I’m going to keep this weeks Friday Five short and sweet. Let’s go!
It’s coming! It’s coming! Well at least something is. Canon has put a teaser on their site “Destined Evolution“.
Sometimes it takes just one company with a great idea to change the world. Let’s hope HP’s idea of selling their laptops in a messenger bag, instead of traditional packaging, catches on. Apple, Dell, Lenovo, you guys paying attention!
Google launches something new and shiny. Chrome. It’s their brand new web browser. It’s only available for Windows right now (c’mon us Mac users wanna play too).
“A picture is worth a thousand words.” What happens when you combine a couple of pictures together? Or, remove something from a picture? Does the word count change? Here are some of the more memorable fake photos of all time.
The video post above is the final post in the series “30 Days Using Aperture 2″ (video shot with a Canon PowerShot G9 )
Here is a brief rundown;
Likes
Output - excellent quality as good as other RAW converters
Short cut keys - very easy to learn and remember
Full screen mode - (My Favorite) I loved being able to work on my images in full screen mode and not having the OS or software to distract me from my images
Fast work flow - I was amazed how quickly I could edit my images to the final selects and burn a CD for the client
Lift and stamp tool - able to lift adjustments from one image and stamp them to other images, while having the ability to select or deselect which adjustments you want to apply to the following images
Comparison mode - able to compare 2 or more images on the screen at the same time made to select the best image
Dislikes
Interface - this took a while to figure out, but I eventually started to get a hang of it
Steep learning curve - this might have been my specific problem due to taking a while to figure out the interface
Sharpening - I couldn’t understand why there were 3 different sharpening options, when edge sharpen was the recommended method by Apple and most users
Tutorials/manuals - trial version came with virtually no manuals or tutorials. If they were part of the download users might get the hang of things quicker and not get frustrated and maybe give up using Aperture
Conclusion
Try it out for yourself - you owe it to yourself to give Aperture 2 a try… It’s Free! And could be exactly what you’re looking for
Would I buy it? Yes! My copy is on it’s way.
Finally, with Apple announcing Aperture 2.1 with 3rd party plug-in support Aperture could become a very powerful piece of RAW image editing software. Only time will tell.
Again, I’ve been busy for last 5 days shooting and working on images. That’s a good thing! This time I did a food shoot for the Korean restaurant. Several different dishes but the lighting set up was pretty much the same.
This time I played around with the stamp tool. The way Apple approached this is quite clever. Instead of having to save settings in every adjustment you make and then apply each and every saved setting to your image, all you need to do is make all your adjustments on one image and then click on the lift tool (which takes all your settings and opens up s HUD). Now here is the cool part. You can select and apply (stamp) only the setting you want by clicking the the check boxes on and off. You can apply the chosen setting to one image at a time or to as many images as you select. This may not seem like a big deal, but it probably saved me about half an hour of sitting in from in front of the computer. That’s an extra half hour I can do something else like shooting or maybe skiing, or mountain biking. I’m off now to figure out what I’m going to do with that extra half hour… I just hope it doesn’t take me half an hour to figure out what I’m going to do ;o)
I’ve been quite busy over the last 5 days and today I finally had the chance to sit in front of the computer and use Aperture 2.
I was originally confused with the 3 sharpening options available in Aperture 2. The very first one is under the RAW fine tuning heading in the adjustments tab. This one is what Aperture thinks should be applied to all images being converted from RAW files for your particular camera… OK That gets turned off right away! I prefer to make my own decisions regarding my images.
The second one is under the Sharpen heading. This one is a remnant of Aperture 1. Edge sharpening was introduced in Aperture 1.5 and is supposed to be the way to go. Lets see.
I found this article on Apple’s website that explains edge sharpening. The image below was converted into B&W and edge sharpening was applied (settings = Intensity - .76, Edges - .31, Falloff - .77). The sharpening was enough for me to actually see, but seems to keep any sharpening artifacts to a minimum.
