Aperture Tip: Selectively Brush Away Saturation

So here is a quick and dirty tip for Aperture users wondering how to selectively brush away saturation. Select the saturation quick brush. It will brush saturation in by default so clicking on the little cog at the top right of the adjustment brick will allow you to selectively desaturate parts of your image.

Review: Noise Ninja 64 bit Aperture 3 Plug-in

Noise, unless used for dramatic or artistic effect, is usually the bane of most photographers.  In-application noise reduction has typically been limited and photographers have had to resort to 3rd party plugins like NIK’s DFine and PictureCode’s Noise Ninja.  Adobe is making every effort to improve noise reduction in the latest Lightroom 3 beta 2 however specialised software that has been concentrating on this one area for many years will be a hard contender to beat.  I have a bunch of snaps that I love but which, due to the limitations of the point and shoot cameras they were taken on, suffer from low light noise problems.  In order to recover these photos I trialled the latest version of the popular noise reduction plugin from PictureCode. 

After installation of the Aperture Plugin, a new option appears in the ‘Edit with plug-in’ context menu.  Aperture users will want to fork out a little extra for this 64 bit plugin to avoid having to export to a referenced image for use in the standalone application or having to roundtrip to Photoshop.

The sliders are easy to understand and manipulate and there is instant feedback of your adjustments in the preview pane.


Below is a photograph of my son (zoomed in to 1:1) that I really love but the noise is horrific and this photo is almost unusable for inclusion in my year end photobook.

After a couple of seconds in Noise Ninja I’d rescued this photo and the results speak for themselves.

I happily forked out $79 for the Noise Ninja bundle that includes the 64 bit Aperture plugin (sheer convenience at not having to roundtrip to Photoshop), a standalone application and the Photoshop plug-in for the few occasions I really have to tame the pixels.

Aperture 3 crash on 64 bit startup fixed by reserialisation.

OK, there are still a few kinks in the linen but on the whole the new Aperture is a very capable and impressive piece of software.  One of the gremlins that got to me and a number of other people on the forums was the Aperture crash on startup in 64 bit mode.  There appear to be two workarounds here:

1. Start in 32 bit mode: Go to your applications folder, right click on aperture and click the little box which says start in 32 bit mode.

2. Reserialise.  I didn’t want to run Aperture 3 in 32 bit mode, this solution fixed the problem on my machine by following the steps below.

(a) Check you’ve got all your serial numbers. If you’re upgrading then make sure you have your Aperture 2 serial numbers.

(b) Navigate to /Library/Application Support/ProApps/

(c) Delete the file Aperture System ID

(d) Start Aperture and enter the license keys

(e) Hey presto, all working!

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Aperture 3 mini review, some early thoughts.

So off the back of two posts from last year I will give a quick round-up of my early thoughts on Aperture 3.  I downloaded the application last night and have not had time to fully immerse myself in it so the extended review is still a week or more away but in What I'd need in Aperture 3 to make me move back from Lightroom I looked at some of the pros and cons of a tool which I loved and compared to Lightroom.

Tackling the original list of requirements it appears that Steve Jobs has popped out of the Apple lamp and granted photographers a number of their wishes with a rich feature set that includes a huge overhaul in functionality and an additional 200+ features.

Finally Aperture 3 supports the RAW output from my point and shoot camera, the Panasonic Lumix LX3.  This was a biggie (for me as it is the camera which is most readily accessible around the house and thus the one which captures the important photos of my family life and my new baby.  Panasonic had included propriety information to compensate for the barrel distortion of the ultra wide lens and as RAW compatibility is at an OS level for Apple it was not a trivial change.  Sure the dSLR still kicks the snot out of it in terms of picture quality, colour richness and depth of field but often by the time I have taken it out of the bag, attached the speedlite, and turned it on to check the settings the moment is gone; the Lumix usually gets the shot and the moment.

The other biggie is the additional suite of non-destructive edits Aperture 3 brings with the brushes, adjustment bricks and the adjustment presets.  I'll leave the adjustment functionality for my extended review, suffice to say the list is comprehensive so take a look at what's available on the Apple site.

