Without doubt, the most welcomed features of Aperture 2.0 are several new image adjustment features included in the program You can almost close your eyes and point them out because they’re so clearly evident. While I greatly welcome the new Lightroom-like features such as vignetting and vibrancy, when I tried out the little feature called Definition, all I could say was, sweeeet.

We all know that both Aperture and Lightroom basically make adjustments to the entire image when they are applied, but with Aperture 2.0, Apple has included Definition as a way of adding local contrast when adjusting an image. Basically it seems to add more contrast to a Contrast adjustment. While the latter affects the entire image, the Definition adjustment affects more local areas, helping to further get rid of haze in the photo.

You can see the changes when applied, but sometimes using the Loupe tool will help you see the changes even better.

Before Definition adjustment:

After Definition adjustment

When I read that Aperture 2.0 had been released today, I couldn’t resist setting aside responsibilities today so that I could get my hands on the updated version. After spending a couple of hours with 2.0, I can honestly that despite its “over 100 dramatic, new features” there’s little or no learning curve to getting up and running with the updated program.

If you’re avid Apple use, and if you have been using a previous version of Aperture for a while, then you’ll feel right at home with 2.0. However, if you need to know more about the new features, such as setting up your camera for tethered shooting or customizing keyboard shortcuts for Aperture, there’s no better place to look than Apple’s very own resource page of video tutorials.

Rarely have I seen a software program receive such a wealth of audiovisual tutorial support, for free! With these tutorials available on Apple’s site, you can always have access to them as you learn about the new features. While these tutorials may not take the place of a good manual book on the program, they make for a very thorough introduction.

I am in Chicago this week, doing a photo shoot for the campaign of Fusion. Fusion is a new yoga school partly owned and operated by my good friend, a yoga master and instructor, Juanita Monaghan. The past two months, I’ve been traveling and I’ve been getting valuable first-hand education on what it actually feels like to be mostly doing on-location pictorials.

Before this constant traveling, and for the past 15 years, I’ve been shooting almost exclusively inside the comfortably controlled confines of a photo studio. Sure I’ve done quite a number of location shoots in the past, but not on a very regular basis (meaning, not all the time). Shooting on location almost all of the time is therefore a somewhat new experience for me and I’m in the process of getting used to it. I am a fish out of the water, so to speak, but hopefully, not for long.

I am guessing that many if not most photographers who are using Aperture are shooters whose work and passion takes them to interesting locations both far and near. These are photographers who may be shooting in some of the most exciting places but maybe under unpredictable conditions. They may be constantly traveling, alone or with assistants, from one place to another, lugging lots of stuff and moving about, while at the same time, keeping in mind the process of consistently producing required output on-the-go and certainly keeping deadlines.

While veteran location shooters may have the on-the-go Aperture workflow down pat, I’m figuring out how it can work for me. Here’s how I’m doing it:

1. All my equipment are stashed in a single backpack: a D2Xs camera body with 6 Nikkor lenses and a Lensbaby 3G , and, an overly accessorized 17? MacBook Pro with an Epson P-5000, and a few other stuff, including an iPhone.

2. After the shoot, or even while shooting, I load all RAW image files into the Epson P-5000. It seems easier and more convenient to load the photos to a handy and compact portable storage device than into a laptop while on the go.

3. Meanwhile, on my MacBook Pro, I have Aperture installed and waiting with an empty Library.

4. The soonest that I am able, I connect the Epson P-5000 to the MacBook Pro, and reference all the shots in Aperture. I keep lots of other stuff on my laptop so I may not have enough space to create a managed Library in Aperture. Also, it seems that referencing the images stored in an external drive attached to the laptop seems faster.

5. First thing I do once the images are referenced in Aperture is that I export the masters out of Aperture, or and burn them into DVDS, and stash these away as a backup.

6. And then I just go ahead and start working on the new shots inside Aperture (with the P-5000 hooked up when necessary).

