Aperture to DNG to Adobe Camera Raw Workflow

I’ve just made a really useful Automator workflow for fans of Aperture. The workflow allows me to select any number of .NEF raw files (either managed or as referenced masters) and with a single click perform the following actions:

• Generate XMP sidecar files with all Aperture metadata and export them with the .NEF to a working folder
• Combine the .XMP and the .NEF into a .DNG using the latest DNG converter from Adobe
• Remove the temporary .NEF and .XMP files leaving only the DNG files
• Open a finder dialog, allow me to select one or all of the DNG files
• Opens my selection for editing in Adobe Camera Raw

This is important to me as it allows me to use all the power and flexibility of Apertures photo management and retain the use of ALL the brilliant non-destructive editing tools of Lightroom (which are all available in the ACR interface). Further heavy pixel pushing from ACR straight to Photoshop is a further button click away.

There is a little basic setup required.

• Go to this site, download and install the DNG Automator action.
• If you don’t have it yet, go to Adobe and download their free DNG converter. Install it.
• Go to my Skydrive and download my workflow (or application if you prefer), unzip it and run it.

You should see something like this:

The workflow should open in Automator. Replace the areas in the image above which say Adobe Photoshop CS4 with the version you have (if you don’t have CS4).

You can now either run the workflow directly from Automator or (from Automator) click: File > Save as plugin. Select ‘Script menu’ under the plug-in for section and choose a name. The script is added to your scripts folder in your taskbar and you can access it really easily when you’re in Aperture.

Done! The best of Aperture goodness with the heavy lifting of ACR and Photoshop for when you want it.

HDR Max – New HDR software.

Love it or hate it, but High Dynamic Range Images are here to stay.  The ability to create a composite image with a higher dynamic range than a single photograph can capture (and thereby creating images closer to what the eye sees) and then tonemap the result was a technique that excited me no end when it first appeared in mainstream software like Photomatix.

The problem is that it is now so easy to create absolutely awful photos and call them HDR, as such HDR imaging has become something of a pariah amongst serious photographers.  There are plenty of examples of the super-saturated, overly sharpened, cartoon cutout type HDR pictures on Flickr and the like and there are some people who are getting rather irate by the whole business.  In the end it’s about personal taste and I’m not going to hob-knob about saying what you should or shouldn’t like.

There is a new contender on the block in the HDR creation space and I think they’re worthy of serious attention.  HDR Max is a simple to use and powerful product which seems to hide a lot of the complexity of making an HDR image yet retains enough control to produce beautiful and more importantly, realistic HDR images.  The image below is one I sent off to the Ariea HDR photo challenge for a bit of fun (Ariea is the company which makes the HDR Max software).  What I found really impressive is that the image was composed of 3 hand-held photos (no tripod involved) and the software did a really good job of sticking the exposures together.  It is worth noting that Photomatix completely bungled this one – especially the grass which ended up looking like a shaggy lime-green carpet.

Time Machine saved me from my own impatience.

picture: Apple Time Machine

I am notoriously impatient, especially with hardware and computers. My abhorrence for slowness and lag has meant a costly exercise of hardware upgrades to keep up with the curve. Mix lag, slowness or system speed issues with my sanctified realm of photography and I grow horns and start breathing fire. And so, due to some weird quirk of software combinations combined with thrashing out some massive TIFFs through Silver Efex, my laptop started to disk thrash and throw up it’s electronic hands in surrender. It was 11pm … it had been a long day … I did not have much sleep the night before and now was faced with a computer which won’t compute; I did what any self respecting person would do and reached for the hard reset.

Not my shining moment.

On logging in I found my user profile was now horribly corrupt! I could log into other profiles no problem but not into mine – I could see my desktop background but that was pretty much it. Thankfully it was late at night with the family tucked up safe in bed for the expletives that resounded around the living room were a hark back in time to the harbour back-streets of 18th Century Amsterdam.

It was here that I realised my backup strategy combined with the use of Time Machine would pay dividends. I had never had to do a full system restore on my Mac before and was nervous whether it would work – thoughts of hours lost doing PC Windows reinstalls provided a bleak outlook for the rest of the weekend.

As an extra precaution I booted up with my Leopard disk, opened a terminal and backed up my entire user directory to my external backup drive – I figured at the very least I could get restore the important bits in the event the full restore didn’t work. The following is actually a one line command broken over 3 for simplicity:

tar -cvf

/Volumes/[my_backup_drive]/userprofile.tar

/Volumes/Macintosh HD/Users/Stuart/

I didn’t really need to perform this step but the extra safety net was of some comfort. For more info on the tar command look here or type ‘tar –help’ from your Mac command window.

I then selected the option to restore my system from a Time Machine backup, was presented with a list of all recent system snapshots (I selected one from two hours before), clicked ok and went to bed. In the morning I followed the prompt to restart the computer, held my breath and logged into my profile – it was like the problem had never happened, full seamless restore, user profile working like a charm and I was back in business.

Time Machine is complete peace of mind, the only upgrade I have planned in the near future is to point my Time Machine backup, photo library and all photo masters at a Drobo.

It’s nice when software works as it’s supposed to.