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 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.

Posted via email from f/9

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?

Zen and the Art of Workflow Maintenance

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:

“Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.”

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.

Getting my Photos off the Camera

This is the easiest part of the process. I pop my card into a reader and plug it into my computer. Aperture opens and asks where I want to save my files. I import all new files into the Aperture library. On import Aperture renames the files to reflect the date and time the image was taken and applies an import preset which stamps the files with basic metadata such as Copyright information.

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:

• identify files to reference: looks at any file which has not been rated and exists on the local volume
• identify files to consolidate: looks at any file which has a rating > 3 and exists as a referenced master. This is useful in bringing any photo identified as a pick in the second guess gut feel back into my library.

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!

An Aperture Users Thoughts and Review on iPhoto 09

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.

In Summary

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.

The Aperture vs Lightroom Shootout

11 Feb 2010 (update) review of Aperture 3

I have been caught in a frenzy of indecision regarding my photo management software for months now.  I have used both Aperture and Lightroom extensively and there are aspects to both programs which I love and others which could really do with some improvement.  They are so close in so many respects that it makes choosing between the two almost impossible; the problem with the indecision is that I’m probably not getting the most out of the one program or the other.

I thought it would be useful to share with you my [Dons flame retardant flack-jacket] view on the relative strengths and weaknesses of each program and then follow up with my selection.  This is not a post meant to start a flame-war between Aperture or Lightroom evangelists; I’m a lone photographer who has used both products extensively and has had to settle on the best fit for me.

Apple Aperture: http://www.apple.com/aperture/

Apple’s Aperture is one slick program; it just makes managing your photos so easy and I love it.  The interface is clean and uncluttered providing you excellent customisable visibility over the information that is useful to you.  The Adjustments palette is easy to use and provides all the standard camera RAW and photographic adjustments that Lightroom does.  I also find Aperture does a much better job at ‘hiding’ more complex aspects of itself until you need it – a good example of this is the metadata views and presets in Aperture which are very understated but an incredibly powerful feature whereas Lightroom seems to throw the lot at you in an often times confusing manner.  In my opinion, Aperture has some clear strengths:

Strengths

• Adjustments - Aperture provides a wide variety of easy to use adjustments which excel at allowing a photographer to tweak the photo.  In terms of standard features like white balance, contrast, levels, black and white point, vibrancy, sharpening etc… both Aperture and Lightroom are on a par with not much to choose from.  Lightroom has a few killer adjustments up it’s sleeve though.
• Photo management and work flow – It really doesn’t get better than this.  Tethered shooting, lightbox functionality, auto stacks, keyword stamping and a blisteringly fast set of views mean you don’t spend time waiting for the software.  Aperture is a clear winner for me here.
• Destructive plugin architecture – I’ve heard a lot of people punting a non destructive plugin architecture but the truth is that only gets you so far and then you need to go into a destructive environment like Photoshop anyway anyway.  Non destructive plugins are a lot harder to write, and not baking the changes into the image means there is a performance cost to opening photos with non-destructive adjustments.  Aperture has a lot of plugins written for it which include the fantastic suite of Nik plugins released as an Aperture bundle – good times.  Happy photographers when the software library is corrupted or lost – edits are burned into the output format (tiff etc).
• Export Options – Aperture’s export options are better than Lightroom.  You can easily create web galleries,  create print quality hard and soft cover books and send your photos to a virtual lightbox so you can play with combinations of photos and see how they work together.
• Integration with other Apple programs means your photos, albums and smart albums are available to your iPhone, MobileMe galleries, iMovie, Final Cut and a whole host of other programs.
• Vault provides an easy way to backup and manage all your photos.
• Speed – Faster than Lightroom, from moving between your photos to applying adjustments, it’s a lot faster.
• Managed mode - Photos are automatically imported into the library and managed there.  One click backup to multiple devices with vault.
• Metadata – create powerful metadata presets to append to existing photos or new photos on import.  Ability to add your own metadata information to photos.