7. At whatever stage I may be in the workflow in my laptop’s Aperture, when I reach my home studio, I export the Project (with Consolidate Images checked) out of my laptop, and then import it into my MacPro’s Aperture, where I then continue working. I also do a little housekeeping at this stage, with all unnecessary and secondary backups and copies are judiciously deleted to conserve space and to avoid confusion.

8. The DVDs I burned as a backup on location undergoes a quick check and then filed and referenced away.

9. Once I’m done with the Project, I export the final Project, burn in Toast spanning multiple discs, label, reference and stash away.

This simple workflow seems to work for me, and I’m enjoying the location-to-studio workflow in Aperture. Being new to “being always on-the-go,” I am meeting photography challenges that others may have already solved ahead of me. The straightforward workflow I outlined above, although I might need to refine it a bit more, helps me concentrate on the images and meet my deadlines. I’m just glad to be able to do this with Aperture as one of my main workflow tools, on the road and in the studio.

Every software program that I’m familiar with includes some automatic adjustments, and without fail, until recently, I’ve been opposed to using them. The reason is that any auto adjustment is a software engineer’s best guess of what adjustments usually work for most images with similar characteristics. I prefer to make adjustments that are image specific. I do use batch processing via the Lift and Stamp tool when images have been shot under similar lighting conditions. But even when taking advantage of the Lift and Stamp tools, I often tweak the adjustments for individual images. So until recently I could accurately claim to never use auto adjustments. But you’ve heard the old adage, “Never say never!”

Not long ago I was experimenting with some underwater photography. I’m new to this type photography and left my camera set on Auto White balance. (OK, some of you are saying, “See, you do use auto adjustments,” and perhaps you’re right. But that’s an in camera setting not a software setting.) As is often the case with underwater shots, there was a strong cyan/blue cast to the images. I tried adjusting the Temperature slider in Aperture but that wasn’t enough and there isn’t a red/cyan white balance slider. I also tried increasing the red saturation and decreasing the cyan saturation, which improved the image somewhat, but the cyan cast was still present. Out of curiosity ( I clicked the Auto Levels buttons that are under the histogram in the Adjustment HUD. And to my surprise the colorcast was gone!

I’ve been using Aperture since it shipped in Nov. 2005 — more than two years of building projects, adding metadata, and organizing images. There have been many little rewards along the way, such as being able to quickly locate this photo from an Apple event. But the big payoff just happened recently.

Over the last few months I’ve been working on a new book, Digital Photography Companion, and I’ve had to cull hundreds of pictures (from a catalog of thousands) for possible inclusion in the project. In the past, this was an agonizing endeavor. Pictures and various iterations of them spread all over the place, difficult to find, hard to organize.

For Digital Photography Companion, it’s an entirely different universe. My Aperture library contains everything I’ve shot for the last two years (except for photos captured with the Canon G9), and the images are totally organized and accessible. I’m building preview catalogs for my publishing team, outputting Jpegs for sample designs, and will soon be exporting high resolution Tiffs for CMYK conversion in Photoshop. (I know what you’re thinking… wouldn’t it be nice to output CMYK directly from Aperture. Answer: yes it would be lovely.)

So the last two years I’ve spent gleefully organizing my images in Aperture is now paying off handsomely. I’m actually enjoying the photo editing process instead of dreading it. If I could only go end to end and output in CMYK, it would be a total victory. Ah, maybe someday. But for now, I have to say that my photography workflow has made a giant step forward. And I feel like my return on investment is excellent.

In my latest Digital Story podcast, I talk about this process. You might want to tune in if you have a hankering for more.

On Friday, Apple unveiled the new West 14th Street store, its largest store in Manhattan. I had a chance to check out the store yesterday and though at this point we expect Apple stores to be impressive, this one really takes it to the next level. It occupies a corner lot in the trendy Meat Packing district and it features three floors of Apple products and services. One of the coolest aspects of the store is that the third floor is dedicated entirely to service, featuring a huge Genius Bar for repairs. Perhaps more exciting for Aperture users are the new Pro Labs that the store will offer. These are four-part, eight-hour courses covering either Aperture, Final Cut Pro, or Logic Pro. Students will have their own Macs to use during the classes with all the software pre-configured. And get this: they’re free.

