This weeks Friday Five is brought to you by ibuprofen… “Ibuprofen for when you hear and feel your shoulder pop while riding your mountainbike.” OK, let’s get started!
There is a new section on Aperture’s website called “Aperture in Action“. I know, it’s marketing stuff! But there is some cool little tips in the videos.
Chase Jarvis has put together another video. This one is called “Photo Shoot in 180 Seconds“. How cool is that! To see a shoot from start to finish. Thanks Chase!
Vincent Laforet now has his own blog! Check it out.
“You eyeballin me?” Very smart people have created an electronic eye camera. This could change photography for ever.
As many of you know I live in Whistler, BC, Canada and I am an avid mountainbiker. Starting tomorrow (Aug 9th,2008) Crankworx starts. This is the premier mountainbiking event on the planet! The best riders come to Whistler for 9 days riding, music and partying. Let the festivities begin.
I got my hands on a copy of Pixelmator a while ago and have been playing with it a little bit over the last month or so. My first impression of the software was very positive. I like the layout. And after using it for a little while I realized the software’s potential and a few short comings.
Image processing is powered by Core Image and Open GL
Built using Cocoa
Includes Automator actions
ColorSync color management
Spotlight support
The world’s first GPU-powered editor
And much more…
The first thing I noticed about Pixelmator is that it looked different than other image editors, but still made sense. The floating panels are great, allowing you to move them exactly where you want them. The second thing I noticed was the PDF manual. It has to be the best layed out manual I have ever seen. With lots of screenshots and images to help you find exactly where everything is. Other software companies could learn a lot on how to create a great manual from the guys at Pixelmator.
Everything a photographer needs to work on their images seems to be there. There are a couple of things missing though. I’ll get to those later. Layers, cropping, magic wand, clone, eraser, paint brush, it’s all there. Pixelmator has full range of filters and supports third-party Core Image and Quartz Composer-based plug-ins. I liked the ease of use of Pixelmator and its power for image manipulation.
The major thing I didn’t like was the inability to to white balance using an eye dropper tool like you can in PS and PSE with the levels adjustment box using the “set gray point” eyedropper. I asked them about that and this is the response I got:
We do have plans to add a way to use eyedropper once in adjustment tools, but for that every single adjustment tool must be improved. We already improved 40% of our adjustment tools. 60% left.
This is a very promising reply. With that one feature added, JPEG shooters will have everything they need in one app.
The other thing that I found annoying (in a small way) was that you had to turn on “caps lock” to see the actual brush size. Not a big deal if you are only working on the image, but as soon as you want to add text, toggling caps lock on and off can be bothersome. That also came into play when I switched to another app and started typing (again, had to turn off caps lock).
What’s the conclusion? If you shoot JPEG and don’t white balance your images, Pixelmator will work great for you and I would recommend it. However, if you shoot JPEG and DO whitle balance your images I would suggest you use something else until Pixelmator gets the white balance eyedropper straightened out. For the RAW shooter who white balances their images in their RAW conversion software and then does more work in an image editor, Pixelmator will definetly do the trick for you. Over all, it’s a good piece of software with serious potential to become a strong player in the image editing software game.
Why am I talking about JPEG? I’m going to be shooting RAW + JPEG for a little while with my Canon G9 and my new Nikon D300 (when it arrives). I would normally shoot only RAW with both cameras but I got my hands on a copy or Pixelmator and I am going to do a longish term review of the software and I want fresh JPEG images to use for the review.
I realize there are many photographers who just shoot JPEG and I want to experiment with a JPEG workflow. I think there are times when shooting JPEG will save time and be more efficient.
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.
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