when it comes to adding (or not adding) information (whatever the case maybe) when it comes to importing to and exporting from Aperture. We often hear the phrase: “If you can control information, you can control everything.” In this case, and with Aperture’s flexibility, we can completely control the management and search of photo images in our Macs from within and outside of Aperture.

Knowing how these things work can help us figure out what is the best strategy for typing in IPTC, keywords, and other information, and how useful they can be when conducting searches inside Aperture, and searching with the Mac’s Spotlight.

Here’s a tip for all the Aperture users who have iPhones: when you find a snapshot of a friend or colleague in your photo library, take a quick second to add it to their contact card in Address Book. Then every time the person calls, you’ll be greeted with their face smiling up at you.

The quickest way to copy the photo from Aperture into Address Book is a simple drag-and-drop. When you’ve found a photo that you want to add to a contact card, do a Spotlight search for that person’s name. Choose the contact card from the Spotlight search results to open that card in Address Book. Then switch back to Aperture and drag the photo from the Browser right onto the placeholder icon next to the contact’s name in Address Book (you don’t even need to put the card into Edit mode to do this).

When you drop the photo on the placeholder icon in Address Book, the familiar crop sheet will appear, allowing you to scale and crop the image to fit in the square. As a bonus, if you’re using Leopard you’ll see that Address Book now includes the ability to apply Effects in this window. Click the Effects button and you will be able to experiment with over 40 effects, including many new effects that weren’t available from the effects palettes in Tiger (Line Overlay and Neon are particularly cool).

Next time you sync your iPhone, the updated contact information will be copied over; after that, whenever the person calls you’ll see the photo rendered in all its glory on the iPhone’s big screen.

This week as I was thinking about a topic for this blog I remembered some features that I would like to see in a future version of Lightroom and I thought I would share those with you. Of course all of this is just conjecture - luckily for all of us Adobe is listening and we can all submit our feature requests for future versions of Lightroom online. You can submit your own feature requests here:

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

So here are some features that I have wished for since I first started playing with Lightroom - as it is currently Lightroom is better than anything else out there that I have found - but to make it even better here are some things I would add:

1. Make it even faster.

With the latest upgrade to 1.3 Adobe has made Lightroom faster but it would be nice to see it run even just a little faster. I also just updated my imaging machine to a very fast Apple MacPro and that has vastly improved the operating speed of Lightroom. It isn’t slow on the new tower but it would be nice to see the import process get a little faster - especially the time it takes to render previews. This improvement might require faster computers rather than a change in the software.

2. Make Lightroom the Digital Asset Management tool!

As I have mentioned before in my blog posts, there really isn’t anything out there that I like in terms of a digital asset management tool. I am hoping that the Lightroom engineers can make Lightroom the DAM tool that we have all been waiting for - one where we can have huge catalogs (100,000 + images) of high resolution raw image files imported into Lightroom with no performance penalties.

3. Make the compare mode work with more than just two images.

As a sports photographer it would be really nice to be able to view five or more images side by side and go to the 1:1 preview on all of them at the same time instead of just two images as it is in the current compare mode. This would make the editing process much faster for those of us that shoot lots of high-speed sequences. Even for portraits this could be very useful to compare facial expressions and sharpness.

4. Add local adjustments for contrast, saturation, vibrance, etc.

Lightroom already has some local adjustments - red eye correction and cloning/healing, but it would be really sweet to have the ability to adjust hue, saturation, luminance, vibrancy and other aspects of a part of an image in a similar manner to Nikon Capture NX’s U-Point technology. This would keep us in Lightroom just a little longer and perhaps simplify what can be a complex process in Photoshop. Of course we already have this capability in Photoshop but it would be nice to make basic adjustments in Lightroom and not have to deal with time-consuming selections in Photoshop.

5. Add sharpening to the web gallery images.

One of my long time issues with the very powerful Web Module is that the large previews aren’t quite as sharp as they could be - they need some form of sharpening so that they look their best when viewed by a client. If Adobe were able to introduce a sharpening dialog like the one in the print module it would be a huge improvement to the Web module.

Well, there you have it, just my thoughts on some additions that would make Lightroom a little nicer for my workflow. Lightroom has come a long way in a short while if you ask me. And my workflow has been improved immensely by using Lightroom - I can’t even imagine using my old workflow anymore.

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

Adios, Michael Clark

In my workflow I like to keep most of my Master images files on a network attached storage device. In fact I have my entire image library sitting on a number of USB attached hard drives that are connected to my Airport Extreme base station. This gives me easy access to my entire image library, and a great storage solution for all those large RAW files that I don’t want to cary with me on my laptop.

However, when I want to work on a file, I usually prefer to have it on my local machine for the sake of speed and portability. To move the image masters back to my machine I simply select the images I want to work on and use the Consolidate Masters function found in the File menu. This copies the files back to my machine as Managed files.

Now that I have my selects back on my machine I can go about editing the images from wherever I am.

One caveat to this system is that I end up with a number of Managed master files sitting on my laptop’s hard drive. This was something that I had wanted to avoid in the first place, so once I am done I need to put them back on the external as Referenced Masters.

This is simple enough, just go back and use the Relocate Masters function to put them back. Well, there is one problem with this. Sometimes, while editing, I may decide to downgrade an image that I decide that I don’t like. Now that image is back in the heap of the original shoot. I could certainly select the entire shoot and Relocate the whole thing, but instead, I have come up with a pretty simple trick.

In my Query HUD i select Show All, and then I add the File Status attribute. I set the File Status to look for Managed Files, and viola, my Managed images are shown. I can now set this as a new Smart Album and easily be able to see which images are on my local machine and which are not, regardless of their current star rating. Now I can move the Managed files back to my USB drive with ease.

This weekend I spent some time photographing a benefit Thanksgiving dinner that my girlfriend put on for her local chapter of Physicians for Human Rights. We brought all sorts of food and fun to about 15 residents of a small retirement/assisted living home on the island. The light was sort of all over the place, with harsh sunlight backlighting some of the subjects. Luckily Aperture’s Shadow recovery tool was on hand to help fix up some of the scenes. The pictures turned out pretty good and I may make a quick photo book to donate to the home when I return after the holidays.

To see the rest of the photos check out this post on my personal blog at micahwalter.com

Sometimes the best way to overcome annoyances is to embrace them and make them your own. To protest the way rampant commercialism has corrupted Christmas carols, O’Reilly author Michael W. Dean recorded “God Rest Ye Merry Bonzo.” This “perverted Xmas music” mates a drum loop from Led Zep’s “Bonzo” Bonham with vocals, bass, sleigh bells (!), and an e-mailed guitar track.

On a more expansive note, soundscape artist Darwin Charmber just released 3D Christmas Sound Effects (iTunes link). I’m sitting in the middle of its swirling virtual snowstorm as I type this.

Happy shopping — or nothing-buying. Please leave a link if you come up with your own twisted take on this raucous season.

This has been a week full of Nikon anxiety for me and little less. The big question for the last week has been, will I get one of the first batch of the new Nikon D300? And the answer is, yes it has been picked up from the dealer and is on it’s way to me.

Strangely enough I have bought one in Orlando, Florida and a friend (who just happens to be traveling in this direction) is bringing it to Thailand for me. Those of you who are Nikon users, are of course wondering why I am having a Nikon brought from the US to Thailand, where it was manufactured in the first place. Why didn’t I just buy it in Thailand?

There are two very good reasons that I am carrying the proverbial coals to Newcastle, one being that the camera costs quite a bit less in the USA than it does in Thailand, and two is that I want to have a Nikon USA warranty on the camera, it makes it much easier to get the camera serviced in the USA (if necessary).

I promised to make some corrections to the images I used in lasts weeks blog, but in addition to the new camera release Nikon also threw us all a curve ball by coming out with a new version of Capture NX. Somehow it also seems more fair though, now that we are comparing version 1.3 of Lightroom with version 1.3 of Capture NX.

So on with the show. Basically all I want to do for this exercise is improve the sky a little bit.

The original default Lightroom 1.3 image.

The enhanced Lightroom 1.3 image. I tried to match the saturation enhancement I was able to make with Capture NX in the sky, but was held back because the blues in the rest of the image became over saturated.

The original default Capture NX 1.3 image.

The enhanced Capture NX 1.3 image. I used four color control points to boost the blue saturation of the sky and three control points to boost the contrast of the clouds. I have to say that Capture NX is really great for manipulating the sky, without affecting the rest of the image.

Conclusion:

Capture NX allows me to easily and quickly add (color, contrast, exposure) enhancements to specific areas in an image. I know I can do the same thing from Lightroom by round-tripping to Photoshop CS, but Capture NX allows me to do it without exporting or converting the RAW (NEF) image, right in the application. And if I may repeat myself in Capture NX it is very easy to do this.

I know the following may be impossible for both political and practical reasons, but I have to state it anyway, in the hopes that maybe someone can implement at least part of what I would like to see happen.

I would like to see a Capture NX module made available for Lightroom so that Nikon photographers can both get the image quality and enhancement advantages of Capture NX and at the same time have access to the more practical and easier to live with Lightroom workflow. If it is at all possible I would like to hear some comments on the topic. If you think it is not possible or practical I would like to hear your comments on why you think it is impossible too.

As dusk darkened to night, my exposures got longer and longer until the swirl trails of the stars echoed the swirls in the rock of the Wave.

View this image larger.

To take this photo, I needed to wait until darkness out in the desert with the ordeal that was to come. But, I say, since all’s well that ends well, well worth it!

I have to admit, one of the apps I’m having most fun with in Leopard is iChat. With all the new features Leopard brings to applications like Safari and Mail, iChat’s 24 new features outnumbers all others. With the new video effects for example, you can annoy your friends pretending to be in Paris, or on a roller coaster or in space or just look weird and beautiful, with the many crazy and abstract, distorting video effects.

But all fun aside, it’s got some really huge features that photographers are going to find very useful.