Aperture 3 at first glance seems to have retained the projects based workflow which, now that Aperture can handle multiple libraries with ease, I am moving back to in consolidating all my files in the Aperture library.  This lets me backup to multiple drives using the Aperture vault functionality and not worry whether I have the correct folder structure.  The new export to library and merge in changes functionality allows me to export the metadata and files associated with projects, work on them on my laptop, and then merge those changes seamlessly back into my master library.  I thought I would need the ability to be able to sync file locations with physical folders but a couple of months of doing this in Lightroom has proved to me that it's a pain and you never get your photos in a structure that just works.

Some of you who have followed my posts for a while now will remember a time when I didn't think that the consumer features of faces and places would need to appear in prosumer software.  I am happy to admit I was wrong.  Faces is incredible!  I used to spend too much time keywording people in my photographs.  Faces now mostly takes care of this chore by identifying people and learning what they look like as the change and age leaving a more purist experience when it comes to cataloging and keywording my photos.  Places has really just opened up geotagging for me.  I have spent time with buggy satellite geolocation loggers strapped to my camera bag and have felt the frustrations of arriving home to corrupted location paths and useless data.  Aperture 3 allows you to take a snap on your iPhone at the location you're shooting and stamp that location data against your photoset – couldn't be easier.

And then there is the simple workflow joy of not having to go to another tab and another view and wait endlessly until the photo loads again every time I want to make an adjustment.  Aperture allows you to stay on the photo you're editing, viewing or comparing.

I am in the process of creating our yearly photo book.  As we live in Australia, and have family scattered around the world, my wife and I collect the best photos from the previous year and put them into a photo book that we send to our loved ones to help make the distances between us a little smaller.  Aperture has made some improvements with their already incredible book and print services as well as a slew of updates to their online slideshows which can now include HD video.  For those who need to read it again, you can now import and utilise HD video – now I have one program to pull photos and video off my camera. Aperture shares a common framework with other tools like iMovie so if I want to use those photos or videos in a more expansive video project then it's a snap. Nice!

For those who have been using Lightroom as their primary catalogue and want to either switch or trial the new Aperture, make sure you have your lightroom metadata written out to XMP files.  Aperture now imports a large amount of that metadata, especially keywords and IPTC information.  Due to the different ways that Aperture and Lightroom implement their adjustments it comes as no surprise that adjustments are not portable between the two applications.  In my case I have a full JPG copy of photos with custom adjustments anyway in the event that (not tempting fate and yes it has happened before) my library becomes corrupt and the adjustment changes stored in the library file cannot be restored.  Any heavy creative work exists in TIF or PSD format anyway which is compatible with both tools.

So this happy photographer will gladly carry on using Aperture as his primary photo cataloging and editing tool.  No doubt Lightroom, ever innovative, will again raise the benchmark and the competition between the two products will continue to make photographers giddy as kids at Christmas.  I have used both tools extensively since they were released and will keep upgrading both in order to understand and review how they change over time.  My personal preference has always been aligned to the look, feel, speed and functionality of Aperture and it will now continue to be place I work with my photographs.

If you haven't already done so, pop over to Apple and listen to Chase Jarvis and other great photographers talk of their personal experiences with Aperture and the version 3 beta.

I'd ask those who I've seen on various social sites and blogs trying to flame or belittle the "other" tools due to a personal preference or limited experience in one or the other to stop being silly.  Aperture and Lightroom are two top notch products and their fierce competition is bringing innovation and fantastic features sets to both.  In essence they have the same goals in mind, albeit slightly different in their implementation.  Enjoy the tools you use, be informed of the options and spend less time arguing and more time taking and producing great photos.

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John Nack: Lightroom pulls further ahead of Aperture

Apple have really dropped the ball on this one! I guess the problem is with Apple is they are essentially a hardware company; Snow Leopard has shown that software is a value add for them.  Aperture 3 will be a big decider for a lot of photographers.  I for one made the jump to Lightroom a few months ago and am very very happy with the software – I'll take a massive intervention in the next version of Aperture to win back my loyalties.