Weaknesses

• Referenced Masters file management – Not quite as strong as Lightroom, Aperture still relies quite heavily on it’s library to know about file location.
• Raw Updates – they always come but invariable Adobe beats Apple to them.  Not sure if rushing to release new raw updates are a good thing.
• Big Library – The Aperture library is always bigger than the Lightroom one however as Aperture is 2-3x faster at rendering images and information the extra harddisk space is a small price to pay.

Adobe Lightroom: http://www.adobe.com/products/photoshoplightroom/

With a big brother like Photoshop you’d be correct in thinking that Lightroom has some big guns when it comes to photo adjustments.  It doesn’t seem as  polished as Aperture and it’s nowhere (I mean nowhere!) as fast as Aperture;  I have subsequently learned that this is because Aperture stores all previews of photos (hence a massive Aperture library file) whereas Lightroom does the more space-friendly thing and stores only recent previews.

Strengths

• Adjustment tools – In addition to all the standard adjustment tools Lightroom has some additional ones which mean business.  The non destructive localised adjustment brush is outstanding; to be able to selectively modify local areas of colour, exposure and other parameters and apply them without having to apply complex photoshop masks is incredible.  Note: Aperture users can export to camera RAW in Photoshop CS4 (Photoshop can be set to open TIF files and JPGs in Camera RAW) and have the entire range of lightroom adjustment tools available.
• DNG - Easily convert RAW files to the digital negative format an excellent way to future-proof your photos.
• plugin architecture – non-destructive plugin architecture.  Has it pro’s and con’s – it’s all very nice to have 1000 beautifully edit photos and then have the library corrupt itself.  There are always library backups – in both Lightroom and Aperture make sure you backup regularly.
• Cross platform – Windows – clear advantage here.
• Integration with Photoshop – Seamless round-tripping to Adobe Camera Raw and Photoshop.
• Smaller library - Good for the laptops.

Weaknesses

• Speed – Consistently much slower than Aperture in all areas.  Displaying of images and editing.
• layout has always seemed a little clunky. Collapse some of the side toolbars and there is this annoying on-hover expansion – Coming from Aperture I really think that Adobe need to have a serious chat with the people in the UI department.  The side panels which, once hidden, pop out at you on mouseover are terribly annoying.  The other thing which I don’t like is the seperate areas you have to go to for viewing and editing,  in Aperture once you’re looking at the photo you can view, edit, export, send to lightboxes and perform a whole host of actions on it.
• Export options, books watermarking – The export options are not as strong as Aperture.  There is no support for my book creation, my favourite Aperture export option.

MY CONCLUSIONS:

So after going backwards and forwards for months I have finally settled on Aperture as my photo management software of choice.  I love the speed, the workflow tools, the ability to print books, the integration with my various web services and gadgets, the metadata presets and the ability to add my own metadata information and having the one-click Aperture vault backup.  It is a deceptive piece of software with much of the complexity and power hidden under the hood which won’t overwhelm newcomers.  Advances with technology in the new iLife series like facial recognition in iPhoto ’09 means Apple is not sleeping on their hands but are busy making huge strides in all the areas which are important to me as a photographer.

In the end both Aperture and Lightroom are sophisticated tools for both photographic workflow management and photo adjustments.  There is no right answer in choosing between the two of them and a decision boild down to a matter of personal taste.  If you are undecided then try both (both have demo versions) and decide which aspects win out for you.

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.

Creamy Bokeh with Alien Skin

The photo above lets me kill two proverbial birds with one stone.  As I wrap up the year the weight of another move weighs on my mind.  We moved continents at the beginning of the year so moving house again, albeit just down the road, fills me with dread.  The photo above was taken on the last day of packing before all the household contents were put into the container.  It was incredible how the packers grafted the bubble wrap cardboard around every item of furniture – it was bizarre seeing bicycle or lamp shaped boxes.

