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.
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.
Posted via email from f/9
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.
Posted via email from f/9
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.
It’s been months now, Picasa and ACDSee support the Panasonic Lumix LX3 but we have yet to have any love from Apple. Apple released some nifty new features in their consumer iPhoto 09, gimmicky but nice nonetheless. The silence has fallen over the halls of Aperture development however and the place seems shut up tighter than the dusty tombs of Moria. It’s kinda like Steve went home for a few months and left the Aperture developers locked in the basement.
Twitter, being the largest live database on the Internet at the moment is a great place to gauge the mood of photographers; try Aperture update or Aperture LX3 or Aperture vs Lightroom as search criteria and you can’t help but notice a strong undercurrent of frustration.
It’s not that I’m asking for a shiny new version of Aperture (which would be nice) but rather the simple plea that the program I love and have invested an inordinate amount of time getting to know at least keeps up with Picasa or ACDsee in RAW support. It’s the never-ending eternal secrecy that shrouds everything that Apple does which is what I’m sick of. Let us know there is a problem, or not – we’re big people, we can handle it.
I suppose I could round trip the RW2 files to DNG in Lightroom (which is getting a lot of love from me at the moment) but even with compression and not embedding the original RAW data into the file it seems to blow the file up from 12M to around 33M, an unacceptable 3x jump which I just can’t do at the moment in my limited land of precious HD space.
I don’t think Apple realises just how many people have made the jump to Lightroom recently because of their silence, or how many people are teetering on the edge.
I have received a number of emails asking how I manage the workflow of images from my camera to my library and how I go about protecting and backing up my photos. With this post I hope to share some of the tips (and pitfalls) I’ve discovered in trying to simplify, reflect, readjust and further simplify the way I manage my images.
First things first and this is the most important point before we continue; There is no right or wrong process when it comes to workflow! Every photographer approaches their workflow in a way which makes sense to the type of shooting they do and their own personal preferences. TWIP podcasts #62 and #63 on workflow illustrate how diverse each of the podcast members’ workflows are. I continually seek to refactor my workflow, looking for the simplest set of processes which meet the requirements I have for my images.
Antoine de Saint-Exuper once said:
This is my ideal, thus this post encompasses a snapshot in time and, if I work hard and keep looking to simplify and improve further, it probably won’t be relevant in a month’s time – it will have changed into something which works better for me.
Setting the Scene
Initially I recommend getting a feel for what resources you have at your disposal. Do you have any external hard drives or USB memory keys lying about. What computer do you use? How many photographs and what type of photography are we talking about; are they family snaps or client’s wedding portfolios?
If you have a lot of photographs like I do then you probably have some of them on your primary computer and the rest floating around in some sort of disconnected storage; an external disk, a set of DVDs or some file host on the Internet. Questions I’d ask here are: Does your primary photo management software (be it iPhoto, Photoshop Elements, Picasa, Aperture or Lightroom) know where all the photos are? Are offline files referenced properly and can you search for information associated with them?
Do you have some way of keeping the important photos offsite? What if, God forbid, the house burns down or someone nicks your hardware in the middle of the night?
Do you have some sort of archival strategy in place? In 10 or 20 years time will those scratched DVDs in the drawer still work?
Below is a diagram of my hardware and storage situation. It may seem very complicated at first glance but it is a breeze to set up and is automated to the point where I can forget about it and get on with the business of taking pictures. I will talk through aspects of the diagram later in this post.
Keywording
This is the next task I perform and I have it first because for me it is the most important way to find information about my photos and search across years of archives. It was the most neglected aspect of my workflow for a long time and the sweat and effort to keyword 4 years worth of photos taught me the valuable lesson ‘keyword on import’. If there are any recognisable events in the photos I can quickly bundle them up in a selection and use the Aperture album creation hotkey to turn the selection into an album to which I can refer later.
First Pass gut feel
Next comes a quick pass over my import. I go into full screen mode and quickly move through the photos not paying too much attention to the details. I trust my gut feel here enough to know if the composition is good or bad. In Aperture I flag photos I want to mark as picks with a 4 star rating. Lightroom users can do the same or use the ‘flag as pick’ option to do the same. I prefer the star rating because the graduation means something to me which we’ll get to later.
At this point I can leave the process and carry on with it later if I like. I have my photos in a managed environment. They are keyworded, in albums as required and I have identified the couple which are important to me.