Lightroom pulls further ahead of Aperture
via John Nack on Adobe on 21/09/09

The past couple of years at this time (see entries for 2007, 2008), independent research company InfoTrends has surveyed professional photographers* about their choices of raw image-processing tools. It's interesting to check in on how the competition between Adobe Photoshop Lightroom & Apple Aperture is going.

Among photographic pros using the Mac,

In 2007 Lightroom was nearly twice as popular as Aperture

In 2008 it was nearly three times as popular

In 2009 it's approaching four times as popular

By the numbers:

	2007	2008	2009
Photoshop Camera Raw plug-in	66.5%	62.2%	57.9%
Lightroom	23.6%	35.9%	37.0%
Aperture	5.5%	7.5%	6.3%
On the Mac platform only:
Lightroom	26.6%	40.4%	44.4%
Aperture	14.3%	14.6%	12.5%

You might notice some decline in the use of the Camera Raw plug-in inside Photoshop as more pros move to using Lightroom. Let me be clear in noting that Photoshop use among these pros remains in the 90% range, and that the decline applies only to Camera Raw usage. (That makes sense as Lightroom and Camera Raw share the same processing engine, and photographers are, as expected, handling more of their raw processing in Lightroom.)

 
 

What I’d need in Aperture 3 to make me move back from Lightroom.

When Aperture and Panasonic decided to invest in a round of photographic gut-barging and not support my superb little carry-everywhere LX3 I was forced to look to alternative solutions to process the RAW files flying off my card.  I have used both photo management systems extensively over the years but had invested in Aperture about two years ago to hold my metadata.  I just found Aperture’s interface far more intuitive and, although it came at a space cost *cough*, the tools ability to render and process standard darkroom adjustments still kicks the crap out of Lightroom.  Aperture was starting to show it’s warts however so the LX3 wasn’t the only reason for my move to Lightroom; the fact that Aperture handles referenced files like an enraged toddler with a bowl full of mushed veggies was an endess source of hair pulling, as was the fact that I needed a small data center to store it’s enormously bloated library file, squatting like a pregnant cane-toad with previews and thumbnails for every image I had.  So I took the complete plunge into a world of clunky windows, slower previews and wonderful gorgeous non-destructive edits and haven’t really looked back.

Nostalgia, and a love of the power of the Apple software (insert fanboy expletive here) still have me tinkering around in Aperture and there is still nothing like it for putting photo books together.  I also still have a whole lot of metadata in Aperture that I am happily putting off moving over – so I’m sitting on the fence yet again until the much rumoured Aperture 3 makes it’s secretive entrance from the locked down, hush hush Aperture development headquarters.  I do have a couple of basic non-negotiatiable requirements from Aperture 3, fail me on these and my search for the one photo tool to rule them all (sorry Mr. Tolkien) will be over.

1. Referenced file management:  I like to move my files around on the disk (or multiples thereof).  Aperture 3 will need to be able to synchronise folders without throwing its toys and all your adjustments out the window.  Yes I know you can re-attach images but it’s a pain.
2. Non-destructive edits:  This is a biggie.  I don’t want a 60Mb TIF file every time I do a little dodge and burn – it’s not fun so please could we take a leaf from the Lightroom school. en-oh-en-dash-dee-ee-ess …..
3. Smaller library: I’ll take the performance hit.  Libraries almost the same size as your image folders are not cool and there is no need to keep every preview forever; delete them if I haven’t looked at the picture in a month or two.
4. Better DNG support:  It’s pretty much an archival standard now.  I use it, a number of camera manufacturers use it, many many high profile photographers use it so please support it.  There are these cool new things call Opcode lists which store camera specific information for things like barrel distortion compensation; please look them up.

So that’s all really, not too much to ask from the Aperture development team is it?

Hello … can you hear me down there … hellllloooooooo!

Did someone remember to let the dev team out when Steve went on leave?