This is pretty impressive. With these Pro Labs, Apple can now offer three ways for new Aperture users to learn the software:

There are the instructor-led workshops, where anyone can sit in the audience and listen to a demo-style presentation and ask questions. And there’s “One to One”, in which customers can sign up for one-hour personal training sessions. This was formerly included in the $99/year ProCare service, but was spun off into its own offering a few months ago. Still, $99/year for weekly personal training sessions is a great deal. Even if only one out of ten sessions is truly mind-altering, it’s still 99 bucks a year. Most Apple trainers I know charge more than that for an hour. And, of course, the level of training that pro Apple Certified Trainers can offer is far beyond that of the Apple Store, but I still think that these sessions can be quite useful and are an affordable option for a lot of beginners using Aperture.

Add to workshops and One to One training sessions these new Pro Labs and you’ve got a really compelling reason to go with an end-to-end Apple solution… I’m thinking specifically of the new user, just starting to get into digital photography and trying to make a decision between Aperture and Lightroom. It’s a pretty strong selling point for Apple to be able to say “hey, go with Aperture and come back to the store for free training and workshops”.

One thing that I’ve heard a few rumblings about from some of the Pro Trainer channels is a feeling that these Labs might threaten some of our prospective business. And I suppose it may. But I don’t think that these Labs are intended to parallel the experience or depth of an expensive multi-day Apple Training course. And I’d be perfectly happy to direct a beginner Aperture user to an Apple-led course and then have the chance to work with him or her in-depth once they have a foundation in the software.

The Pro Labs are currently only being offered at West 14th Street, but it seems likely that Apple is using the new store to try the concept out. If Apple’s track record is any indicator, the initiative will be a huge success and we’ll see these classes offered at other stores. Even if Apple decides to charge a nominal fee for the courses, I bet it will still be a steal over the alternatives.

Almost a year ago, Ben Long wrote a pretty nice article about how to move away from Aperture. He outlined a plan that would ensure that you would be able to preserve much of the work you have done in Aperture, should you decide to adopt a different application.

Back then, and even now, there has been much speculation as whether or not Aperture will make it. People have suggested that if Apple doesn’t grab hold of a certain portion of the market they may just dump the whole project altogether.

These types of rumors have been running around the internet since Aperture was launched, and while I don’t really see Apple dumping a product like Aperture anytime soon, talk like this does prompt me to think a little about things like image permanence in the digital world.

With film, the study of image permanence was a huge deal. All sorts of studies were done to prove or disprove the “archivalness” of film based materials. They studied the affects of UV radiation, humidity, and all sorts of other variables to determine how long we could plan on keeping our precious negatives around.

But, when digital photography became readily available to the public, we saw a whole new onslaught of issues arise along this same vein. The first ( and quite possibly the most talked about ) issue was the concept of RAW images.

Camera makers began offering their proprietary RAW image data from their cameras in addition to a processed Jpeg or large TIFF file. I think this was partly due to a demand for more control over the image and partly a way for camera makers to sort of show how much they cared about their customers. Remember, there is nothing stopping Canon or Nikon from only writing TIFFs and Jpegs, aside from the influences of their customers.

But, photographers never really even knew about RAW until camera manufacturers started offering it. I’m not really sure which came first, but the point is, somewhere along the line, we photographers got obsessed with the word RAW.

Along comes Aperture

When Apple announced Aperture, one of the biggest selling points was its ability to simplify a RAW workflow. Apple showed us that one software application could handle all sorts of RAW image types and with a seamless and enjoyable user experience. And I believe they did a fine job. I personally shoot nothing but RAW anymore, and Aperture continues to be the focal point of my workflow.

It’s a pleasure to be able to work with RAW files so easily in Aperture, and I have to say, I’m hooked. But one other thing that Aperture introduced ( for me anyway ) was a really seamless and non-destructive work environment. Now I feel like I can work without having to worry about hurting my original artwork. My “negatives” are always safe, never touched by human or computer hands, and stored neatly and in an organized manner within my archive.