I just discovered how you can host an iChat Theatre Presentation. Unfortunately at this time, we can’t share an Aperture slide show in iChat. But you can share QuickTime Movies and Keynote Presentations, as well as photos or anything Quick Look (space bar in Leopard) can preview. You don’t even need to have a camera built into your computer to take advantage of this useful feature.

iChat is a great way to share your work with friends, editors, students anywhere in the world in real time. Even when you’re in France.

For instance, you can select a bunch of photos and then show them to your Buddies, one at a time as a slideshow. They will not only see the slides, but see you (if you have a web cam, standard on all new iMacs, MacBooks and MacBook Pros) and hear any narration you’re wanting to give. You control the show from a toolbar outside the video window. Same is true for Quicktime movies and Keynote presentations.

I have used a program called LiveSlideShow to make Quicktime movies of my slide presentations with words and music– and have inserted these Quicktimes into Keynote. When Keynote gets to a slide with a Quicktime Movie in it, it launches that Quicktime automatically. I’m hoping the next version of Aperture allows us to save slideshows as Quicktime Movies.

Using iChat, you can share elaborate presentations with Buddies all over the world, in real time. “What will you be presenting at the conference next week?” Let me show you on iChat…and talk about it as we move through the work. Or maybe you want to get editing opinions from a trusted friend a thousand miles away. There are so many possibilities.

I suspect iChat will work with the next upgrade of Aperture, but for now it lets you pick photo albums in iPhoto 08 to share. What is nice about showing work form these apps is, you use the iPhoto 08 or Keynote controls to make your way through the slideshows. Plus, you can record these iChat conversations and shows; iChat asks the other party if it’s okay and a small red light glows to let you and them know, the iChat is being recorded.

Also with Leopard, iChat utilizes something called H.264, which Apple says will give you higher resolution and sharper images with improved color accuracy using advanced video compression techniques.

I’m hoping to put iChat’s video conferencing savy to the test. I’ve been teaching a course at ICP in New York, but I may be heading to Rwanda in a couple of weeks and have to miss the last class when students make presentations. If I can secure a broad-band connection, I should be able to “be there” for that class, see the presentations and comment in real time. Of course the other great thing that iChat provides that real life doesn’t? You can turn someone off, at anytime. The students will love it.

Although I rarely use the Split Tone panel in the Develop module (and I bet you can say the same), there are a couple of situations in which I find it extremely useful: Toned Black and Whites and full color nature scenes that are designed for emotional impact.

Here’s a black and white in which I first used the HSL panel in Grayscale mode to adjust each of the primary and secondary colors to give a black and white exactly the tone shades in black and white that I want. Then I used the Split Tone panel to assign blues to the Highlights and Sepia to the shadows. You can see the color, black and white, and split-toned versions in the illustration below.

Here’s a Sunset in Guayabo, Costa Rica, first as it looked when I adjusted the color as I normally would, then when I used Split toning to emphasize the reds in the Sunset sky and the greens in the tropical lushness of this pasture.

In the world that goes in my laptop, I find that there are few things more refreshing than grabbing an updated piece of software that I rely on and taking a walk through its halls, both in familiar and unfamiliar nooks. There are a couple benefits to taking this time out from my regularly scheduled editing:

• the first benefit is to see what new features and tweaks have been added to the piece of software, and
• the second — and secondary — benefit is to notice features that have been around for a while but that I haven’t even considered adding to my flow.

For applications — like Lightroom — that have a non-trivial learning curve, taking a fresh look at what’s inside the box can shake up your workflow in ways that go beyond the itemized feature list in the release notes. We all like getting things done in the most comfortable way possible; we appreciate comfortable surroundings and thrive in simplicity through repetition. That’s all part of the learning process.

But sorting through gigabytes of data in an effort to stay afloat in your sea of photos can lead you to form a groove that is difficult to break. Every once in a while it helps to take a step back and look at the bigger picture (so to speak) and see how we can adapt our flow as we learn all of the nooks and crannies of our tools. Setting aside some time to take a step back and look at your workflow after an application update can pay off in the long run.

And for those of you running Lightroom on Leopard, it never hurts to have the application actually work on your operating system, either. Viva Lightroom 1.3!

Compatibility with Mac OS X Leopard is one of the bullet points of the recent Lightroom 1.3 release. Now that I’ve had a few days to work with the release, I can indeed confirm that Lightroom 1.3 gets along with Leopard, at least for the most part. There are, however, a few small issues I’ve run into.

The first of these issues appeared for me when importing files directly from a compact flash card. I’ve seen some spurious error messages on a few of my imports, including an odd message indicating that there was a problem with 0 of the images imported. Also, on one occasion, an image wasn’t copied as part of the import process. For the time being, I may start copying images over to my local drive in the Finder and then import them. I did this with a previous version of Lightroom to work around import problems. This would be a real drag, but incomplete imports are also a drag.

Second, I’ve seen Lightroom crash a few times while working with the Print module. This was reported in a few places on the first day of release. The workaround talked about on the net is to minimize the print preview window, as shown to the right. I can report that this seems to work for me so far.

And last, as you’ve probably heard, there have been warnings concerning Lightroom’s database and Time Machine. For the time being, I’ve followed the recommendations to exclude my Lightroom catalog from Time Machine backups. I’ve also excluded the preview folder as well, since it only includes data that can be easily rebuilt from my image library.

This doesn’t mean you have to skip backups of your Lightroom database, however. If you make backups of your catalog from within Lightroom—I have mine set to make a backup every time I run Lightroom—those backups will be nicely stashed away for you by Time Machine. Also, if you have Lightroom automatically write XMP data, those XMP sidecar files will be faithfully backed up by Time Machine as well, providing a fairly complete backup solution.

A while ago, I posted a blog about previews, discussing when they’re useful and how to turn them off. A friend of mine, Ralph Hill, recently told me about a potential problem when you disable previews, and it’s worth sharing with everyone.

Specifically, if you turn off previews, quit, but do NOT force quit, Aperture as soon as possible after changing your settings (if Aperture crashes before you quit it normally, that counts as an accidental force quit). It is possible if you force quit Aperture that you will end up in a funky state where the preference for preview generation displays that generation is off, but Aperture is still creating previews (try saying that three times fast! :) ). If you do happen to end up in this state, simply turn previews back on, quit Aperture, re-open Aperture, turn previews off, and quit Aperture again to restore everything to the correct state.

Lastly, to all of our American readers, Happy Thanksgiving!

The first time I heard and paid attention to the term “pain points” was at an Aperture conference held in Cambodia. I was part of a group of hand-picked professional photographers from different Asian countries. We were selected to attend this conference so we can share knowledge about real-world and actual use of Aperture.

I remember feeling very excited because I’d get the chance to meet and interact with my colleagues from different Asian countries, and learn first-hand how each one of them are managing their workflow with Apple’s Aperture as a post-production tool. I was very much looking forward to picking up and learning a few tips and tricks here and there so I can refine my own workflow with the aim of making it more effective and efficient.

Well, I was not disappointed. Photographers are mostly outgoing, and once you get them started on a particular topic, the discussion is bound to go on forever. I said a few things myself but mostly I listened to what others said. I was fascinated to hear them talk about their actual work experiences with Aperture. I must have asked a lot of questions. Maybe it shouldn’t be so surprising by now that each photographer actually have a somewhat unique workflow style. Still, I couldn’t help but somehow feel really surprised at the innovative ways different photographers use Aperture. No one was shy in sharing what exactly they do and how they actually push photos out of their ateliers’ doors. It turned out to be a fantastic learning experience.

Apple’s Aperture conference in Asia nicely coincided with the annual Ankor Wat Photography Festival. I enjoyed viewing the many exhibits of featured international photographers with subjects spanning from historical to contemporary images. And on the side, we had the chance to explore a couple of places in Cambodia. First, we took an interesting “sunrise” look at the majestic, inspiring and tragic sprawl of the Angkor Wat ruins. Next, we experienced the painful and forlorn beauty of being afloat in the middle of the endless Tony Sap lake at sunset.

In Cambodia, I found myself caught up in the vortex of the old and the new. In this modern world, we continue to “live” the history of the past. There are, of course, valid reasons why we should look back to our past and reminisce. Philosopher, essayist, poet and novelist George Santayana was the first to say, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” From the historic perspective of Cambodia, remembering the past means side-stepping the “pain points” that might again happen.

To me, as a photographer, I hope to keep remembering the past in order to get away from it, to move away from it, and even to escape it, so that I can fully appreciate what is new, and do things in a better way. We may not appreciate it as much as we did the first time around, but, the technology of Apple’s Aperture has truly and radically altered the way we do our post-production work. I feel that this software was designed to remove a lot of the “pain points” we have to deal with on a day to day basis. Aperture has simplified enough the process for us so we can achieve our photographic vision and deliver the results to clients with minimum fuss and on time.

Apple’s Aperture puts into the hands of digital photographers today some of the most important tools of our trade. We may be deceived into thinking, for instance, that the image enhancing and editing tools are quite simplistic and almost like a child’s play, but underlying that simplicity are technologies that does the job. For me, this is one of the ways that Apple have removed “pain points.” To make it easy to do. Many photographers all over the world have amply demonstrated the power and beauty, and the ease, of the many built-in enhancement and editing capabilities of Aperture.

Almost with certainty, the new major version release of Aperture, when it is announced, will contain new and interesting features. Whatever these new features will be, and in whatever way these new features will be delivered to us, we will welcome them. I just hope that Apple shall continue to look back at their fine tradition with Aperture of removing “pain points” for photographers like you and me.

With the recent update of Lightroom to Version 1.3 late last week I thought I would cover some of the improvements that have been made with this latest version…so without further ado here they are:

1. Vastly improved Speed!

I don’t have any hard numbers to back up this observation but version 1.3 seems quite a bit faster than any previous version of Lightroom. I first noticed this improvement when I imported my last assignment into Lightroom. It took only a few seconds for the 300+ images to be imported before Lightroom went to work building the 1:1 previews. I was shocked how fast it loaded the previews. Then while editing and processing these recent images Lightroom was much faster than I have ever seen it. All in all, the new speediness is a very welcome upgrade.