So while I pondered whether I had the energy to pack the household into boxes again I played with the new Bokeh plugin from Alien Skin:

Bokeh is the only software that accurately simulates the distinctive blurring and creamy highlights of real lenses. Terence Tay, Bokeh’s designer, performed careful experiments with lenses famous for their bokeh highlights, such as the Canon® EF 85mm f/1.2 II and the Micro-Nikkor 105mm f/2.8. The result is a photo-realistic look, in contrast to the unnatural blur from other software.

This plugin will allow me to add pleasing bokeh effects to photos taken with less capable cameras and turn the dial from average to good.  I’d like hearty lashings of double thick cream with my highlights if you please!

Download the trial and give it a go.

The Shaft at Cape Schank

This is Cape Schank

We’d spent a lovely time in the Mornington Peninsula yesterday with family from overseas who’d come to Australia for a visit and some great diving.  After a scrumptious lunch at the Red Hill Estate (vineyard) we took a slow drive to the lighthouse at Cape Schank; we thought it would be nice to potter around a lighthouse and work off some of the postprandial bloat.

The drive was magic, the scenery straight out of an Australian bedtime story – the only blight on the day was the commercial money-grubbing rip-off that was the lighthouse itself.  It seems that sometime ago, a miserly Scrooge got hold of some land rights to the lighthouse and decided this was his/her meal-ticket to the big time.  You drive through a boom gate into a ridiculous shopping mall like car park and then proceed to the little trinket hut where you are eye-balled by a rather obnoxious blond woman.  Here she, in no uncertain terms, informs you that to proceed any further you need to cough up $10 per person and if you want to go inside it doubles to $20 per person and if you don’t like these conditions feel free to  mosey on up to the car park lookout (be still my beating heart) where you can see the top of a very average looking lighthouse (nothing as grand as the “free” lighthouses down on the Great Ocean Road).

The money is non-refundable and it makes sense that they’d make you fork out first as I’d imagine the sense of overwhelming disappointment you’d feel after paying all that money would be too much to bear and you might have to resort to fisticuffs for financial justice.

We opted not to be ripped off but unfortunately they had the last laugh.  In addition to the $40-$80 (4 people) you’d have had to pay; it seems that your car could not leave the boomed parking lot without paying an additional $4.50.  I briefly entertained the idea of ramming through the boom, A-Team style, but the damage to my new car would have just added insult to injury.

My advise, if you’re down in the Peninsula steer clear of the rip-off at Cape Schank.

I provide a photo to the world, free of charge and in large format, taken from the  parking lot lookout to ensure I got my $4.50 worth.

Cape Schank Lighthouse

p.s.

About 2-3km from the gate there is a parking spot where you can do the most incredible walks.  We stopped after our unsavory lighthouse experience and went on a walk.  At one point we walked smack into the middle of a group of rather startled looking kangaroos and got some really cute photos.

Made me forget all about the lighthouse and it’s snarky gate-keeper.

Nikon D3X review

I am not sure there is a serious amateur or professional photographer in the world who does not know about DPReview and their excellent reviews and information on cameras and lenses.

They have recently released their review of the new 24 Megapixel full-frame Nikon flagship, the D3X.

Europe today introduced its new top-of-the-range D-SLR, the D3X. Building on the reliability, handling and durability of the award-winning D3, the D3X offers an imaging sensor with far higher resolution than its counterpart, breaking new ground in imaging quality. The all-new 24.5MP CMOS sensor makes the new camera eminently suitable for the broadest range of shooting situations, both in the studio and on location, and will be especially appreciated by uncompromising photographers in nature photography, studio work and fashion.

“This is the camera that many professional photographers have been waiting for,” said Robert Cristina, Manager Professional Products and NPS at Nikon Europe. “Just as the D3 has become the professionals’ camera of choice in sports photography, the D3X’s extremely high imaging resolution will raise the bar for commercial, fashion and stock photography. The results speak for themselves: this is without doubt our highest-quality camera to date.”

http://www.dpreview.com/news/0812/081201nikond3x.asp