I also usually click the button to backup my vault at this point. The vault backup contains my library (keywords, metadata, adjustments, file library and any managed files). As this process is a synchronisation rather than a full backup every time it is usually really quick and updates only the files/information which has changed.
Adjustments: Time to whip out the Loupe
At some point I’ll want to take a closer look at the technical aspects of the photos. I usually go through my picks with the loupe looking at the finer details and making minor adjustments to contrast, sharpness and exposure as required. Photos which I want to retain as picks but need more serious adjustments I will rate as 3 stars and then attend to them in a later editing session. The photos I will use for my portfolio I will rate as 5 stars. The rating system allows me very quickly to move between all the photos that need work (3), are part of the pool of picks (4) or are my very best shots which will make it into books or onto walls (5). The majority of my Online photos (Flickr, Ipernity etc.. ) come from my 4 star pool. At any point if you feel the photo doesn’t make the grade you can simply remove the star rating.
Second pass gut feel
As this step can happen at any time I recommend you leave a bit of time between your import and adjustments and the second pass on your non picks. In this workflow you will be working only with your picks for most of the time seeing the non-picks only when you look at the contents of an album for example. It is usually a good idea to take a little time at a later date, sit down and browse through photos you felt didn’t make the grade. I am constantly surprised by the little gems I find which then finally get to make it as a pick.
Non picks become referenced files, picks become managed
Photos I’ve selected not to be picks leave my laptop hard disk – there really is little point in them eating up my precious free space. In Aperture you can easily move files around using the ‘Manage referenced masters’ option. Select a group of pictures and put them on a drive of your choosing – in my case above my 1 terabyte drive. The files are still referenced by Aperture and you can still browse and search on the files. If I need to use any old files such as a group of bracketed photos for a HDR image then the ‘Consolidate masters’ option sucks the files back into my library (alternatively I can plug back into the big drive and export the masters to a local folder).
I have set up a couple of smart folders which make the identification of files that need to move easier:
So that’s really it, a simple set of steps which have ensure I have a set of photos sorted into albums and picks which are easy to browse and search on and are easy to backup.
Make sure your photos walk out the door
The last point I want to make is ensure you have some sort of offsite backup available. You can have the fanciest systems, terabytes of storage, a wall of Drobos but putting all your images in one place leaves them vulnerable to loss through natural disaster or theft.
I rsync (a sync command in Leopard or other UNIX based systems) my referenced photos to a seperate portable Hard drive and ensure that Aperture also keeps a vault on that disk. This disk goes everywhere with me, when I’m going out for the day it is either in my camera bag or in the cool centre console of my car. At work it lives in a bag in my desk drawer. I know that a meteorite can hit my house (in this scenario my family and pets are vacationing in Fiji) and that all my expensive computer equipment can go up in a ball of flame and I will not lose a single image. I can buy new furniture, I can build my house again brick by brick from the foundations but I cannot replace my wedding photos, or the pictures of my son or my portfolio.
Cloud Backup
Call it simple paranoia but my portfolio photos are very important to me and represent a tangible emotional and dollar investment. These photos are usually converted to DNG as my long term archival file format of choice and a copy of the photo with keywords and adjustments are then saved as a full size JPEG. These files are exported to a local backup folder where a little piece of software picks them up and uploads them to secure cloud storage.
My cloud backup of choice is Jungle Disk. Jungle disk is part of Amazon.com’s S3 storage services. They allow you to create an encrypted drive using a key you provide. You can setup the software to automatically backup files from selected locations to your cloud drive. The main reason I like them as a provider is that you only pay for your files in transit (bandwidth is charged for upload and download only) and having the online drive encrypted means the files are totally safe from being viewed or stolen. I also use Jungle disk to backup my important documents putting them safely in a place where I can access them from anywhere.
Wrapping Up
I won’t hark on much more on this topic of workflow and backups, you have a good idea of one possible workflow which may work in part (or entirety) for you. I am more than happy to answer any questions on actual details of this workflow or my storage solutions; just leave your question it in the comments and I will get back to you.
Now stop worrying about backups and get out and take some photographs!
I am a long time user of Apple’s Aperture and have dabbled modestly from time to time in the iPhoto pond. Like many all over the world I bought into the iPhoto 09 hype and also fell for the clever Apple marketing scheme of putting a sufficient ‘salivary gap’ between the keynote and the product release.
Well I received my long anticipated copy last night and after installing it immediately got to work putting it through it’s paces.