2. Ability to render 1:1 previews on import.

With version 1.3, we can now have Lightroom build the 1:1 previews on import. This is a feature I have been hoping for now for quite a while and it is nice to see it. Thanks Adobe! This just cut one extra step out of my workflow.

3. Improved version of the “Automatically write changes into XMP” preference.

In the past, choosing the preference to “Automatically write changes into XMP” files for each image resulted in a significant slow down. Adobe has now upgraded Lightroom so the slow down is practically nil which is a very nice feature for those of us that rely on the XMP files as a backup and so that the raw files are rendered with our develop settings in Adobe Bridge. This is yet another small but very significant upgrade in version 1.3.

4. Compatibility with Apple’s latest Mac OS X Leopard.

Since I had my G5 tower crash hard a few weeks ago and I have already purchased a new Apple Mac Pro, I am very glad to see the folks at Adobe have made Lightroom fully compatible with Apple’s latest Mac OS X Leopard. I’ll find out later today how seamlessly it works with the new operating system as my Mac Pro arrives today! Very exciting.

5. Better rendering of Nikon RAW files.

One other feature I have noticed but need to look into further is that my raw Nikon D2x files seem to look better than they have in previous versions of Lightroom. It seems with the Adobe Camera Raw upgrade to version 4.3, the folks at Adobe have also improved the auto-rendering of some Nikon camera models. I’ll write more about this as I work up recent images.

Even though the upgrade to 1.3 might not have seemed like a big deal I am very excited about the improvements that have been made. For my workflow specifically these improvements will help make Lightroom even more user friendly and hopefully shave off a bit more time that I have to spend in front of the computer.

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

Adios, Michael Clark

One scenario where I still regularly make trips from Aperture to Photoshop is when I need to use Photoshop’s Healing Brush tool. Aperture’s Spot and Patch tool does a fine job of removing unwanted dust and imperfections from photographs, but it’s designed to be used on contained spots, and it doesn’t work well for long or irregularly-shaped imperfections like stray hairs.

I was recently given a scan of this photograph of my grandmother as a little girl in 1917. The photo was in pretty bad shape, with deep cracks across much of the image, however luckily there were no cracks across her face. I imported the photo into Aperture so that I could manage it with the rest of my photo library, but I knew that working with this photo would mean spending most of my time in Photoshop. And that’s fine with me. Sometimes working with Aperture means using Aperture’s organization and management tools, and doing my retouching somewhere else.

The original scan of Grandma in 1917

Photoshop’s Healing Brush tool is pretty amazing. It lets you correct imperfections by painting with sampled pixels from your photo, also matching the texture, lighting, transparency, and shading of the sampled pixels. As a result, the repaired pixels blend seamlessly into the rest of the image. I created a new layer and used the Healing Brush extensively to remove the cracks and repair dust spots and scratches. I also cropped the photo, and created a few adjustment layers to improve the contrast and brightness.

The layers created for retouching

The retouching is still a work-in-progress. And because Aperture works round-trip with Photoshop, I can always come back to the photo in Aperture, and choose Open with External Editor to go back into Photoshop — my layers and adjustments will always be intact. I’m pretty pleased with how this photograph is shaping up; and I’m glad to be using Aperture so fluidly with Photoshop. Below is the original scan and the current working version of the repaired image.

The Good News: Apple has added more supported camera formats to Aperture via Software Update 10.4.11. The Bad News: the Canon PowerShot G9 is not among them.

Rats!

I was happy to read Ben’s post about additional Raw support via the latest Tiger update. Quite frankly, my nonAperture workflow for the Canon G9 is losing its charm. So, I thought for sure I would no longer be staring at gray boxes after today.

Ack!

I know things are pretty busy in Cupertino right now. Maybe for all the hard work that has gone into Leopard, Tiger updates, Aperture, iLife, iPhone, iPods, and everything else, someone at Apple should buy the entire engineering team the perfect gift. Let me think… How about Canon G9s!

Since we now have two brand new versions of the RAW image processor from Nikon and Adobe, I thought that today would be a good day to do a quick comparison test of a Nikon NEF file from a Nikon D80, arguably the most popular consumer level Nikon Digital SLR on the market at this time.

Basically I took one image and quickly ran it through Nikon Capture NX 1.2 without making any changes and did the same with Adobe Lightroom 1.3.

These images were not edited at all in either program, only resized and saved to jpeg at a value of 80. From what I can see on my computer screen they are fairly similar but the Nikon Capture NX 1.2 image is a little blown out in the highlights and the Adobe Lightroom 1.3 image is a bit dark in some of the shadows and some of the colors are a little dull. I will make some corrections and enhancements in both applications and try to post those images tomorrow. Comments would be appreciated, especially if you have made similar tests.

Image processed with Adobe Lightroom 1.3

Image processed with Nikon Capture 1.2

With the release of Leopard, Apple added raw support for a number of new cameras, leaving Tiger-based Aperture users wondering if they would be forced to upgrade to the new operating system in order to gain support for the new formats.

Fortunately, the answer to that question is a resounding “no!” thanks to Apple’s 10.4.11 update, now available via Software Update. In addition to a number of OS level bug fixes, the update provides support for the following cameras: Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50, Leica V-Lux 1, Olympus E-400, Olympus EVOLT E410, Olympus EVOLT E510, and the Canon EOS 40D.

As an Aperture user, is there any reason at this point that you should be hesitant to upgrade to Leopard? Not really, though if you rely a lot on external Firewire drives, you might want to test them with a Leopard system before making the switch. I’ve found that some of my drives aren’t showing up in Leopard - something that happens from time to time with Apple updates. Usually, an OS update soon follows to fix the problem.

I’ve written in previous posts a bit about Amazon’s S3 storage service. So far I have been pretty happy with the service, however, the interface has left a little to be desired. I tried using JungleDisk and a backup program like Synk Pro to move my Aperture Referenced Masters to S3, but I have ran in to a number of problems with this routine. On paper it seems to work just fine. And, in fact, for small numbers of images it works essentially flawlessly. But one thing that Jungle Disk does that has been causing me problems has to do with its method of caching files. It allows you to set a cache and then when you try to upload images JungleDisk writes whatever it can to the cache and then begins the process of uploading.

This is a nice feature theoretically in that you can stop the process and return and begin again, but it can cause problems when trying to upload a large amount of data. When the cache gets filled, the Synk operation can get interrupted. It doesn’t always happen, but on occasion I have to start all over again. If the Synk operation gets interrupted for some reason it fails the backup and you have to try again.

JungleDisk also uses a fairly interesting method of storing your files. Instead of just creating folders and files in your S3 bucket, JungleDisk creates a flattened directory structure, using the folder names you create as part of the filename. It all works perfectly fine if you always use JungleDisk to interface with your S3 account, but once you try and connect with some other application things can be a bit confusing.

So, I am experimenting with Panic’s Transmit. Transmit has been around forever and has served as a great FTP program for me for a long time. Now that there is support for Amazon S3 I have yet another use for the fine program. What’s more is that Transmit offers additional features such as .Mac preference syncing and built in Automator actions.

I set up my Amazon account and saved it as a preference. I created a new “bucket” and then made some sub-folders. I pointed to the folder of pictures I wanted to upload and clicked Synchronize. I was given a number of options as to how I wanted the synching to behave and it is off and running. It seems to write the files one at a time, copying them from my network drive to the laptop and then uploading them to S3. It is going fairly slowly, but seems to working without any problems.

It would be really nice to eventually get everything up on S3 and then be able to just do a sync for any newly added files. This would keep a really nice archive of my Master images files up on a geographically redundant server out there in the ether. Of course an Aperture plugin might be a nice idea as well! Hint Hint….

It’s out. The release we’ve all been waiting for—at least for the last few weeks. Lightroom 1.3 has hit the streets and brings support for running Lightroom on Leopard, some new camera models, and an export SDK.

The new cameras supported are Canon’s 1Ds mkIII and G9, Nikon’s D3 and D300, Olympus’ E-3 and SP-560UZ, and Panasonic DMC-110. Additionally, there’s support for Canon’s sRAW format and Fuji’s compressed RAF format.

As far as Leopard compatibility goes, the print module is working again, but there seem to be a few issues with the newly minted Leopard 10.5.1 release and some of the presets. I’ll know more about this shortly as I’ve just downloaded the release right now and will be giving it a full workout.

You can read more at The Lightroom Journal and the Photoshop Services site.

Generally, when my raw files are well exposed, the White Balance control is the first step I take toward squeezing the best image out of my raw file, and to get the overall color close to where I want it.

When you change the white balance of a raw file, Aperture reconfigures it’s interpretation of color from the red, green and blue data without manipulating it so color correcting with White Balance is a “free” edit, and won’t lead to any posterizing or tonal breaks.

And, you can extend it’s 2500-10,000degrees Kelvin range by having the cursor hover over the color temperature data, which changes the icon, at which time you can click and drag to the right all the way up to 50,000K!

10,000 Degrees Kelvin

50,000 Degrees Kelvin

You can do the same thing by clicking and dragging left to a minmum 2000K. (You can extend the range of most adjustment tools in Aperture the same way). When would you want to extend this range? Rarely, but in sunset or sunrise images for example, you may want higher than 10,000K color temperatures.

When I’m using my monitor at home, I like to widen my Adjustments HUD, so the slider is longer, allowing for subtler changes.

Widen HUD by clicking and dragging the bottom right corner

Getting your white balacne right with the eye dropper tool is easy. Just click on a neutral gray area within the image as a starting point.

Here’s a little nugget that not everybody plays with using the Eye Dropper Control in White Balance. When you click and hold the eyedropper within your image, as you move the dropper around the image you will see the white balance change in real time as the dropper moves.