But what if Aperture dies? What if all of the sudden Apple drops the product, or even worse, what if for some reason I just can’t get Aperture to open on my machine?

Obviously the later is a temporary problem I will probably be able to solve, but the former is much more daunting. What do I do?

Well, I suppose it would really have to do with how extensive the work I had done with Aperture had been. I mean, all of my original files are always going to be safe and sound, even though they are in proprietary format. I have them all stored neatly in a referenced archive, so I can always get at them with other applications without a problem ( and I should probably be doing this already), but what about all my Versions and Masters, and Metadata.

Well, Ben’s article describes some good ways to deal with this stuff, but I have to wonder how “universal” of an approach this would be, and how labor intensive this would be? In other words, what should I be doing differently to preserve the data I am creating on a daily basis in Aperture.

Many people have been talking to me about exporting XMP sidecar files. I think XMP has always been a good idea in some ways, but fails in others. The idea of a standardized approach to metadata is really good on paper, but may never fly in the real world. We shall just have to wait and see how it evolves. But the idea of a sidecar file is something sort of odd to me.

I guess sidecar files came from the non-destructive school of thought. Like, just create a little file that sits next to the “real” file that holds all the metadata. This way you are never actually touching the file.

To me this approach sounds a lot like the card catalog at the library. A system that was replaced by, you guessed it, a computer some twenty or thirty years ago. ( Well, they still use one here at the public library in Dominica, but that’s another discussion altogether. )

So where am I going with all of this. Well, I think what really needs to happen, aside from an open RAW format, or agreement on the DNG approach, or Canon and Nikon playing nice together, or peace in the Middle East, is a much more universal system with regards to digital imaging.

I’m not just talking about the image data, I’m talking about the meta-data, and all of the database instructions that Aperture or Lightroom writes when you make any changes to an image Version.

There should really be some type of package file thing. I know that doesn’t make much sense, but I am brainstorming here a little bit. There should be some type of single unit entity that can house a RAW file from any camera, its DNG equivalent (if you like that sort of thing), and all the metadata associated with that image. All stored in one, non-destructive format that anyone could read, openly.

Okay, maybe I am dreaming of a utopian imaging society somewhere in Bizarro World. But, really, what would you do if all of the sudden there was no more Aperture? Same goes for you Lightroom aficionados! How would you deal?!?!

I often do presentations and I find that one of the most effective and entertaining way for you and your audience to digest a large number of images in a short time is to put your images to music.

Generallly, I like to have total control of the presentation and for years I have been creating audio slideshows using a software program called Live Slide Show. Then, after my slideshow is exported as a QuickTime movie, I drag and drop the QuickTime onto its own slide in Keynote. What’s really nice in Keynote, is when you advance to a slide with a QuickTime Movie the movie automatically launches, making for a slick and seamless presentation.

Aperture does have a slideshow function, but you can’t save said slideshow as a QuickTime movie. I’m hoping in the next version you can, but there are a lot of great things you can do when creating slideshows in Aperture.

More and more, I’m choosing to show my work directly from Aperture, and when I do a demo or teaching, it’s nice to be able to move directly into a slideshow with music, and Aperture accommodates nicely.

What’s nice in Aperture Slideshow, is the ability to create as many albums of images you want as separate shows, each with it’s own unique soundtrack. So during the course of a presentation, you can set the tone and the mood for a body of work with the right audio track selected from iTunes as a pre-set.

I first make an album with the images I want to be in the show and I put them in order. Then, when I click on Slideshow, a dialog box and pulldown menu appears. I choose Edit in the pulldown menu which brings me to a bunch of options for the show.

Scroll down to edit and reveal the host of options below.

This is where you can determine the look of the show, the music to play, and save these directions as pre-sets. I have chosen to keep a consistant look using the traditional dissolve from one slide to the next and my first soundtrack pick is Coldplay’s “In My Place”.

First quick on the + sign at the bottom of the preset window and then call it whatever you want. I label presets by song title which makes sense for me, particularly if I want to use the same music for different presentations.