Two hours!!!! That’s all it took to go through 70+ images and edit them down to 11 final images and crop, adjust and burn a CD (TIFF & JPEG) for the client. Within those two hours I also had a bite to eat, took a phone call and chatted with a friend on MSN. I can honestly say with more practice using Aperture 2 I could easily do all that in under an hour. That’s fast!
Yesterday I was preparing for a photo shoot that night for a local restaurant and making a beauty dish to fit on my flash that I could use for that shoot. Today, I imported the images on to my computer’s hard drive and then I proceeded to import those images into Aperture 2 (stored on an external hard drive). I started rating the images (1 - 5 stars) by hitting the corresponding numbers on my keyboard while I viewed each image full screen. I would hit the right or left arrow key to move from image to image. I then selected only 3 star or higher images.This gave me my final 11 images (I’m pretty tough on rating my images). The cropping and final adjustments were made on those images and then I exported a TIFF and a JPEG of each image to a CD. Hit burn CD and I was done. Not bad considering my total noobness with Aperture 2.
I started looking for more detailed information for working with Aperture 2. The tutorials were just not cutting it. It seems when you buy Aperture 2 you get a booklet “Exploring Aperture 2″ and sample projects to play with. With the 30 day demo you do not. I did find the the PDF file of “Exploring Aperture 2″ here. It is a life saver.
I am now starting to understand the different view modes and the HUD’s (Heads Up Displays). My favorite is hitting the “F” key for full screen display and then the “H” key to get the inspector HUD on screen. This gives you just the image you are working on and the inspector HUD that you can move to anywhere on your screen and size it to a good working size. If you move your mouse to the bottom of the screen your browser of your images comes up so you can change the image you are working on. You can also move your mouse to the top of the screen and the toolbar will drop down. By clicking the toggle switch on the right of the toolbar you can set it to stay in place or leave it so it will automatically hide when you move your mouse away from the top of the screen.
I just started using the “Stacks” feature. I like the idea of being able to stack similar images together by selecting the group of images by shift clicking on them and then clicking on Stacks > Stack. You can also Auto Stack images that have been shot in sequence. By clicking Stacks > Auto Stack you will get a HUD that will allow you to select a time interval between images up to 1 min. Once your images are stacked a number will appear on the main image, by clicking on that number you can open and close the stack to view all or just the main image.
Day 9 I’m starting to feel like a monkey using Aperture 2. It’s probably me, I’m just getting overwhelmed with everything Aperture can do. The learning curve seems quite steep. The tutorials show 2 different screen modes and I can’t seem to get to the one I like. I might be too familiar with Adobe products and the Aperture 2 interface is a bit different from what Adobe offers. I think a bit more time using Aperture should get me more comfortable.
Today I watched all the tutorials under the “Compare and Select” heading on Apples website. I’m trying to get to the point where I start “getting” Aperture 2, but I’m not there yet. I’m seriously thinking of joining Aperture Users Professional Network just to understand the program. But, I’m holding off until I decide Aperture 2 is worth the purchase and I decide to commit to it.
In the mean time here is an image I worked on that I took with my Canon G9 while out ski touring behind Whistler Mountain. I’m didn’t want to make too many adjustments before I really get to know the software. You can see the adjustments I did make on the left side of the images.
Days 5 & 6
“The Weekend From Heck” I did manage to import 34 reasonably decent images (not my best ones) into Aperture 2. At least I’ll be able to show the adjustments and features of Aperture 2.
Day 7
Tried to recover the “lost” images on my computer. No luck! I trying to figure out a solution. Maybe, loading the images on to a PC and converting them to DNG might work. I’ll keep you informed.
Day 8
Watched more tutorials (see list below). I’m starting to see the power Aperture 2 has under the hood.
Cropping and Straightening
Recovering Highlights
Setting Levels
Setting Advanced Levels
Using the Retouch Brush
In the next post we will explore some of the adjustments and use sample images.
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