Wherever you move the eye dropper while holding down the mouse, you see the white balance Aperture chooses for that spot. When the eye dropper covers an area that isn’t neutral, the resulting color will be off.

In neutral areas however, the color temperature will be perfect or very close.

This is handy when determining the exact neutral area you want to use as your starting point for your color temperature change. Small movements while holding down the mouse or trackpad will let you hone in on the exact part of the image that yields the most pleasing white balance; and since the loupe automatically activates you can be very precise in your eye dropper placement. Very nice.

I really like emailing slideshows as a way of showing the results of a shoot or of telling a story, rather than just emailing a series of shots. For one thing, most slide show programs have some way of automatically reducing file size to make the whole thing more e-mailable. It’s also nice if you can put a little music in for drama. Finally, I like to use the image description metadata so that there can be some verbal guidance under each slide for the story being told. By putting that information in the metadata, I’m also able to keep that description with the image when it’s sent to clients, stock agencies, and the like.

Lightroom does a pretty decent job of most of these things. The objection I have is that it only produces PDF slide shows. I usually tell my audience to make sure they have the latest version of Adobe Reader installed, but that scares some people away. I know, it couldn’t be simpler, but lots of people are downright paranoid of installing anything that their consultant or The Genius Bar didn’t tell them to install. It’s also difficult to add a soundtrack to a PDF slide show or to create your own background from scratch in Photoshop.

Here is an example screen from a quick and powerful alternative:

I feel a little like Bob Moog today — or maybe Adolphe Sax. While Googling for one of my articles, I discovered a musical instrument called the Battino:

You play it by whacking a wooden ball with a hammer, causing the ball to tumble across some pegs and strike a bell. “The balls make a pleasing clickety-clack sound as they bounce and roll down the colorful descending wooden bars and ring the little jingle bell at the end,” says one seller. “Turn Battino over and baby has fun rolling the balls down the colorful wooden bars.”

I was pleased to read elsewhere that “Battino is finished with non-toxic, water-based dyes and fragrant beeswax,” making it “the perfect gift for antsy young infants and toddlers.”

Or as the manufacturer says, “Great — now I can bang about and make as much noise as I like!”

That definitely sounds like the type of instrument I’d want to be named after me, but at the same time, it’s not a very obvious name. According to digital illustrator Allen Battino, whose ancestors came from the same Greek village as mine (we haven’t figured out our exact relationship yet), “Battino” means “small tap” in Italian. Supposedly the original Battinos were blacksmiths.

But I’m intrigued by the bigger question: If you could have a toy or a musical instrument named after you, what would it be?

I just downloaded the new Miro player (formally Democracy Player). It’s very nice, seems to organize videos reasonably well, is free, multi-platform, open source and includes features I believe all video players should provide.

But, when I got to checking it out, I was disappointed with the audio quality on many of the videos featured on Miro’s Getting Started page. No fault goes to Miro as they simply aggregate videos from around the world. Many of the media programs contained audio of unacceptable technical quality. Audio levels were either too hot (see Diggnation below) or were recorded in ways that rendered them unacceptable for listening. It was if the producer merely viewed the video ignoring the audio before releasing.

As an example, listen to the audio of this Diggnation video. Here’s a snippet of the waveform (click on image to enlarge):

Remarkably, while the Diggnation sample was shipped way too hot, the program material does not clip often because of this (yeah, hard to believe by looking at the waveform.) More disturbing, however, is that the program is littered with examples of how not to set the mic preamplifier - and we do find distorted audio resulting from this oversight. Maybe the engineer never heard of the AGC button. I do not advocate the use of AGC, but at least it will prevent overloading amplifier stages in the camera. If the audio was recorded separately, then they would undoubtedly have adequate equipment to monitor the audio gain at various stages. There would be no excuse.

Now, compare the Diggnation wavefore to the technically superior audio from an ABC News program on Miro:

The good news is that with a little knob twiddlin’, watching the meters, and LISTENING to your program, audio quality can be reasonable even with the cheap cameras and audio gear that most use on vlogs these days.

How can you improve your audio for video? Well… it shouldn’t be any different than audio for any other medium. I advocate reference levels to be the same as the DVD standard and the levels proposed in the AES Technical Group for Games: -18dBFS. That means the Diggnation audio is way too hot. Go back and compare the two and take note of the amplitude level ruler on the left side of each waveform.

For some tips and the definition of the -18dBFS proposal, see my post The State of Podcasts and Vlogs

After picking up my bags (and other things) and moving to Southern California this past week, I did what I always do when arriving in a new location: I picked up my camera and headed out to take some photos. Upon importing my shots into Lightroom and adding the appropriate metadata, I was treated with the small sugar–rush of a new branch in my Metadata Browser: Santa Monica.

Poking around in the Locations browser reminded me that Eric Scouten, one of Lightroom’s developers recently explained how to geocode your images after they have been imported into Lightroom. His tutorial uses a Mac application named HoudahGeo to embed the location into your images existing metadata, but the steps taken outside of Lightroom will be similar if you use another tool to get the job done.

Being a total GPS neophyte who doesn’t own a camera with built–in GPS support or even an external tracking unit, I resorted to manually grabbing the latitude and longitude of my photos through HoudahGeo’s Google Maps integration. Dropping a pin on the location of every photo you take will definitely get tiring quickly, but it’s a great way for those without the necessary hardware to dip their toes into the pool of geocoding.

Recently someone was asking if it mattered whether you use the Exposure control or Levels or both to adjust an image and whether there was any difference in the results. So this week I’m going to review some basic adjustment information.

The fact is that although you can set the white point using the Exposure slider or Levels, the results you obtain will be slightly different. Let’s look at a low contrast abstract image of color reflecting in a river. Here’s the original image.

You can see on the histogram that the image is very low contrast since the pixels are bunched together. Additionally there’s a gap to the right of the data on the histogram indicating that the image isn’t using the lightest 20% of tonalities. There’s also a large gap to the left indicating it isn’t using roughly the darkest 40% of the tonal range.

If you first adjust the Exposure slider to try to use most of the lightest tonalities, and then use Levels to set the black point, you end up with this image. (I’m not going to adjust the middle slider or the quarter tone controls for this comparison.)

Much of the talk last week and this week focused on Apple’s iPhone. Only a few days ago, and with a software update of 1.1.2, it became officially available in Europe. This is the first time that the mobile device is being sold in Apple stores in U.K. and Germany. With keen interest from Apple fans, it appears that the iPhone is selling very well outside of America.

I’ve always wanted an iPhone ever since Steve Jobs made the announcement at MacWorld. However, it was only last month that I finally got one when I arrived in the US. Exploring the many features of iPhone was like playing with a new toy. And the last feature that I “played with” was the camera. At first, I wasn’t keen on using the camera, but then I changed my mind after I tested it. It proved to be a very decent and usable camera.

The iPhone has a 2-megapixel, f2.8 camera. The image from the camera has a pixel size of 1600-by-1200, which is roughly a 22-by-16 inch image with a 72 ppi resolution. It has a 4:3 aspect ratio, a bit-depth of 8, and it occupies color space 1 with an sRGB IEC61966-2.1 color profile. And depending on the kind of pictures you take, the file size can vary from anywhere between approximately 200 to 500 kb per image. At 300 dpi, you can easily produce very good photo print the size of 4×5. You can even create a bigger 5×7 print without interpolation and without any noticeable degradation to the image quality.

What surprised me is that, straight from the camera, the colors of the images comes out well. Image after image, the colors are almost well balanced and somewhat accurate. Even in mixed lighting or low-light indoor/night situations, the colors still came out okey. And, other than one’s ability to steadily hand-hold the iPhone to avoid or prevent camera shake that can produce soft or blurry images in very low light, the image noise is actually tolerable and bearable. In other words, the internal image processing of the iPhone is pretty good.

Last week, while I was testing the performance of Aperture in Leopard (with RAW images taken using a Nikon D2Xs camera), I took the opportunity to snap several pictures using my iPhone and subjected them to post-production in Aperture.

What kind of image enhancements did I do? First, I adjusted exposure, saturation, brightness and contrast. Then, I worked on the color balance. After that, I converted a couple of images to black-and-white, and a few others to color monochrome. In selected images, I also applied creative adjustments to see how they will hold up.

Understandably, those taken under low light conditions such as during sunsets and in the evening were prone to artifacts. Editing these types of photos needs to be done delicately. Whenever possible, I reduced the image noise in Aperture as well. Only in one image did I use Noise Ninja to fix it. However, images that have been taken under full day light responded favorably to more aggressive editing and enhancements. I was able to bring out fantastic details from the photographs taken with bright light.

Although the iPhone camera has a lot of severe limitations when compared to a full-blown DSLR, the very lack of features and the way it simplified everything is it’s own blessing. Basically, there’s nothing to tweak. It really is just a very straightforward point-and-shoot affair. The lack of shutter speed, aperture, focus, zoom and other controls will force you to focus more on taking the shot rather than playing with it. And of course, you can see exactly what you are photographing from its gorgeous 3.5-inch (diagonal) widescreen multi-touch display that boasts of 480 by 320 pixel resolution at 163 ppi. And then, direct from the iPhone, you can go ahead and email it right away. The past few days, straight from the camera and without tweaking, I’ve been emailing the untreated iPhone photos to my photo blog.

Of course, in this digital day and age, and with our attachment to digital post-production, I wanted to see if the photos I took with my iPhone can withstand the rigors of image enhancements and editing using mostly Apple’s Aperture and also a bit of Photoshop CS3. Well, I was rather pleased with the results. Despite the fact that I was working with only the very limited RGB “in-camera post-processed” 255 colors, and despite the fact that the histogram immediately turns into a fine-tooth comb with wide ledges and open jogs from missing teeth the moment I started tweaking, the images were actually visually holding up. With careful and subtle image adjustments in both Aperture and Photoshop CS3 such as levels and curves, and with the use of layers, it is actually still very possible to further enhance, work on and be creative with the pictures snapped from the iPhone.