After I choose a bunch of different songs from my iTunes playlists and make them presets, I make sure the “play music during slideshow” checkbox is checked. Then, when I go to an album of photos and click slideshow, I simply scroll through the dropdown menu to the song I want to play with the images and in seconds, the slideshow begins.

Just make sure that Aperture has rendered the previews for those images beforehand, so when you click on the slideshow and preset, the show starts almost immediately. Otherwise, you and your audience have to wait for Aperture to render the previews, leaving you to tap dance during the awkward silence while the progress bar slowly makes it’s way from start to finish.

Once these presets are created and the previews are rendered, it’s quick and easy to show different bodies of work from within Aperture, each with it’s own unique piece of music. If either no image or a single image is selected in a project or album, the slideshow displays all images in the current album or project.

Another nice feature is having Aperture fit the slides to the music, for nicely coreagraphed shows. But choose a track keeping in mind the number of images in your show. Choosing a three minute song over a six minute one means your images will be up on screen for half the time, and you want the pacing to be fast enough to keep the audience interested, but slow enough to appreciate the work.

I find that a 3 or 4 second per slide pace works well. So if you were showing 50 slides and wanted to “fit slides to music” then 50 times 4 seconds equals 200 seconds or a three minute and change tune.

Aperture allows you to keep multiple library files, by simply changing the Library setting in Aperture’s Preferences dialog box. Many people use this as a way to get around the fact that Aperture limits the size of an individual Library to a single volume. For example, they’ll use one library for work files, and another for their personal projects.

While there are no right or wrong answers to how you should architect your Aperture library structure, I’m increasingly of the mind that it’s much better to have a single library. First, it simplifies backups. Second, it lets you take advantage of one of Aperture’s core features: a searchable library of your entire photographic archive. Third, multiple libraries introduce an extra level of organization and management hassle to the already complex chore of managing your image library.

So what do you do about that single volume library limitation? Fortunately, the ability to import images as references pretty much solves this problem, because your master files don’t have to consume any storage on the volume where your library is kept. What’s more, the previews that Aperture builds are small enough that you can have hundreds of thousands of them on a reasonable-sized drive. Because Aperture allows you to re-build previews, you can easily change your preview compression settings and rebuild them at any time, to free up more disk space.

Of course, if you keep everythingin a single library, then your Projects pane will be harder to navigate, as it will be crammed full of more projects. To minimize the clutter, consider grouping projects into Folders, or take advantage of Aperture’s Favorites menu. Tag all your personal projects as Favorites, and then change the All Projects menu to Favorites.

This allows you to easily switch to a select group of projects. Or, change the menu to Recent Projects to view the last 20 projects that you worked on.

Keeping one library lets you take full advantage of Aperture’s keywording and search features - features that end up somewhat less useful if you’ve spread your images across multiple libraries.

You probably saw that Apple released a new version of Mac OS X, Leopard, about a month ago. Yet one announcement that didn’t get too much attention was about a public beta of a new, Leopard-only image editing tool called Naked Light. If you’re like me, you might be groaning a bit, going “enough of the new tools; I’ve got a system that works.” Hold on a second, though, as there are two great reasons you should care about Naked Light.

One of the first reasons you should care is the interface–unlike most other editors, Naked Light is node-based (like another Apple pro tool, Shake). As you can see in the screenshot, a node-based UI means that there are small boxes representing each image processing step, and your image flows from the input (in this case, on the bottom left) through a set of steps and out on the top-right. Unlike a layer-based UI (like Photoshop), it is very easy to see how a complex image is getting pieced together from multiple filters, and unlike Aperture’s adjustment panel, Naked Light’s interface makes it possible to see the order of adjustments (there can be a difference between tweaking color balance and then applying curves and applying curves and then tweaking the color balance). Additionally, when you start working with masked areas of an image, a node-based UI makes it easy to see (and change) what set of adjustments are being applied to the global image vs. just the masked area.