Referencing the Aperture library
The first thing I liked was that, by disabling the iPhoto copy-to-library functionality in the preferences and then using the Aperture media browser, I was able to import around 15,000 of my picks into the iPhoto library in short order. iPhoto references the photos in the Aperture library and only makes a copy in the iPhoto library if you do any adjustments on them. A note here is that iPhoto uses the Aperture JPG preview of the photo rather than the original which makes it blisteringly fast and is sufficient provided you have your Aperture previews set to a sufficient size; for what I would want to do with iPhoto (email, face tagging and the odd Facebook post) anything over 1000 pixels on the long edge is fine. If your Aperture previews are too small you will need to reset their size in Aperture preferences and rebuild them. I kept a healthy watch on my hard drive space during the import and was very pleased to see that iPhoto, used in this referenced way, was quite light on my precious free space.
Facial Recognition
This is the wow feature for me and the only one I hope Apple ports to Aperture pronto. Click on a couple of faces and tell iPhoto who they are and iPhoto starts showing you photos in which they appear; As you keep confirming, iPhoto keeps learning. What really impressed me was that as I was selecting progressively earlier pictures of my son it kept recognising earlier and earlier photos of him which meant I was able to tag 8 years of photos of him in relatively short order; iPhoto essentially learned ‘how’ he was getting younger back through the years.
In Aperture I would like to see this feature integrate with keywords better and leverage off all the people I’ve key-worded in my main Aperture library – used in combination with existing tags or metadata, facial recognition would be a potent feature.
Geo-tagging Location information (Places)
I was very disappointed with the geotagging option in iPhoto. I am a bit of a location nut and love embedding location data in my photos. I use a GPS logger when I am out in the field and embed the co-ordinates into my photos in a batch process on import but I still have a good few years of photos which have no location data and I was hoping this would be the answer.
Sadly it is not. The iPhoto video makes it look to easy but in my experience I found the process of clicking the photo, searching for the location, wading through all the business listings from Google, dropping the pin, naming the location and saving the data to be too much of a hassle. If you’ve taken 60 pictures in one location it seems you’re out of luck because you can only tag one photo at a time. [update: select many photos and click the i button on one of them to set the location information for the selection, thanks Jim MacDonald]
I see no significant advantage over better programs such as the Aperture ‘Maperture’ plugin.
Flickr and Facebook Integration
These are in iPhoto for the consumer market. I have similar plugins in Aperture which actually do a far better job and hook me into Facebook, Flickr, iStockPhoto, Smugmug and a heap of other online systems. Apple would be really stupid to include these as a built-in option in Aperture. I believe that a baked in solution here is silly, iPhoto should have rather leveraged off the development which has been done in the Aperture plugin space to integrate with already existing 3rd party plugins.
I like iPhoto 09 and in combination with the other iLife enhancements it is a good upgrade. The facial recognition is the only thing I’d want to see make it (in it’s current incarnation) into Aperture and only if it can leverage off all the hard work I’ve put into my tagging and metadata already. I wasn’t blown away by iPhoto 09 and it certainly (for me) didn’t live up to all the upgrade hype.
iPhoto 09 makes better use of my system resources and seems a bit snappier in some areas. Its integration with Aperture was a pleasant surprise and there are a few new adjustment tools thrown in for general photo touchups. There were a number of annoyances though – poor geotagging, the way the recommended faces move around as it prompts you for other faces which might match (which meant I was accidentally rejecting photos which weren’t under the mouse cursor a second ago) and a couple of performance slow downs due to the load iPhoto was under.
This is a good consumer level photo management upgrade to the previous version and a worthy contender to other applications like Picasa. I am endlessly amused by the number of posts I see on the web by people trying to decide between iPhoto and Aperture (or Lightroom); my advice in this regard is ‘if you are asking the difference between the two then stick with iPhoto’. New users who want an easy way to manage and share their photos – stick with iPhoto. Any serious photographer who needs the heavy lifting in the adjustment and workflow department then Aperture is your baby.
Now that I’ve played with it a bit (and because I am an Aperture user) I probably won’t use it again; other members of my family who aren’t power-users will love it because it makes general purpose photo management easy and fun. From that point of view it scores a resounding 5/5.
As a final note, contrary to the general consensus, I am pleased these new features came out in the consumer product first – that way I can feedback to Apple as to what I would like to see in their pro-level software rather than the other way around. ‘Yes’ to facial recognition and a definitive ‘NO’ to everything else.
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