But then again, we of course know that we are pushing it.

Evan Van Zelfden’s coverage of the Project Horseshoe game-design conference reminded me of a striking moment in one of the speeches there. Mike Sellers of Online Alchemy challenged us with this question:

Original CD image by Arun Kulshreshtha

Name a wildly popular entertainment technology that suddenly perished because its stewards didn’t innovate. Here are your clues:

1. It was introduced in the ’70s.
2. It became more popular in the ’80s and hugely popular in the ’90s.
3. By the turn of the century there were 9,000 titles available.
4. By the ’10s it was the dominant entertainment technology in the U.S. and Europe.
5. By the ’20s, everyone who was anyone in entertainment was distributed via this technology.
6. And then, almost overnight, it became irrelevant.

Can you guess? Answer after the jump….

I’ve been really enjoying using my Aperture library to create video slideshows with iMovie 08. I wrote about using the previous version of iMovie for this back in July, but I’ve finally gotten around to spending more time with the new iLife 08, and let me tell you, iMovie ‘08 has made designing video slideshows easier, more flexible, and more intuitive.

As you may know from experience, or from the many online reviews, iMovie has been completely rebuilt in this version, and it bares little resemblance to its predecessor. Additionally, several features that were available in iMovie ‘06 have actually been eliminated from this release, prompting David Pogue of the New York Times to wonder how Apple could release a piece of software with the same name as its predecessor and fewer features. His questions are valid ones, and I don’t disagree that iMovie ‘08 is a completely different experience with a different features set than the software in its lineage. The lack of a traditional timeline and audio editing tools may have some amateur video editors considering a move to Final Cut Express. However, its redesigned tools for creating video slideshows from still photographs are a huge step forward.

When I create a video slideshow in iMovie, my goals are pretty straightforward: I want to specify which photos to use, choose their playback order, pick a duration for each, customize a “Ken Burns effect” zoom-and-pan, add transitions between photos, and maybe add some music and/or titles. Let’s see how easy this is in iMovie:

We’ll start by firing up iMovie and creating a new project. To access our Aperture library we can use the Media Browser: click the little camera icon at the middle of the left side of the screen, or simply press Command-2. Let’s drag a few demo photos from the Photos pane to our Project pane — drop the photos where it says “Drag media here to create a new project”. To reorder the photos, we can click once on a photo so that it is selected with a thick yellow border with two little handles on the right and left sides, then drag and drop to change the order. It’s easy to preview the playback of our project by scrubbing our cursor across the photos and watch the playback in the Viewer to the right.

Drag photos from the Photos pane to your iMovie project

To specify a duration for each photo, we can mouse over a photo and click the little clock badge that appears in the lower left corner. From the sheet that appears we can choose a duration for this photo only, or change the duration of all the photos in the slideshow. Now, let’s customize a zoom-and-pan with the Ken Burns effect — this is the redesigned workflow that I really love. Mouse over a photo and click the little crop badge that appears in the upper left. In the Viewer, be sure that “Ken Burns” is selected from the three tabs at the top left. To customize the effect, we can just resize and move the green Start box and the red End box. A yellow arrow helps us understand the movement that will take place. This is so much easier than in the previous version of iMovie. Preview the animation by clicking the preview icon in the upper right of the Viewer. When we’re satisfied, just click Done and the effect is applied.

Customizing zoom-and-pan with the Ken Burns effect

Adding titles and transitions is pretty straightforward: turn on their respective panes by pressing Command-3 and Command-4. Drag and drop from their panes to the Project pane; customize as desired. All in all, it’s possible to create a compelling, polished video slideshow really quickly. We can add a music track by showing the Music pane (Command-1), and dragging a song to the background (gray area) of the Project pane.

When you have some time to experiment, try creating a few video slideshows in iMovie. When you’re done, you can try the cool new built-in YouTube export. It’s super slick to be able to publish a video to YouTube with only a few clicks and no plugins or external tools. Give it a shot: I’d also love to hear about your impressions of the new iMovie and see links to any iMovie slideshows in the comments.

About a week ago, my Apple G5 tower suffered a fatal crash. Initially it just froze up - upon restarting, it froze again in several minutes. Sadly, earlier that day, the hard drive I backup all of my business files to also crashed so at that point I had to get the information off my G5 tower as quickly as possible. Luckily I was able to get the information off and all of my important data before the G5 tower wouldn’t start up at all.

I find it quite amazing how unreliable hard drives are - and I seem to have some of the worst luck of any photographer I know when it comes to faulty hard drives. As a result I back everything up on a minimum of three devices. For my images they are always on at least two hard drives and burned to DVD for offsite storage. My computer is also backed up completely to an external hard drive each night. And every few days I back it up to a third hard drive just in case. I have had four hard drives crash on me this year alone.

I have used several methods of backing up my main computer - LaCie’s Silverkeeper, Superduper and others. The point is to find something that works for your system and be vigilant. I covered backing up Lightroom catalogs in a previous post. You can check that out here.

Because I back up my entire computer’s hard drive I have not been using the Lightroom back up solution. My Lightroom catalogs are already backed up each and every night when I run SilverKeeper. And since I have many catalogs - sometimes one catalog for a single set of images it would be a pain to have to go through and let Lightroom back up all of the catalogs individually.

Whatever your systems, I would say backup your images and important information to a minimum of three locations. And whatever your backup solution, whether you use Lightroom’s very good backup option or a different method make sure it is robust and can withstand a fairly severe catastrophe. If your office or home burns down do you have your images and important information somewhere else?

This week’s blog post is just a cautionary tale for those of you out there that have never had a hard drive fail. It happens much more often than hard drive makers like to talk about. Luckily, with my many backups, I was up and running within a few hours on my laptop and will have my tower either repaired or replaced this week.

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

Adios, Michael Clark

With 486 comments at last count, our discussion on the Zoom H2 handheld surround recorder is teeming with questions and tips. One of the latest struck me, because I’d been wondering about this myself. Reader Lee Wong wrote:

Help! Does anyone have a schematic they can share for making a really small, portable preamp so I can stick my Soundman OKM II mics in to the H2?

Within hours, reader Gershon responded with this link to reader Trevor Marshall’s home-built preamp. Here’s a photo of the outside; the inside looks nothing like I expected, given the promise of high fidelity. (I won’t ruin the surprise; click the photo below to see it.)

Trevor Marshall’s DIY microphone preamp for the Zoom H2 reportedly provides much better quality.

Don’t miss our extensive review of the Zoom H2 and follow-up article on turning its recordings into surround-sound DVDs.

I’m in Washington D.C. right now, finishing up a two day shoot for a PR firm. The assignment was to cover a trilateral summit of the three main patent offices in the world. Everything went according to plan. Thursday evening I covered their dinner and reception, which took place in the National Portrait Gallery after closing time. It was really cool to be able to walk the halls of the gallery without anyone around. While the guests were eating I had a chance to check out some really amazing photographic portraits as well as some iconic Andy Warhol images of Marilyn Monroe and Michael Jackson.

The client is interested in creating a photo book with a selection of the images, but they have told me that they will handle the design and post-production phase. I pointed out what you can do with iPhoto and a few other online book makers and they seemed very excited.

So for this project the goal was to simply deliver to the client a DVD of original images. I chose to shoot RAW+Jpeg for the entire two day shoot as I though it would benefit me in a number of ways during post-production. If all of the sudden the client needed the images I would be able to quickly burn them a DVD of the Jpegs on-site without even opening Aperture. I could also burn them the RAW and Jpeg images very easily and in two separate folders using an Automator script if need be.

However, the deadline was not so harsh and so I was able to take the shoot home and import everything into Aperture. After looking through the images I realized that the artificial lighting in the various rooms I had been shooting had thrown my auto-white balance meter off in a few directions.

According to my agreement with the client I could easily burn everything to DVD and call it a day, but I decided to at least try and fix the white-balance issue, so that when they opened the images they wouldn’t have a heart attack.

A few white balance eye-dropper corrections in Aperture, followed by some lifting and stamping and I was finished. They weren’t perfect, but at least now they all sort of match and are in the ball-park.

I exported the shoot as full-res Jpegs so they could have something to work with right away. However, since many of the images could benefit from some additional manipulation, I decided to include the RAW images as well. Many photographers fret over whether or not to deliver RAW images. I think it really depends on the client and the purpose of the photography. For this type of job, I have no problem with it. For a job where my artistic vision was more important to me, I would probably put up a fight if asked for RAW images.

Rather than deliver a folder full of Canon CR2 files I decided to convert the images to DNG, embedding the CR2 files as well. This at least makes me feel better in that the client will have more software options if they choose to use the RAW files.

Burn both folders to a couple of DVDs, drop in the FedEx box and my job is done.

This whole DNG/RAW format has had me thinking though. If the powers that be could get together in a fashion similar to the trilateral summit I just covered, we could really make some serious headway. I will have more on the DNG format next week. Until then, try out the DNG export plugin I created last week. You can download it and read all about it at Aperture Plugged In.

A few days ago John Nack posted an interesting story on his Adobe Blog. The title of which being, “Photoshop, as seen through Johnny Cash”. The article compares the development of Photoshop over the last twenty years as being very similar to the story in the Johnny Cash song, One Piece at a Time. In the song Johnny Cash presents himself as a Cadillac assembly line worker who stole individual parts of a Cadillac over a period of twenty years and when he finally assembled it not all the parts fit together seamlessly and the car looked kind of funny but it ran well, like a Cadillac should.

The point of the story being that although Adobe Photoshop is a top class application and arguably performs better than any other competing graphics arts application, it is not very pretty and many think it is badly in need of a graphic user interface overhaul, as well as a judicious pruning of some fairly obviously obsolete functions. A possibility that he also hinted at is that Adobe may opt to produce various versions of Photoshop for different industries and professions, or that the application can be configured more easily and completely to suit the individual user.