What’s even cooler, though, is that Naked Light’s taken a concept revolutionized by Aperture, non-destructive image editing, and applied it to more complicated actions. Although Photoshop supports more complex actions to some extent with smart objects, you have to convert a smart object back to a normal image for tools like dodging. In Naked Light, there’s no need for these conversions–everything is non-destructive. There are some interesting future possibilities, too. For instance, you can paint on top of an image in Naked Light, and no matter what resolution you resize your image to, it’ll adjust your brush stokes to match perfectly. While painting in bright pink might not be very useful for a photograph, imagine if the same brush technology were adapted to create a non-destructive Photoshop-like healing and clone brush.

All this being said, keep in mind that the available version of Naked Light is still a very early, pre-release public beta. There are funky notions, e.g. you can’t just open an image, you have to import it, as well as annoying parts in the interface (the “dock” of tools don’t stick open when you click on them–you have to hold your mouse button down to keep the menu open). The toolbar even warns you that some commands are slow and/or crash-prone. But again, it is just a very early version, and I’m sure this will all get better.

Why am I spending time on an Aperture blog talking about this product? Well, quite simply, I think that the feature set that Naked Light is developing should one day, when it’s mature enough, end up inside of a future version of Aperture (I am not saying I think Apple should buy these guys, but rather I believe something like Naked Light is a natural evolution of the image editing tools you see in Aperture). I really like the idea that I could one day just use one program with a node-based UI for all of my adjustments, especially if I am non-destructively modifying a RAW file. Hey, I can dream, can’t I? :)

I’m feeling a little nostalgic. It’s probably because I am thinking forward, and anticipating the annual MacWorld Expo & Conference happening in January ‘08. In any case, come with me and let’s stroll down memory lane. We have time, believe me.

When Apple first introduced Aperture, it got a lot of photographers really excited. I have to admit, I was one of them. And to this day, I am still excited about Aperture. It must be the “geek” in me.

Many professional photographers who are on top of their game, and those who always seem to be at the forefront of digital imaging, embraced the revolutionary concept of an all-in-one post-production tool. This was an idea that Apple introduced with Aperture that re-framed the way digital photographers plow through their workflow after the shoot. There was nothing quite like it, or quite as organized and smooth-flowing, and it seemed short of revolutionary.

Fast-forward to today, the idea of a post-production software unifying almost all the essential steps that most photographers need to take is now somewhat ubiquitous. It is almost difficult to imagine working on digital images without some sort of a step-by-step, logical and organized, and yet flexible, way of going through thousands upon thousands of high resolution image files. Today, every digital shooter seems to be doing the same thing–going through the same “routine” when it comes to post-production workflow.

How many years has it been since Aperture was first introduced? It almost seems a very, very long time; and yet, it was only actually a few years back when version 1.0 was first launched.

Maybe, this is because everyone thinks time is relative. And because of this, to some, the development and evolution of Aperture may be slow. But to others, the pace may just be right. And, let’s not leave out those who might even say that Aperture’s development is quite fast.

But who’s counting the years? Perhaps, I’m the only one. Despite the absence of official announcement, I’m probably just eager for 2.0 to come around. But while I’m in breathless anticipation of the yet unannounced 2.0, there’s one feature that was in 1.0 that I somehow miss.

And that is the Camera Clock Sync feature. You do you remember the Camera Clock Sync feature in Aperture 1.0? No, you don’t?

The Camera Clock Sync feature is a tiny clock icon that appears from within Aperture’s interface when your camera is directly hooked to the Mac via USB cable. Yes, once upon a time, Aperture did have a built-in feature that can supposedly sync the clock of your digital camera with that of the accurate time of your Mac computer. I love the idea behind this feature: for the camera/s we use to finally keep accurate time by being in sync with the Mac’s clock. Just like the iPods. Or the iPhone.

Maybe, this feature, accurate digital image time-keeping, is not that crucial to most photographers. This feature is perhaps only really useful to photojournalists, investigative photographers, forensic photographers, event photographers, and maybe, even to paparazzi photographers. Imagine what it would mean if they are able to commonly and routinely capture the accurate time of any event’s occurrence with every shot. Personally, and even if my work is far from photojournalistic, I’d be curious to know the very exact actual time of each and every shot that I take.