What he goes to great pains to explain to his readers though, is that Adobe is not intending to revolutionize the Photoshop experience, but rather to continue down the well trodden evolutionary path of Adobe Photoshop user interface and feature development and not throw out anything that could be of possible use to anyone. Kind of like getting married to a new wife every couple of years to keep up the appearance of vitality, but keeping all the old wives in the house because they are needed to take care of the children. In the process some of the rooms and joint family activities will inevitably end up getting pretty messy.

Oddly enough Photoshop Lightroom is not mentioned even once in this article. I say oddly because not long ago Adobe went to great pains, to make us aware of the fact that Lightroom is indeed a member of the Photoshop Family of applications. What that tells me is that Adobe is planning to go into two (or maybe even three) separate directions with the Photoshop Family.

The old Photoshop (or as I like to call it, Photoshop Classic) will remain pretty much the same as it is now and continue to evolve for many years to come, until the user numbers fall too low to support further development.

The new Photoshop (Lightroom being the first of this group) will be cloned into separate but equal applications for a new generation of graphic arts professionals who are either new to Photoshop or willing to adopt a new way of doing things. My guess (actually my wish) would be a Photoshop Webroom (or maybe Webstudio) will be the next one in this series. I can also imagine a version of Photoshop Lightroom that is designed for photo retouching only with a simple browser interface instead of the current Library system and no Web or Slideshow modules.

I don’t want to go to far into conjecture concerning specific versions here, but I think by now you might understand what I am aiming at. Everything that the “Classic” Photoshop now does can be offered in a number of separate software packages using the Lightroom Graphic User Interface. As long as the “Classic” Photoshop version is still available this should not really upset anyone, and if I am right it would explain why there is so much overlap between the current Photoshop CS and Photoshop Lightroom applications.

One of the very few annoying things in my Lightroom Experience has been what I perceived as the awkwardness of storing and moving my photographs to different media and drives as my work moved along. Often, in fact, if I was shooting a big job for one client, I’d just do all the “Lightroom” processing for that job in Camera Raw and store those files in their own folder. After all, I’m not usually going to use those photos to submit as stock or sell as fine art. To boot, not having hundreds of 16MB files in the Lightroom Library speeds everything else up quite a bit.

I knew that Lightroom 1.1+ makes it a lot easier to create separate catalogs for different purposes, but I was just lazy enough to stick with the system I had. The irony is, now that I’m working in a foreign country with only one computer at my disposal (my laptop, of course), working with one catalog is getting to be more, rather than less problematical. The main reason for that is that there just isn’t enough room on my laptop hard drive for the library of pictures I want to have at my disposal;especially since I’m wanting to spend a lot of my time here creating collections for submission to various stock agencies.

I see Visual VST/i Programming: Synthedit is out now. I haven’t sighted it yet, but it includes some of my custom SynthEdit modules, so it is quite fun for me. SynthEdit is a shareware application for PC that is a kind of modular synthesizer; it gained a lot of traction early because it had one killer feature in particular: you could save your creation as a VST and sell it or use it in other sequencer or studio applications. (Actually, it gained traction because it is fun.) I

SynthEdit comes out of New Zealand and has a public API, which has meant that there is quite a rich variety of custom modules, programmed with C++. SynthEdit modules are notoriously CPU hungry: a combination of a design preference that disliked zipper noise and the fact that it is quite easy to make big creations. The custom modules go a long way to help performance but still SynthEdit has a legacy problem that many modules are not compiled to use the SSE2 or SSE3 pipelining instructions of the recent generation of CPUs. So it is good to see that the book has a section on optimization: I see in the sample page of the link above that my 2 cents on optimization made it (which is to set your interface up to discourage long release times) so I suppose I must consider the authors very sound fellows!

From the look of the table of contents, Fortune, Schoffhauzer and Haupt (who are all active on the Synthedit group at Yahoo! Groups: most of the modules are sourced from participants there, it is a great community) have a useful book on their hands.

There has been a long (five years?) wait for the next version of SynthEdit. The developer puts an absolute priority on getting any problems with the current version fixed fast, and has worked on a couple of releases of the API first. Apparently the new version of the API will be available real soon now, but it is obviously a labour of love and pride, not of deadlines, which I find pretty admirable. What would be great would be some book on the API too, but that would have to wait for the new release, and perhaps be too specialized.

I haven’t used List View in Aperture so much, because List View seemed to be one long boring list of text. But List View is full of suprises.

List View can be transformed with a simple slide of the Thumbnails Sizing Bar. Slide it to the right and watch those little boxes transform into colorful little thumbnail images. What’s more, when you summon the loupe and drag it over the thumbnails, you can see a 100 per cent view of that image!

Boring List View

Almost sexy List View

Sexiest List View when using the loupe, which works on any thumbnail anywhere in Aperture

Suddenly List View has come alive and I’m going to see just how handy it can be.

By typing CMD J, you call up the View Options, under which you have a choice of List View Basic or Expanded. Expanded adds a few extra options, like Captions, Keywords, Copyright etc.

Cmd J Brings up View Options

You can sort by any of the fields in List View, just click on the field title. If you want to see all of your photos in a particular project or album sorted by Focal Length for example, just click on that field title (focal length) and Aperture does the sorting from wide to tele. Click on the arrow to reverse the sorted order from long lens to wide.

When you switch back to Grid View, the images are still sorted by Focal Length and Focal Length remains in the sorting drop-down menu.

Sort by focal length, even in Grid View

By dragging the title field in List View to the right or left, you can customize the order in which the columns appear to suit your needs. I moved the Caption and File Name and Master Location to the right of Version Name, but you can customize the various columns any way you want. List Views as sexy browser? Who new?

In Leopard, and with the latest version of Aperture, it is easier and faster than ever to email photos that are inside Aperture. You don’t even need to open Aperture to do it. You can email photos from your Aperrture library direct from within Mail.

In Mail, when you click on New Message, you will notice two new buttons on the upper right hand corner of the pane. The first button is Photo Browser and the other is Show Stationery. When you are replying to an email instead of creating a new one, the Show Stationery button will not be available but the Photo Browser button will still be there.

Click on the Photo Browser and you will see that all the images from your active and currently selected Aperture library are there. You can see the photos in List View or Icon View, and when necessary, you can open an image in Aperture from there. Select and drag the images you want in your email, resize accordingly, type in a few quick notes, click on the send button, and your email with the photos from Aperture is on its way.

In the past, I realized that the times when I most wanted to show photos to clients or to share with my associates are when I am writing an email. It just make sense this way, and Apple has addressed this matter. I’ve always wanted a quick and convenient way to be able to email the photos from a shoot.

In Aperture’s previous version, and in Tiger, the way to email photos is by exporting them to an Email. You still can do this, but the Photo Browser in Mail saves you time and reduces the number of clicks. It seems more convenient by doing it from within Mail itself.

However, you will notice that the versions of the images you may have created while working in Aperture do not show up in the Photo Browser. If you want to email the versions instead of the original shot, you still have to go inside Aperture, and do the usual, which is to export to an Email.

Despite this minor limitation, the new Photo Browser feature of Aperture from within Mail is a fantastic idea that extends its functionality.

Like Michah over on the Inside Aperture blog, I was surprised to see the InfoTrends RAW workflow tool survey numbers that John Nack of Adobe published last week. If you haven’t seen them yet, they basically indicate that about 2/3rds of the serious photographers out there are still using Photoshop and the Camera RAW plugin as their main workflow.

On the one hand, Lightroom and Aperture reflect a way of working with digital photographs that’s pretty new. Aperture opened up this market in late 2005 and Lightroom just shipped this year. In that light, the market penetration by Lightroom and Aperture is pretty impressive. On the Mac, Lightroom clocks in with a 26.6% of the survey responses, and Aperture at 5.5%. Pretty impressive really, especially with Lightroom doing so well in its first year as a released product.

On the other hand, for me—and I’d expect most people who have been working with either Aperture or Lightroom for more than six months—it seems almost crazy that there are photographers that are working with different tools. What’s the deal with that? Don’t they know what they are doing to themselves? Oh, the horror!

It’s easy to forget that people fall into different categories when it comes to technology. There are the crazy ones who adopt as early as they can in the curve, and then keep on moving as fast as they can. That’s me, an early adopter to a tee. And, it may be (probably is?) you. Then, there are those that keep their pulse on things and then jump when the cost/benefit analysis looks favorable. And, then the last group are those that want to use the time tested methods and are only willing to jump when all the bumps have been smoothed out.

I think that in the adoption of tools like Lightroom and Aperture, we’re just starting to welcome people from these last two camps to the party. As evidence, Scott Kelby reports from his Photoshop CS3 Power Tour New York yesterday:

But what surprised me most was what turned out to be the #1 most-asked question of the day, which was, “What is Lightroom?” I kept referring to Lightroom throughout my first session (assuming everybody at least knew what it was), and as soon as the session was over, I had a line of people all asking what was this “Lightroom thing” I kept talking about.

Lightroom and Aperture are both early in their product development cycles, each still in their 1.x phase. As both the wider population of photographers hear about what you can do with these kinds of tools, and as they make the run towards 2.0 in the nearish future, I think we’re going to see a lot more people ask the “What is Lightroom?” question. Followed quickly by “So, How does it help me?”

I think level of discussion on the digital photographic workflow is going to uptick another few notches over the next few months. Get ready for a lot more discussion on the matter in your own circle of photographer friends and out on the forums.

Not all of us have bleeding–edge hardware to run their processor and memory–hungry software on (*cough* Lightroom and Aperture *cough*). My mobile machine — a 3–year old 15” Powerbook (1.5 GHz G4 w/ 1.5 GB RAM) — is definitely showing its age when processing and displaying RAW files, and it doesn’t even hold a candle (color temperature: 1850 K) to the machines that are currently rolling off the assembly lines.

However, Lightroom is by no means a slouch on older hardware — especially when compared to its archrival, Aperture. But restraints and limitations can blossom into creative solutions, and I’ve gradually adapted my mobile workflow to adapt to the machine I’m working on. In doing so, I’ve come to learn and understand Lightroom’s nooks and crannies much better than I would have if I didn’t need to coax as much performace out of my laptop as I have.

In case you haven’t noticed, part one of my article on backing up with Aperture is now posted on Inside Aperture. Part two will cover online solutions, but I received an email yesterday about a solution I didn’t cover in the article. I wanted to take a minute to mention this new service, SpiderOak.

The basic idea is similar to other services, like Mozy, where your files are uploaded to an encrypted, remote server. However, there are a number of key differences. SpiderOak actually creates versions of your files, instead of just uploading the latest copy, and the versions are updated each time the file changes. Furthermore, multiple computers can share the same SpiderOak account. One very interesting concept is that SpiderOak can act like your iDisk, too, in that since multiple computers can access it, you can login and retrieve a file whenever you need to. Their free client tool is cross-platform, and you could even login from a PC (unfortunately this also means that it doesn’t behave or look quite like a native application).

The most unique idea is their concept of “share rooms.” Essentially, you have the ability to setup sets of files that different groups of people could access. For example, you might make a NetworkShare so that a group of people can work on a set of files, like your website, together. You might make another ShareRoom with a set of edited images for a client to download, available for a given number of days at a special URL. Plus, because the images are stored on SpiderOak, you don’t have to worry about creating a backup of the client’s images. As long as your images are in a format that SpiderOak can understand, when you look at the share in a web browser, you’ll see thumbnails and large previews of your images. There is even a slideshow feature!

I spent a few minutes playing with a trial account (2GB of storage free) yesterday, and it seems straightforward. From what I can tell, to really take advantage of their system, it’s best if you have referenced files. Even if you have managed files, every change you make to your images in an external editor will be versioned and backed up, but it’s easier to setup shares of your photos if you don’t have to dig through the Aperture library to find your files. No, I haven’t experimented with how the versioning works with an Aperture database, but I would imagine that it has similar problems to Time Machine–if you backup while Aperture is running and then restore from that backup, your Aperture database might end up in a bad state. I, like many of you, am still waiting for a backup solution that handles Aperture libraries in a smart way.

All that being said, if you want a generic, one-stop, automatic online backup solution for multiple machines that also lets you access your files remotely, SpiderOak might fit that bill! At the very least, their free trial account is worth checking out, and for $10/month, you receive up to 20GB of storage.

After 8 years, several hard drive upgrades, and a great lifetime of service, my daughter made our Series 1 TiVo go boom the other day. She knocked over the TV, the TiVo, and our DVD player/recorder. In the end, daughter was fine (albeit in big trouble), the HDTV also survived without a problem. The antennas on both the TiVo and DVD player ended up at about 45-degree angles off where they should be. Within hours, the TiVo reception had degraded to unwatchable.

A quick google turned up this TV Squad post that mentioned a Series 1 upgrade to HDTV TiVo for $500–$300 for the unit, $200 to transfer the lifetime service. I pulled out my long-suffering Visa card and ante’ed up.

In theory, this offer goes until November 8th. In reality, TiVo offers this kind of upgrade pretty regularly. Last year, transferring service would have cost me almost $1000. This year, it’s half the price. And next year, I expect the price to drop further.

What’s more, given the ready availability of really inexpensive tuners and scheduling systems like Elgato’s EyeTV, TiVo has to fight back not only with their great interface, beautiful remote, and vaunted reliability, but also with price.

George “the Fat Man” Sanger with his hand-tuned 1958 Rolls-Royce. He learned auto repair keeping it going; at one point he had almost enough tools and spare parts in the trunk to build another engine.

I’m just back from my 14^th trip to Texas to participate in one of the Fat Man’s amazing digital media conferences. This one was called Project Horseshoe, and dedicated to “solving game design’s toughest problems.” (That’s my back in the photo on the site; the image was from last year’s event, in which I ran a brainstorming group tasked with exploring how — and if — video games could become artistically “legitimate.”)

Videogame journalist Evan Van Zelfden was covering this year’s event, and just published this teaser. In the comments on that article, though, was a link to an earlier article about the Fat Man’s game music, and I found it mighty interesting reading.

Look for more detail from Evan over the next week, and the full reports from all four of this year’s brainstorming groups next month. If history holds, this improbable but beloved conference will have far-reaching results.

Last week I discussed a technique for adjusting white balance in the Develop module of Lightroom. While writing that blog I thought it might be instructive to blog about how I work in the Basic Panel (right hand panel) in the Develop Module. In general I work with the Develop module set up as below so I can see the image large. I will usually also snap off the upper and lower sections of the interface and have just the image, the toolbar and the right hand panel open. When I need to sync images I’ll open the filmstrip.

The image below is from a recent shoot in White Sands, New Mexico. The images were shot using battery powered strobes and a custom white balance was used. I always shoot raw images with my Nikon D2x- so when they come into Lightroom the images can sometimes be a little overexposed (exposing to the right) and washed out to some degree - strobes are pretty much the cat’s meow for digital so these images looked quite good already when I started working them up. Below are the before and after versions of the image in Lightroom.

Before

After

As you can see above, even with a custom white balance set in-camera Lightroom reads the image on import with a significant warm green cast. So now let’s move onto how I use the basic panel in the develop module.

First off, I check the Recovery slider, holding down the Option key (Mac) as I move the slider to see if any highlights are blown out. I’ll recover as much highlight information as I can but there shouldn’t be too much blown out if I exposed correctly. If there are metallic or reflective objects in the image I won’t try to recover all of that information as it should be blown out - I can deal with that in Photoshop. Next, I’ll move down to the Blacks slider and do the same. I don’t want my blacks blocked up completely but a little isn’t the end of the world. I find the default of 5 is pretty close to where I want this slider for most of my images. If the image is a silhouette then I might even try to block up the blacks to force a pure silhouette.

My next move is to adjust the Clarity, Vibrance then Contrast and Brightness in that order. Since all of these affect the white balance as I wrote in last weeks blog I save white balance for last - unless it is so far off I can’t work with anything else - then I’ll make a quick white balance adjustment, get it into the ball park and continue with my normal sequence.

I am very careful with Saturation, Vibrance and Contrast as those can really affect how an image prints - especially if it is going to a magazine and will be converted to the CMYK color space. Clarity is very subtle so go wild there if you want. Saturation I never go more than +15. Many times I’ll decrease saturation, especially with skin tones. And with contrast it is rare that I go above 40. Again these numbers are relative to my clients and how the images are used.

Hence, my basic workflow starts in the Tone box and then moves to the Presence box and back up to the white balance. For my work efficiency is king and this method of working makes for a very fast workflow in the actual image processing phase.

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

Adios, Michael Clark

It looks like the upcoming release of Lightroom, which is supposed to bring compatibility with Leopard, may bring more. Todd Dominey wrote the following on the SlideShowPro News blog:

A frequent request from many, I’m pleased to announce that in the coming weeks we’ll be offering a plugin for Adobe Lightroom, the Windows / OS X photo management and editing software developed for professional photographers.

SlideShowPro looks interesting, and being able to have more output options from Lightroom is a good thing. But, hello! This might (emphasis on might, I know nothing, I’m not under NDA, etc) mean that the long awaited SDK is about to be ready to go. If so, that’s great news and will be a welcome feature in the next version of Lightroom.

Prior to Leopard, when I needed to switch between Aperture and another application, I always used a variation on basically the same technique:

1. Launch Aperture.
2. When I needed to switch to another app, press Command-H to hide Aperture.
3. If necessary, press Command-Tab to switch to the second application with the Application Switcher.
4. Repeat steps 2 and 3 to switch back to Aperture.

The Command-H step may seem silly, but I like to keep my screen as tidy as possible, seeing Aperture’s window in the background always drives me crazy (unless I’m trying to drag-and-drop into it). So when Leopard introduced virtual desktops with Spaces, I figured I’d give this new feature a try.

How great are these new drop-shadowed screenshots from Leopard?

I dug around the Spaces System Preferences and decided to assign Aperture its own Space. I left the shortcut to switch between Spaces at the default Ctrl-Arrow Keys. Then I decided to force myself to put the kibosh on Command-H and tried interacting with Aperture like this:

1. Launch Aperture. My screen shifts to the left and Aperture opens fullscreen in its own virtual desktop.
2. When I need to switch to another application, I press the Control-Left Arrow shortcut and Aperture slides away.
3. I switch back to Aperture with Control-Right Arrow.

Now this may not seem that different than my old technique. And at first, I must admit that I didn’t see the value in Spaces. But a happy accident occurred and showed me the light: I used the Spaces technique while Aperture was in Full Screen mode. Without thinking about it, I switched away from Aperture and went and typed an email. But when I switched back to Aperture with Control-Right Arrow, it was still in Full Screen mode.

Ding ding ding ding! We have a winner! My Adjustments HUD was right where I left it and the photos I was working on were still in place. This is incredibly cool. I spend most of my time adjusting photos in Full Screen mode, so this simple little trick has completely changed the way I interact with Aperture.

Give it a try. And please share any other Aperture/Leopard tips and tricks in the comments. I’d love to hear other ways Leopard is changing the way you use Aperture.

The sun in the photo below apparently frames the northern tower of the Golden Gate Bridge in a perfect circle. In fact, there are apparently three “suns” in the photo. One sun is real, two of them are optical artifacts. The fake suns, including the perfect one framing the Golden Gate tower are caused by an optical phenomenon called double refraction. Double refraction is also called birefringence.

My Three Suns, photo by Harold Davis. View this image larger.

In double refraction, each ray of light separates into two rays (the “ordinary” ray and the “extraordinary” ray) when the light heads through the lens. The extra suns are in my photo caused by the extraordinary rays. The birefringence effect is dependent on how the light is polarized.

Normally, you’d want to avoid something like double refraction in your photos (although, avoid as much as can, you’ll likely see some if you shoot directly into the sun with a long lens as I did in this photo).