It seems ironic that, in this day and age, and despite modern advances in inter-connectivity, we still have to manually set (in a notoriously inaccurate analog fashion) our digital camera’s internal clock. We do the same analog approach to almost all wristwatches and other time pieces. Frustrating to a certain extent because it would appear that we have not, to this day, mastered the art of accurate time-keeping beyond our computers. The iPods and the iPhone is a good start. What about our camera’s clock? And what about our wristwatches? (Maybe, Steve Jobs should introduce a new product line that will do what watches are supposed to do best: tell accurate time.) Is there hope?

With Aperture 1.0, photographers had the chance to sync their cameras into the world’s atomic time. Imagine that unprecedented level of accuracy! But somewhere along Aperture’s iteration, this “feature” disappeared. It is possible that no one was paying enough attention to it, and therefore it may have eventually been deemed unimportant. Or, it could be that linking into the time mechanism and technology of various camera models, brands and configurations is difficult, hence, was just not working.

In any case, if I can turn back the hands of time, the Camera Clock Sync is one feature that I wish Apple engineers retained. Yes, I’m being nostalgic.

So, while we are moving forward, maybe we ought to step back as well? Do you think Apple engineers will be inclined to bring back the Camera Clock sync feature in future versions of Aperture?

We can only speculate. And of course, only time will tell.

I recently rediscovered a useful feature of Aperture that slipped my mind a long time ago: the Edit AutoFill List menu command. A few months ago, I imported a bunch of photos from a business trip to Chicago and in my haste to keyword them, I typed “Chiacgo” in the IPTC field for City. No big deal at the time — I corrected the misspelling and moved on. But last weekend when I went to another card of photos from the trip, Aperture tried to help me out when I typed “chi” in the City field, and autofilled my mistake. This is like the Aperture equivalent of the Previous Recipients database in Mail.app: incredibly useful unless you’ve made a spelling mistake or (in the case of Mail) the person’s address is no longer valid.

A misspelling in my IPTC information.

I knew there was a way to correct this, but I had a blank moment, and hunted through the menus to try and find the command. After a frustrated trip to the Aperture User Manual PDF, I found what I was looking for under the Metadata menu. Choosing Metadata > Edit AutoFill List… brings down the AutoFill Editor sheet. I was able to find my misspelled city name and remove it, and while I was there, I figured why not add a handful of other useful metadata that I knew might come in handy.

Fixing the mistake in the AutoFill Editor.

The AutoFill list will remember up to 20 entries for each field. I’ll have to remember that during my next trip to Chiacgo.

Lately, I’ve been getting a lot of questions about using the Vault with referenced images. Because a lot of people still seem a little confused by the question of backup when choosing between managed or referenced images, I thought I’d review a couple of important concepts.

When you import an image as a referenced file, which you do in the Import dialog box by setting the Store Files pop-up menu to “in their current location”, Aperture leaves your original master file where it is and imports a pointer to that file. Next, it builds a JPEG preview of the file so that even if the master goes offline, you can still see a high-res view of the image, for keywording, organizing and rating.

As most people know, Aperture’s Vault system does not back up original files that are imported as references. Instead, you have to take care to back up those files yourself, using whatever method you like. Josh Anon covered a few excellent options Synchronize Pro which is what I use for backing up my original master files, as well as lots of other things, such as my iTunes music library. Synchronize Pro can be used for both synchronizing two folders (making sure that both folders have identical contents) or backing up one folder to another (making folder B look like folder a).

Synchronize Pro has a very simple interface, and it provides an easy way to perform progressive backups. That is, a backup that only copies files that are different or changed, rather than re-writing files that were copied in a previous backup. This is how Aperture’s Vault system works, and it makes periodic backups much faster.

However you choose to back up your referenced files, though, you still need to keep a Vault backup also. With a Vault backup you’ll preserve your library structure, all of your previews, and most importantly, all of your edits, versions, and metadata. If you only back up your referenced masters, a crash will wipe out all of the actual work that you might have done in Aperture.

After a crash, or other calamity, you’ll need to restore both your Vault backup, and the backup of your referenced masters that you performed by hand.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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!

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….