But a few nights ago I was feeling bored, and I knew I had more than enough photos in my files for my Golden Gate book, so I amplified the effect by adding a polarizing filter in front of my lens, and rotating the outer ring of the filter to change the direction of polarization until the subsidiary “sun” was in position.

This is the only photo in the set where I got it exactly right, so try and try again is the motto if you want to go for this effect yourself. Adding a polarizer with its infinite variety of possible settings increases by an order of magnitude the complexity of finding the right photo settings under deadline (in this case, the drop-dead event was the sun sinking beneath the horizon).

[375mm in 35mm terms, circular polarizer, 1/750 of a second at f/9 and ISO 100, tripod mounted.]

A lesser-hyped feature of Leopard is its inclusion of a number of new raw formats. This page shows a complete list of all of the raw formats now supported in Leopard. A quick peak shows that Apple has snuck in a couple of newer models such as the Canon EOS D40. So, with Leopard, Aperture, iPhoto, the Finder, and Preview — all support the full assortment of raw formats shown. This is great news for those who have a newer camera, but hopefully Apple will provide some kind of update for those who don’t want to, or can’t upgrade to Leopard.

Here are a few more new cameras supported… just in case you don’t feel like parsing them out of the overall list on the Apple doc:
Olympus EVOLT E-400
Olympus EVOLT E-410
Olympus EVOLT E-510
Leica V-LUX 1
Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ50

One final note… site editor Derrick Story laments that his Canon PowerShot G7 didn’t make the cut.

This post is a continuation of last weeks post on Exporting and Saving JPEG images for website use. I’m not a software engineer so I can’t explain what really goes on with this application aside from that it makes the process of preparing JPEG images for use on public and personal internet websites a lot easier.

There are three ways to use PictureSync with Lightroom (illustrated below), Export (with the full dialog), Export - with PictureSync Preset, and using the PictureSync application as the alternate external image editor and selecting Edit with - PictureSync.

This image was exported from Lightroom using PictureSync.

The full Export dialog using the PictureSync Preset and manual settings.

The Export with PictureSync Preset menu command.

Using PictureSync as the alternate external Lightroom image editor.

PictureSync can of course be used both for individual and batch processing of JPEG image files intended for internet website use. PictureSync is usually only $15 for use on picture sharing sites such as Flickr but for use with Aperture, Expression Media and Lightroom the “Pro” fee is $30. If you do as much web work as I do it is well worth it though.

I was surprised to see the results of a survey conducted by Info Trends and posted on the blog of Adobe’s own John Nack. The survey, (which I wasn’t able to find at the InfoTrends website) claims that out of 1026 professional photographers in North America, 66.5% are using the Photoshop Camera Raw plug-in, 23.6% are using Lightroom, and 5.5% are using Aperture.

Before I get into what I really think these numbers mean, I would like to point out a few things about the survey. Obviously, since I haven’t seen the “actual” survey results, I really can’t say much for sure, but I will do my best. First of all the sample size is pretty small at only 1026 photographers, and having the region limited to North America could certainly say something about the results. The other main point that I think Nack overlooked was the definition of term “professional.” Both Aperture and Lightroom are billed as pro level applications, but I am sure that a large portion of their respective users range anywhere from serious amateurs to hobbyists, to semi-pros and more. In fact it wouldn’t surprise me at all to find out that a large portion of Aperture users fall into that new category of “pro-sumer.” Man, I hate that word!

That being said, Nack did mention the fact that Lightroom and Photoshop are both Mac and Windows applications. My other big peeve is that the survey is attempting to determine how many people use these applications for “RAW” processing. I happen to know that Aperture does much more than RAW processing (yes, Lightroom also fits this bill) and in fact I know many people who use Aperture to edit and manage their point-and-shoot Jpeg libraries.

So, aside from this being a far from conclusive report, what else can we really take from it? Well for one thing, there is definitely a HUGE need for some evangelism here! My personal belief is that software like Lightroom and Aperture are really the way of the future. The concept of non-destructive image editing is so important to preserving our artwork and history that it really needs to be talked about more.

When I was in college we had a whole department devoted to the preservation of imagery. They dealt with things like ultraviolet light and acid-free storage containers. It was all in the name of preserving our historical documents that we photographers like to call photographs. Now in the digital age we have different issues. Trying to figure out how to deal with file formats and storage media was one thing, and we still haven’t quite got it right, but the actual treatment of the files and how they get stored, backed up and organized is also a huge hurdle we face with digital media.

So why is it that 66.5% of these North American Professional Photographers are using Photoshop as their main RAW processing device? Does that mean that they are using the Finder to edit and organize their shoot? Or perhaps they are using one of the other image management applications like PhotoMechanic or Extensis Portfolio, or iView-Media Pro (oops, I meant to say Microsoft Expression Media).

Personally I think it is all about a willingness to try new things. I am one of those people who is fascinated by the next latest and greatest “thing.” I update my software as soon as it comes out, and I experiment with just about every imaging application out there on the market today. Yes, I do have a copy of Lightroom installed on my machine, and yes I do read the Lightroom version of this same blog, but for me it has always been Aperture. I’ve written extensively about my opinion of the two apps, but I have never really talked about how much I believe programs like Aperture AND Lightroom are so important compared to the old Finder-Photoshop workflow.

So how can we band together and evangelize this stuff? Obviously there is a small rift between the Lightroom and Aperture users, but to me that’s essentially the same as Canon Vs. Nikon, or Ford Vs. Chevy, or boxers vs. briefs. It’s all personal preference when you get down to it.

What we really need is a community of “photographers.” Not just “professional” photographers, but EVERYONE who uses this stuff. We need to get together in some way and make the world understand how important it is to preserve their digital imagery. If we don’t, years from now, we will wind up in the same boat we did with film–millions of digital shoeboxes filled with who knows what.

I’ve discovered myself forgetting to make settings in my files that I have discovered need making for virtually every image I shoot with my current ca’mera. All I have to do to set those settings without changing the settings that I want to set individually for every picture is to click the Reset button to return all the settings to their defaults. Then I set such sliders as Clarity, Vibrance, Sharpening, and any noise reduction that I tend to need at ISO 200 (for the rare shots that don’t use ISO 200, I can always change that setting for the appropriate group of selected images). I then create a Preset named Pentax10D (my current camera model). You may have other settings that are fairly consistent for you. Or you could create presets for several different types of shoots and use those on the appropiate occasions. When the Preset dialog appears (see below), be sure to turn off all the settings that you don’t want to have changed when the Preset you created for your camera runs.

Next, I go to Auto Import > Auto Import Settings. You can see the dialog below. I set the Watched Folder for the drive that the OS automatically assigns to my card reader. I create a folder that has the date and location or client of the shoot as it’s name. For Filename, I choose Filename. I’d like to preface the file name with the client name or photo category, but I can’t do that without loosing the camera’s original filename. I like to keep those letters that precede the number of the shot because they immediately identify the camera brand that was used. This won’t mean anything to folks who stick with one brand, however. Personally, I find that difficult given all the rapid changes that are happening in digital photography at this point in history.

Now comes the good part: Open the Develop Settings menu and choose Pentax10D–or whatever camera you made the pre-sets for. I have also set up a Metadata pre-set that contains all my copyright information. So now you know that all your files have your notice attached to their metadata, not that it can’t be erased, but at least you can show that you put it there.

Finally, since I change this dialog’s settings every time I insert a card, this dialog show up as soon as I put the card into the slot. So I just add those two or three keywords that will work for every image–such as the name of the general locale or location they were shot it. If there’s only one subject type (such as Fashion or Wedding, I put that in, too. I also check the Render Standard Size previews box.

Further to the Time/Machine backup issue, Inside Aperture viewer Bill Cheeseman is on top of this issue for us, commenting on my last post about new information that Apple has posted.

You no doubt saw the warning that “Running Time Machine backup or restore operations while Aperture is running may lead to inconsistencies in the Aperture database.”

The fix was quite simple and just before writing this, I dedicated an empty hard drive as my Time Machine Backup Drive and excluded my Aperture Libraries. Apple suggests you keep this disc only for Time Machine backups and nothing else.

It was very easy following Apple’s directions for excluding Aperture Libraries from automatic back ups. I simply followed Apple’s updated instructions.

“If you use Time Machine with Leopard, be sure to set Time Machine to exclude the Aperture Library from automatic backups. To do so:
1. Open Time Machine.
2. Click the Options button.
3. Click the “+” button in the Do not back up window.
4. Use the resulting file browser to navigate to the location of your Aperture Library. The default location is ~/Pictures/Aperture Library (where “~” represents your home folder).
5. Click the Exclude button.
6. Click the Done button.

Note that this means that your Aperture Library will not be backed up by Time Machine. Be sure to manually back up your Aperture Library.”

If you have any external Hard Drives plugged in, they should automatically be listed in the “Do Not Back Up” window. However, I have two drives inside my G5 Tower, one with my system on it that I want backed up, and a larger drive with Aperture libraries that i don’t.

Your external hard drives that are plugged in and the Time Machine disc itself should also show up along with the Aperture Library you have chosen not to backup.

So I hit the + button again, and navigated to my second internal drive and excluded that drive as well from Time Machine backups.

Once you’ve set up your disc for Time Machine, when you click on the icon in your dock, (if it’s not there, check your Applications Folder) your screen takes you on a very cool journey into a deep space desktop, where you can go back in time to restore lost information easily. It’s a very cool interface. Just press escape to get back to where you started.

I’m still using managed Aperture libraries on external hard drives with vaults, a simple backup solution that works well.

But I like the idea of having my entire library of referenced images with high quality previews with me on the road and I’m thinking of going the referenced route. But with referenced libraries, I will have to have my own backup workflow instead of letting Vaults do all the work.

I hear good things about certain backup software like Chrono Sync, but I would love to renew the discussion on how you backup your Aperture Libraries in light of this Leopard/Time Machine issue. Post your comments here.